A Mesh enterprise (as opposed to a Mesh company) consists of everyone directly or indirectly associated with the design, production, marketing, sales, distribution, and servicing. It relies on advanced web and mobile data networks to obtain or create whatever information is needed (e.g. demographics of consumers, market trends and patterns, as well as the nature, extent, and frequency of usage. Also, it makes effective use of word-of-mouth and social network channels to “get the word out” about offers, news, and recommendations.
I have been researching this topic myself for four or five years now and am familiar with almost every other book in this genre, and I can unequivocally say that this is now the definitive work on the world's financial and banking system, the history of money and power in Western civilization, and the dire prognosis for our economy and our personal freedoms, in general, as a result. It is vastly superior to “The Creature from Jekyll Island”, to compare it to one other fine book on the subject that is now outdated, both in terms of its complete historical coverage, as well as a completely up to date perspective on recent financial history and a deeply insightful analysis of our current debt crisis, why it was let out of control, and who would benefit from its ultimate unwinding. Quite frankly, looking back four to five years from now, this could be the most profound non-fiction work of our times. Robert Hemphill, Credit Manager for the Federal Reserve Bank in Atlanta, when speaking on the same topic as this book, stated, “It is the most important subject intelligent persons can investigate and reflect upon.” I couldn't agree more, and even encourage many unintelligent persons to give it a go. The mechanics of money and finance have a profound affect on every person's life and well being, and is inextricably linked to the fabric of our society and our freedom. Yet it is almost completely ignored and poorly understood by the common man. As Henry Ford said, “It is well that the people of this nation do not understand our banking and monetary system, for if they did, I believe there would be revolution before tomorrow morning.” It's time we all started to understand what's been going on and how it will affect our immediate future.
6 Star and Beyond–the Essence of Fuller, the Future of Humanity
November 28, 2010
I did not truly begin to understand the breadth and depth of Buckminster Fuller's thinking until I read this book as it deserves to be read, with full attention and detailed notes. This is one of those books that merits–and received from me, a Work Table of core concepts, definitions, obstacles, and solutions, posted online at Work Table [link live at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog].
Although I heard Fuller speak personally at Muhlenberg College and distinctly remember him saying that a housing foundation could support the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner, it was not until this book that I understood in detail exactly what he meant: that we are wasting 90% of what we put into buildings. I have previously read and reviewed Critical Path as well as Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and it is my great privilege to know Medard Gabel, co-creator of the analog World Brain and sole creator of the new digital EarthGame (in concept pending funding).
CORE POINT: True wealth is cosmic energy and the creation of means to deliver to humanity unlimited free energy. Among many other things this creates the possibility of applying energy to create self-contained homes that are lightweight, fully self-contained in water and sewage, and totally green.
CORE CONCEPT: Capitalism and democracy have been perverted by money–those who manage money manage those who manage politics, and they both concentrate on optimizing the false God of money, an abstract concept hardly worth its paper representation, while ignoring–even subverting–the possibility of achieving infinite cosmic wealth on behalf of all of humanity.
CORE CONCEPT: Predatory capitalism on the one hand, and controlled socialism on the other, are both extremes and both fail to meet the needs as well as the possibilities of humanity. Fullerism is at root a non-zero equation.
PERSONAL POINT: This book answers the question I could not answer when a senior executive asked me “what do you do?” Now I know. I am a Comprehensive Global Architect whose objective is Prime Design: From Waste to Wealth (the title of my next book, inspired by this core reading from Buckminster Fuller). All my prior works, including my most recent, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, have been a preamble to what I now recognize is my life's work…I will try to earn another 25 years (I am 58, 58 + 25 is 83 — my family history suggests I will make it.). I am still looking for a country or global organization that wants to profit from doing this.
A few definitions up front:
QUOTE (142): WEALTH [is] the measurable degree of forwardly organized environmental control, in terms of quickly convertible energy, capacities and performance ratioed system capabilities, per capita, per diem.
Advertising destroyed public trust by pre-empting “industrial design” as code for airbrushing superficial changes to move products to market, rather than seeking integral improvements that could be shared with the consumer.
Design-improved livingry increases wealth.
Synergy is the delta between the sum of the parts and their anticipatable outcomes, and the actual outcome not anticipated.
CORE CONCEPTS
Architects deal with the externalities of man.
“At rest” science and understanding (Newton's paradigm) have been replaced by “constant change” (Einstein's paradigm).
Bad housing breeds bad humanity and bad science–the time/energy costs and the materials costs are too high, housing is the socio-economic “runt” of all the professions.
Challenge is IRREDUCIBLE.
Design is innovative re-assembly that adds value.
Design-preventable includes illumination and prevention of corrupt exploitation of materials for inefficient or unjustifiable applications.
Energy mass, energy radiation, energy gravitation (E3) times Intellect (E3I)
Good design would reduce the per capita consumption of building materials from nine tons per person to one ton per person [this is in the developed world–these reductions would allow the extension of the lower tonnage home designs to nine times more people and more–with mass consumption come mass efficiencies.]
Industry is *supposed to be* the organization and application of collective knowledge and action that produces synergy (added value) over the sum of the parts in isolation.
Individual freedom is ESSENTIAL to the expansion of diversity needed to enable collectives to see the whole.
Total Thinking is the intelligent acquisition, ingestion, processing, and exploitation of all relevant information in order to produce efficiencies and effects beneficial to the mission objective.
Wealth is intellect plus energy combined to create capacity [with more free energy making more refined capacity possible].
Worldwide commonwealth credit is both needed and achievable to provide mass-produced sustainable housing for all. That in turn frees up the five billion poor to create “infinite wealth” by combining their intellect with infinite free energy to advance civilization.
OBSTACLES to advancing humanity include:
Advertising in place of genuine progress [should not be a tax-deductible expense in my own view]
“Credit” fueled the perpetuation and expansion of rotten housing at great cost.
Housing is the works of design, the worst of materials, and the worst of applied engineering
Housing as the sucking chest wound in economics [mortgages should not be tax-deductible, this both encourages waste of materials on housing, but also enables the growth of financial fraud]
Managers lack the over-all philosophical discernment to be effective at seeing the whole and building to the whole.
Politics is VERY wasteful, perpetuating inefficient industries.
Specializations are attracting the most gifted, and this leaves the less gifted dealing with integration if they think about it at all. [I always thought this was what business and public administration programs were supposed to do, but having graduated from such a program realize they do not.]
A HANDFUL OF QUOTES
p. 25 “My envisioned transcendental world design plan would be inherently nonpolitical, because it would be utterly independent of any need for authority beyond that to-self-by-self for initiation of its study and development.”
p. 95 In relation to the waste of heavy materials in housing, “…that in this war crisis it is technically treason to allow ourselves to be short sixty-five thousand freight cars weighing fifty tons of steel each, which shortage is equivalent to the number of cars required exclusively to transport the solid foundation and flooring materials unscientifically employed as frozen compression elements to structurally support the tiny weights of one-tenth-of-a-ton load of men who comprise the negligible working loads of housing, or to support machinery from below that could better be suspended, etc.”
p. 246 “The efficiency of the industrial equation is directly proportional to the numbers consuming.” [In other words, capitalism focused on the needs of the one billion rich is long overdue for a redirection of focus to the needs of the five billion poor.]
p.247 “Serve one hundred per cent will involve a world design revolution, not just design of end-products, but of the comprehensive industrial network equations including world-around-livingry-service systems, at regenerative occupancy rentals, mutually installed in anticipatory facilitation of total world enjoyment of individually respected total man.”
p. 249 “Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet, who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his coordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”
SOLUTIONS
Energy investments will define the future.
Need a world housing industry. We do NOT need water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure. Distributed housing and small cities connected by high-speed rail should be the norm.
Harvesting of scrap is the next needed Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan.
This is an extraordinarily diplomatic and measured book, a book that can nudge even the most recalcitrant of know-it-all stake-holders toward the “aha” experience that what they are doing [doing the wrong things righter] is NOT WORKING and maybe, just maybe, they should try Reflexive Practice (or at least begin to hire people that think this way).
This is *the* book that could-should lead to the first-ever Secretary General of Education, Intelligence, & Research, IMHO. THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest, done with Congressman Rob Simmons (R-CT-02) was a proponency book. This book by Dr. Myers et al is a praxis book absolutely up there with the other 6 Star and beyond books that I recommend.
QUOTE (32): What has taken place over the last generation is a highly complicated merger of crime and policy, of stealing and government. Far from taking care of the rest of us, the financial leaders of America and their political servants have seemingly reached the cynical conclusion that our society is not work saving and have taken on a new mission that involved not creating wealth for us all, but simply absconding with whatever wealth remains in our hollowed out economy. They don't feed us, we feed them.
I defer to the other reviewers on the substance of the book, but want to provide links here to several books that address the larger context of the soul of capitalism and the corruption of the two political parties that have undermined the US Government and US economy with malice aforethought.
I am blogging twice a week at Huffington Post on what a Virtual Cabinet doing sane evidence-driven policies in the context of a balanced responsible budget might look like, and would welcome visits there by those interested in getting back to honest government and responsible capitalism.
Phi Beta Iota: two reviews are provided, one from the blogsphere (Tip of the Hat to Pierre Levy at LinkedIn, and one from Amazon. If not obvious, this new trend in organizational learning assures that “secret” organizations will get dumber and dumber as time goes by.
Getting a chance to read this timely work excited me for several reasons. First, I began my consulting career in the learning space in the 80s and have remained convinced of its importance for accelerating business performance. I presented at several ASTD session during this period. Second, Marcia was also a colleague of mine at Pistachio Consulting where we did some projects together. I had a chance to review an earlier version of one of the chapters of this book. But most importantly, it is the first book I have seen to help organizations understand and harness the huge workplace learning potential of social media and enterprise 2.0.
It's About Context, Business Ecosystems, and IT Impact
September 18, 2010
Ric Merrifield
I bought this book on the recommendation of a colleague whom I have known for twenty years, both of us members of the Silicon Valley Hackers Conference started by Stewart Brand and now managed by Glen Tenney. When I came to buy the book and say all of the very short, very empty, largely negative reviews, I was surprised. Trying to understand this, and having looked up the author's history, I speculate that a bunch of folks bought this book because of who the author is (Microsoft's business rethink strategist and innovator), and then did not have the contextual background to appreciate the story line.
Of course the books suffers some from being a book-length expansion of a core idea originally published in the Harvard Business Review, “The Next Revolution in Productivity” (free online at Phi Beta Iota), but from where I sit, 47 of the 53 reviews miss the whole point, and I am not that thrilled with the remaining six, but they did help me.
POINT NUMBER ONE: Businesses are eco-systems within eco-systems. The industrial era has piled up a mish-mash of stovepipes, conflicting chains of command, etcetera etcetera. Until Web 2.0 (I'm working on Web 4.0) there was not much one could do about it, but now Information Technology (IT) has reached a point where it CHANGES EVERYTHING. Bare bone zero sum reviews are a priority.