I don’t think that many romanticise war too much these days. And there is something very poignant and compelling about seeing the fruits of war.

In northern France and Belgium the unimaginable scale of loss wrought upon so many families in the great wars of the twentieth century [...]]]>

I don’t think that many romanticise war too much these days. And there is something very poignant and compelling about seeing the fruits of war.

In northern France and Belgium the unimaginable scale of loss wrought upon so many families in the great wars of the twentieth century is still visible at every step.

It was in north eastern France that I found some family graves. Here is the the resting place of young ANZAC Rupert Alexander, aged 31 years, along with his compatriots lost in France in 1917.

This poem by Gellert captures the melancholy of war:

Anzac Cove

There’s a lonely stretch of hillocks:
There’s a beach asleep and drear:
There’s a battered broken fort beside the sea.
There are sunken trampled graves:
And a little rotting pier:
And winding paths that wind unceasingly.
There’s a torn and silent valley:
There’s a tiny rivulet
With some blood upon the stones beside its mouth.
There are lines of buried bones:
There’s an unpaid waiting debt :
There’s a sound of gentle sobbing in the South.

By Leon Gellert

“They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:
Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.
At the going down of the sun and in the morning,
We will remember them”
Lest we forget

As we come up to the year 2012 many prognosticators are predicting the end of the world. I suspect that this will not come to pass.

But I do think that we are seeing the end of the world as we’ve come to know it during the latter years [...]]]>

As we come up to the year 2012 many prognosticators are predicting the end of the world. I suspect that this will not come to pass.

But I do think that we are seeing the end of the world as we’ve come to know it during the latter years of the twentieth century and the early years of the twenty-first century. Many of the verities upon which we’ve relied will be falter or disappear.

Doomsayers talk about the Mayan calendar ending in 2012. However, The Guardian kindly reassures us that an “expert” says: Mayan tablet does not predict end of the world in 2012.

No matter what one thinks of these predictions of doom it is clear that we are moving into a new world next year on several fronts, mainly due to the global economic situation.

The economy

The global economy is not looking well – the British, European and US economies are mired in problems that seem insurmountable.  Austerity measures are starting to bite in the UK and Eurozone. We are starting to see the breakdown of normal social bonds. For example, in Greece, there are even stories of parents giving up their children to the state because they can’t feed them: Greek economic crisis turns tragic for children abandoned by their families.

The US is coming up to a Presidential election and the deadlocks between Republicans and Democrats are likely to continue thus blocking any possibility for change. The economic situation in the US does not seem to be improving, in spite of the ‘green shoots’ some speak of.  Instead the charts tell a sobering story (source: Financial Armageddon) for the US:

Australia has been sheltered from all of this by the strength of China, and it remains to be seen if this continues into the coming year.

What can we do?

It seems that there is not a lot we can do as individuals to address these larger global problems.  However, what we can do is adjust our own lifestyle and mindset to better suit these challenging times. Since we are moving into a different kind of world it seems prudent to prepare proactively rather than sit and wait.

We are moving into a world where the rule of law is shifting, where the rights we’ve assumed were ours are being stripped away, where the social contract between the government and the governed is dissolving.

In this kind of environment the only source of solace is individuals who join together to create positive change in the world. We must join together to create a new kind of polity that rejects control and inequity. We must join together to create tribes and communities that embrace peace and reject anger.

Here are some of my thoughts about how we can approach this challenge:

Mindset?

Kindness. Compassion. Love. Community. Dignity. Composure. Peace. Grace. Flow.

Lifestyle?

Find our tribes. Build communities.

Sustainability. Grow a garden.  Simplicity.

Walk with a friend. Slow down. Eat fresh food. Share a meal. Breathe.

Business?

New models. Innovation. Doing good. Creativity. Collaboration. Consensus.

Profit with honour. Nurture people and the environment.

And?

It is good to remember that there is strength in the people when they join together for the common good…

It is interesting to think about this now that we see Occupy Wall Street spreading around the world (even to Occupy Sydney).

Back in 1976  Michael Jensen and William Meckling argued that the solution to the principal-agency problem — business leaders [...]]]>

It is interesting to think about this now that we see Occupy Wall Street spreading around the world (even to Occupy Sydney).

Back in 1976  Michael Jensen and William Meckling argued that the solution to the principal-agency problem — business leaders advance their own interests not those of shareowners — was to make the goal of the corporation the highest return to shareholders and to align shareholders and business leaders through granting stock options. Today this remains the prevalent model of organizing and motivating people within organizations in the western world.

I have long argued that this approach evokes extremely dangerous behaviours in companies – creating corporations that are run as if they are peopled by soulless automata.

The construction of reward systems that prioritize shareholder value as the sole objective of the corporation encourage risk taking, little focus on other concerns (such as social and environmental good), and poor treatment of human resources.

Dan Ariely has written about Better (and more) Social Bonuses - it is worth reading. Bonus scheme incentives encourage unhealthy competition and can drive unintended outcomes, such as ignoring due process (as in the various bank scandals such as the recent UBS rogue trader).

One characteristic of the shareholder value model in action is the objectification and monetization of things – people, environment, social good.  This attitude has inherent problems for all stakeholders in a business, even for the shareholders. Shareholders are people too, they live within a society and an environment.  Thus prioritizing shareholder value over social and environmental good is not necessarily good for shareholders.

As a senior manager in large corporations I often found myself referring to people as FTE (a.k.a. full time equivalents). This objectification of the people within the organization – treating them as if they are mere machines – is a characteristic of this shareholder primacy model.

Once the people who work in the business are successfully objectified it is much easier to treat them in ways that previously impossible. It is easier to implement inhumane or unsafe work practices. It is easier to fire people. It is easier to ask people to do things that are unethical.

The other part of this unhealthy equation is the large institutional shareholders in corporations.  Because they represent interested parties at second or third hand again we see objectification of the process.  They too seek only to maximize benefit for the shareholders that they represent.  But  because they represent those shareholders at arm’s length they do not understand the needs or wants of those shareholders.  Thus the real people who are shareholders are assumed to only seek maximum value no matter how that is achieved.

The common thread in all of this that real people with real desires to create a good world for themselves and their grandchildren do not have their interests adequately represented.  Instead we all suffer – people, planet, nature – because of this single-minded pursuit of maximal shareholder benefit.

Jeff Jarvis sparked my thinking on this recently with his post on The Jobless Future. As Jeff so bluntly stated:

“We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future.

Holding out blind hope for the magical appearance of new [...]]]>

Jeff Jarvis sparked my thinking on this recently with his post on The Jobless Future. As Jeff so bluntly stated:

“We’re not going to have a jobless recovery. We’re going to have a jobless future.

Holding out blind hope for the magical appearance of new jobs and the reappearance of growth in the economy is a fool’s faith.”

If that is the case in the US, and we have riots on the streets in the UK, Spain, Greece, north Africa and the middle east, then things are not looking good in large portions of the world. There will likely be flow on economic and social effects around the world, especially since Richard Florida is pondering if riots could come to Canada too.

Nouriel Roubini may be right in his assertion that “Karl Marx had it right. At some point, Capitalism can destroy itself.”

The inherent instability of markets in the US and Europe mean that jobs are going to be harder to come by, especially for the less educated and the less skilled.

All of this got me thinking about what skills are really useful in this new world that is developing before our eyes? What kinds of businesses and communities will be more resilient in the face of changing economic verities? How do we need to recast our expectations and aspirations for this new world that is unfolding?

That kind of thinking led me over to John Robb’s blog and one of his recent posts, Entrepreneurs and Open Source Hardware. Perhaps we are all about to become open source entrepreneurs?

The kind of economic environment that is emerging is one where sustainable and ethical business models can come into their own. Not large scale, top-down, industrial operations. Rather there is an opportunity to develop peer-to-peer and networked organisations. Social innovation, social enterprise and ideas like collaborative consumption become significant, and a return to older ways of organising businesses – like co-operatives and mutual associations – become critical.

We also need to find ways to create and exchange value in an environment where traditional mechanisms might no longer be available to us. This means creation of new means of value exchange, or even new kinds of currencies. Reverting to gold is not really feasible, after all it’s rather heavy to tote around. Thus virtual currencies might even come to replace some of the existing ones

If you consider it unbelievable that major currencies can fail then it’s time to go read some history. Just to put it in perspective there’s a great visual post by Jeff Clark over at The Daily Reckoning that illustrates the risk rather neatly: A Thousand Pictures Is Worth One Word.

My buddy Anthony Baxter has been a Googler for a while and has worked on many fascinating projects. But what he’s working on now is not just interesting from a technology perspective, it is interesting from a social innovation perspective too.

He’s working on the Google

My buddy Anthony Baxter has been a Googler for a while and has worked on many fascinating projects. But what he’s working on now is not just interesting from a technology perspective, it is interesting from a social innovation perspective too.

He’s working on the Google Crisis Response Team, which is part of Google’s philanthropic activities, and he’ll be talking about this at the next Social Innovation Sydney Unconference on 13 August 2011.

The Crisis Response team is an excellent example of social innovation. Google set it up to focus on technology-driven philanthropy via Google.org.  It is a practical way of helping people who have experienced some kind of disaster or humanitarian crisis.  They work to make critical information more accessible during times of crisis.

As they explain it:

The types of activities we might initiate include:

• Organizing emergency alerts, news updates and donation opportunities, and making this information visible through our web properties
• Building engineering tools that enable better communication and collaboration among crisis responders and among victims such as Person Finder and Resource Finder
• Providing updated satellite imagery and maps of affected areas to illustrate infrastructure damage and help relief organizations navigate disaster zones
• Supporting the rebuilding of network infrastructure where it has been damaged to enable access to the Internet
• Donating to charitable organizations that are providing direct relief on-the-ground

Read more about past efforts.

If you’re interested in this kind of thing then register now for Social Innovation Sydney Unconference 13 Aug 2011.

A while back I did a Live Local Challenge, attempting to consume only food produced within 100 kilometres of my home for a week. You can check out the results and learnings from the process in a

A while back I did a Live Local Challenge, attempting to consume only food produced within 100 kilometres of my home for a week. You can check out the results and learnings from the process in a series of blog posts from 2009.

Since that time I’ve been much more conscious of what I consume and where it comes from. Last week we screened Food Inc. at Social Innovation Sydney and that kick started me thinking about the issue again.

Then this article popped up in my RSS feed: Local Food or Less Meat? Data Tells The Real Story.

Andrew Winston summarises the research in a US context:

“Thankfully, a couple scientists took a harder look at the data and published an analysis in the Journal of Environmental Science and Technology. The abstract for this article is a prime example of clear writing and good lifecycle analysis — which don’t usually go together — so check it out. But here’s the essence:

• Food is transported a long way, going about 1,000 miles in delivery and over 4,000 miles across the supply chain.
• But 83% of the average U.S. household’s carbon footprint for food comes from growing and producing it. Transportation is only 11%.
• Different foods have vastly different greenhouse gas (GHG) intensity, with meat requiring far more energy to produce, and red meat being particularly egregious, requiring 150% more energy than even chicken.

So the journal article adds this up to an obvious conclusion: if you want to reduce your food’s carbon footprint, eat less meat. In short, “Shifting less than one day per week’s worth of calories from red meat and dairy products to chicken, fish, eggs, or a vegetable-based diet achieves more GHG reduction than buying all locally sourced food.”

As a numbers geek, I love this kind of analysis. Now for the caveats: none of this data should dissuade anyone from eating locally also. The footprint benefits are real, even if dwarfed by food choice. And the benefits to local economies and smaller farms are very important.

But let me repeat: just moving away from meat for one day a week is more effective than buying everything you eat locally. This number will be surprising to most people, but it’s partly why the global call for “Meatless Mondays” is gaining steam, with school systems and universities adopting the approach in cities around the world, from Baltimore to Tel Aviv.

Source: Andrew Winston, Local Food or Less Meat? Data Tells The Real Story

I suspect that the distances mentioned in the research hold for Australia too due to our large land mass and lack of local farming close to most cities. Thus it becomes clear that if you can’t decide to become vegetarian full time then there are substantial benefits to replacing a number of meals each week with vegetarian choices. That’s what we’re doing at my place.

Over the past several years I have come to think that capitalism as practised in the western world is fundamentally broken. Even before the global financial crisis (GFC) this feeling was strong. But in the aftermath of the GFC my discomfort with modern capitalism has continued to grow. Nothing [...]]]>

Over the past several years I have come to think that capitalism as practised in the western world is fundamentally broken. Even before the global financial crisis (GFC) this feeling was strong. But in the aftermath of the GFC my discomfort with modern capitalism has continued to grow. Nothing I have seen, read or heard has shifted my perception.

I know and understand the world of capitalism. I like capitalism and think that it has been good for us in many ways. I respect profit and the law of compound interest. Most of my work experience since leaving school has been with large corporations (mostly large enterprises, Fortune 500 or S&P/ASX 200) – what I jokingly refer to as ‘the belly of the beast’.

But business models that were effective for organisations in past centuries are no longer relevant to the conditions that face the world today. We must find business models that are sustainable, equitable and fair to replace them.

A few things to consider:

• Western business has been like a cargo cult for too long and has elevated shareholder return as an idol.
• What good to shareholders (a.k.a. human beings) if the profit that is returned to them comes at the price of the environment their children and grandchildren must inherit?
• What good to the shareholders if the people who work in the business to generate those returns are broken by corporate politics and are called upon to undertake immoral or illegal acts (for example #hackergate)?
• What good if those returns to shareholders are generated at the cost of social bonds and the common good?

For many years I’ve pondered: surely it must be possible to generate profit sustainably and to create social good while generating profit?

Over the years I’ve also noticed a growing number of people thinking along similar lines. These people have talked about, among other things, the idea social innovation.  They have also discussed concepts such as sustainable or resilient communities (checkout the MiiU wiki); and concepts like open source innovation are becoming increasingly important.

Even if the US manages to sort out its internal issues with the debt ceiling, there remain serious economic issues in Europe and North America.

We need to take collective action to create profit and abundance that is sustainable on a social, economic and environmental basis.

For too long we have let run rampant a corporate ideology that exalts profit as a deity and we have allowed worship at the altar of shareholder returns to dominate our thinking and ways of doing in business around the world.

It’s time to create better ways for organisations to be more sustainable, more humane, and more planet friendly.

UPDATE 7 AUG 2011

An interesting article just popped up on The Guardian from the UK: Our financial system has become a madhouse. We need radical change. Here Will Hutton argues that “As a new global crisis looms, and political paralysis worsens, genuinely bold solutions are required to overcome the malaise”. I recommend this article.

Last year with the launch of Social Innovation Sydney I was inspired by the idea of rebooting capitalism. I had become depressed about the nature of business in our world today and wanted to do something practical about changing things.

Then I went off to Paris for

Last year with the launch of Social Innovation Sydney I was inspired by the idea of rebooting capitalism. I had become depressed about the nature of business in our world today and wanted to do something practical about changing things.

Then I went off to Paris for LeWeb 2010 Conference and ran into Tara Hunt and our conversation got me thinking (I love meeting people who make me think!).

Upon arrival at home I read Tara’s posts about The Hole in the Soul of our Culture [Part 1 here and Part 2 here - both are recommended reading] and these resonated with the feelings that had sparked my involvement with Social Innovation Sydney.

Tara’s posts also pointed me in the direction of Umair Haque’s I’m Bored – The Significance Manifesto, which I’d missed during my travels.

I believe that we have entered an age where ‘business as usual’ is no longer viable. We need to come up with new business models that are founded on truth, openness, justice, equity, and sustainable profit. No longer can we sustain a world where profit and profit alone is the only goal of business (after all we are not Ferengi). We need businesses that change the world, that make things better for people, that do not destroy the environment for future generations.

We have flirted around the edges of change with notions like the triple-bottom-line to no avail. The existing culture of business has shown itself to be highly resistant to change. Existing business culture does not value the things that go into creating value that are not easily measured as ROI. Thus having a conversation with a customer is often not valued highly over getting the customer off the phone quickly to meet KPIs in a call centre.

I suspect that Tara is right when she identifies a key part of the problem as us:

“But it all comes back to what we value and why I think we have a hole in the soul of our culture. It isn’t merely the businesses and boardrooms where there lies an issue. It’s all around us. In North America at least. We pay lip service to wanting to change the world, to being better human beings, to ‘balancing’ our lives, but when it comes down to it, we tend to be more impressed with big numbers: 1 MILLION hits, 100,000 followers, $1 BILLION market capitalization, etc.”
[Source: The Hole in the Soul of our Culture - Part 2]

The change needs to start with an individual deciding to be different and to think differently. Deciding to shift away from instant gratification and ROI measured in mere numbers seems to be the first step. I also suspect that once an individual changes their thinking in this way that individual behavioural change will not be far behind.

I was lucky enough to hear my friend Mark Pesce speak at the Social Innovation BarCamp in Sydney on 6 Nov and his talk, while entertaining, was also profound.

Mark commenced by referring to mobile phones as “dream machines that deliver the desires of the material heart”. [...]]]>

I was lucky enough to hear my friend Mark Pesce speak at the Social Innovation BarCamp in Sydney on 6 Nov and his talk, while entertaining, was also profound.

Mark commenced by referring to mobile phones as “dream machines that deliver the desires of the material heart”. Then he pondered the notion of materiality and how it takes us away from the ‘real’ and towards the things. He concludes that what we own ends up owning us and that the material goods we own do not matter at all in the long run. He draws attention to Australia’s prison of stuff. He noted that sustainability starts with each of us saying no to stuff and that we need friends who’ll say “f*ck off mate, we’re full”.

These are challenging ideas. A call to reject the lure of things, of shiny pretty things, is hard to execute in this society that is so full of shiny pretty things.

Social Innovation Keynote by Mark Pesce from ApostrophePong on Vimeo.

After many weeks of planning with my co-conspirators Michelle Williams and Kim Chen we are finally on the eve of the second Social Innovation BarCamp.

This venture was a leap of faith for us. At the start we did not know if anyone else had a [...]]]>

After many weeks of planning with my co-conspirators Michelle Williams and Kim Chen we are finally on the eve of the second Social Innovation BarCamp.

This venture was a leap of faith for us. At the start we did not know if anyone else had a passion for social innovation and wanted to join in creating conversations around making change happen. Nor did we know if the unconference format would transition successfully out of the geek world where it originated.

But now with one successful event done and another under way it looks like our idea of creating a shared space where ‘change makers meet’ is coming together.

We’ve had great support from organisations like ASIX, COFA, Cisco and Headshift. Brasserie Bread also helped out with some of their wonderful artisan style bread for lunch. A huge thank-you to our kind supporters.

It’s not too late to register for this free event in Sydney. Also check out:

All you need to know for tomorrow’s Social Innovation Sydney!