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“Man is an agent … a center of unfolding impulsive activity “teleological” activity … seeking … some concrete, objective, impersonal end. … he is possessed of a taste for effective work, and a distaste for futile effort. He has a sense of the merit of serviceability or efficiency and of the demerit of futility, waste, or incapacity. This aptitude or propensity may be called the instinct of workmanship.”

Thorstein Veblen 1899

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Remember, we don’t come from nowhere. We have roots.

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Personally, I don’t envision a future of work where people don’t work. The entire “automation/robots will replace people so they can pursue their passions” seems a bit farfetched to me mostly because I think most people like doing things in which their ‘doing’ produces something, or as Veblen suggests, we ‘possess a taste for effective work.’

Anyway.

Let me talk about “instinct of workmanship.” In business we spend a lot of time talking about engagement, authenticity, empathy, psychological safety (all worthy things to talk about), but maybe we should be talking more about facilitating the instinct of workmanship. Maybe make it an objective (or intention).

Let me tell you why I think it’s worth considering.

Industrialization fucked up work in a variety of ways, but mainly it separated people from pride and shifted them to productivity. That sounds simplistic and I meant it that way. It certainly brought some management issues into play (consent versus command), but for today I am thinking about ‘the instinct of workmanship’ so hear me out. As industrialization began its inevitable climb in an increasingly materialistic world the worker , even while working in shit environments, felt like they were part of something. Part of a better, and bettering, world. sure. They may have felt like a small cog in a big wheel but the shit they were helping make was reshaping the world. In other words, the working world was shifting from pride in craftsmanship and production (agriculture) to pride in reshaping the world. And this is where things began to go awry. The workmanship value, contribution, resides in an arm’s length distance. The work itself was shit but it was making the world less shitty. So as Taylorism hit its stride, making workers even more miserable, and sucking any ‘instinct for workmanship’ out of the daily work life (unless you were now one of those new things called “managers”) the world actually stopped getting better. Or maybe the things the non-instinct workmanship was being asked to miserably work on began to take on appearances of not really what people needed but feeding an almost insatiable consumerism. The arm’s length contribution was now so far away that even if the worker squinted it was tough to see how their machine-like rote work was doing anything but making the guys in the ivory tower richer and richer. So, while people had an innate ‘instinct of workmanship’ nothing about their daily work suggested what they were actually doing was ‘workmanship’ in addition to the feeling that the work they were doing could, well, pretty much be done by any halfwit. And, in fact, while most simply wanted to enjoy some modicum of ‘instinct for workmanship’ they were seeing more and more half-wits being promoted to manage them!

Yeah. All of that sucks.

Circling back to my opening quote, work dispensed with the taste for effective work and injected a good dose of distasteful futile work.

To make work not suck it seems to me we should revisit enabling the instinct of workmanship in, well, the workers and the workplace. I actually believe this, in and of itself, if achieved increases a sense of meaning and establishes a sense of contribution (both incredibly important if we desire to increase the value of work in a Maslow-like sense). I am not going to invest the time and energy today sharing how I think that could be done because today I just wanted people to think about this. Think about the fact we, people who go into work day in and day out, don’t come from nowhere. We have roots. And if our roots are as miserable as I walked through, where we are ain’t so good. And that’s the esoteric point I am trying to make. If we come from somewhere, wouldn’t facilitating the instinct of workmanship be a good place to start to grow better citizens, better society and better business? Ponder.

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“And so shines a good deed in a weary world…”

Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory

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“We live in a world where finding fault in others seems to be the favorite blood sport. It has long been the basis of political campaign strategy. It is the theme of much television programming across the world. It sells newspapers. Whenever we meet anyone, our first, almost unconscious reaction may be to look for imperfections.”

Henry B. Eyring

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What is good in business? This question is gaining importance as discussions increase about businesses focusing on more than profits or shareholders. To be clear. Business has always invested lots of oxygen on the “how” <servant leadership, customer-centric, experience economy, etc.>, but all of those ‘hows’ were simply attempts in making profit better, i.e., ‘good’ was attached to the ‘how’. Anyway. There are a lot of good conversations on creating “good” organizations for the future of business. I, personally, center all my conversations on two foundational thoughts:

• • • Business is in, and of, society
    • The purpose of business is to benefit people

Both of these typically get some head nods until you actually hunker down and talk about what it actually means. Most people, people I respect, talk about “things” (it’s always easier to have a ‘thing’ and focus in it) rather than the grander narrative arc of business.

What do I mean by ‘things’? Purpose, culture, community, psychological safety, autonomy, molecules/organisms, teal (or any color you want), ‘shared values’, trust, transparency, digital transformation, authentic leadership, etc. Things that I would argue, despite their improvement consequences on how business is typically done today, are doomed for failure (or certainly not optimized) because the grander system mindset remains the same. Yeah. I do believe the institutions have crafted a cage from which they can make an employee feel like they are free, or freer, but only have made the cage a bit more accommodating to those seeking to fly. But. Going back to respected minds and ‘things’, it doesn’t mean they don’t attach their “thing” to something like a ‘learning organization’ its just that there is a sense that if this individual company, or institution, did ‘this’ that progress will be made. And they may be right – incrementally. I believe the larger discussion needs to be had not over ‘things’, but the business context narrative – its role in society, zero sum, benefits to people. Things like that.

So. My two “things.”

• Suggesting that a business is in, and of, society is acceptance that there are no moral, ethical, integrity lines between the workplace, the kitchen table, the PTA meeting, the community center and how people interact within and without work, and the business of doing business. This doesn’t mean a business is sacrificing anything. It can pursue profits, sales, productivity, all the business objectives which insure the survival of the business. but it pursues while understanding that “how you play the game matters.”
• Suggesting the purpose of business is to benefit people. This has nothing to do with Purpose (with a capital P) and everything to do with, well, benefiting people. I often suggest: the purpose of business is to create, and offer, value without extracting, or exploiting, things that are valued. Therefore, value is collectively created. Ponder that a bit. Things that are valued include the environment, earth itself, as well as people’s dignity, sense of mattering and truth. You don’t exploit people or ‘extract’ their productivity nor exploit them, you create value through collective creation – with no, or little, expense to that which is needed to create it. regardless. This idea is an old idea. It is at the core of most business thinking from the beginning of the industrial age. Create things that people need and will benefit from. So what is old should be new again.

I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that to totally embrace both of these thoughts you almost have to believe the business world, and world in general, is not a zero-sum game. That’s an additional thought to ponder.

there’s never a single reason for anything a human does.

In and of society.

In and of society. To me an individual of business is also of the community and society just as an individual in business is also in the community and society. An individual fulfilled at work is more likely to offer something fulfilling to the community and society. Order begets order and just begets justness and good begets good. By shaping a fairer, more creative and more productive business, one begets a fairer, more creative and more productive society.

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“Business is, and should be considered, truly a social agency.”

Mary Parker Follett

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A business person should think of their work as one of the necessary functions of society, aware that other people are also performing necessary functions, and that all together these make a sound, healthy, useful community and society. I would argue it not only makes business more interesting, but a job more interesting if one acknowledges it contributes to the culture of the world it interacts with.

A business should think of their work, and their business, as one of the necessary functions of society, aware that other businesses are also performing necessary functions, and that all together they make a sound, healthy, useful community and society.

A business in and of society almost demands the convergence, and connection, between individual meaning, business vision, community health and engagement with the greater society (world).

If a business does not, they will act upon opportunities solely in a self-interest way, in other words, kind of what most businesses do today. It is a zero sum attitude in which survival demands the death of someone else (or their sales). So to be a better business ultimately, any business needs to recognize, and acknowledge, it is dependent upon maximizing human potential which also is a reflection, and recognition, that work, what one does to earn a living, is inextricably linked to being in, and of, society — structured in a better way to get the best out of people & resources as well as be a better citizen within the society in which it exists. 

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“A person is a point in the social process rather than a unit in that process. A person is at the same time a social factor and a social product.”

Mary Parker Follett

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Purpose of business is to benefit people.

Benefiting people seems like a simple objective and, yet, business seems to forget it time and time again. We produce products people do not really need and produce them in ways to the detriment of the world people actually count on to keep living. We extract and exploit. Neither are to the real benefit of people. I would argue if every business simply began here this alone would put businesses on the right path to a better business world. But the truth is to really get where business has to go there needs to be some rigor to answering whether a business achieves this objective and some harsh reflection.

Which leads me to my issue with most ‘human-centric’ business discussions. My issue resides in the fact they appear to center on productivity within the 4-wall-construct of a business and not see themselves as any version of a producer of a social product. The truth is productivity is actually contingent upon people within, and with out, the constructs of the physical building. Humans have a symbiotic relationship between the business, society, community and, yes, the environment. It was first Follett who pointed this out and Drucker put a sharper point on that thought by pointing out a business cannot be successful within a sick society.

People, at least in a business, need to be productive, but to find meaning that productivity needs to meet two main objectives:

• It should tap into one’s potential (unleashing potential rather than extracting skill)
• It should offer a benefit to someone other than the person doing it.

To be clear. This isn’t about Purpose or some grand vision. This is simpler. This is a simple decision to believe that a business is part of the weave of society, community and the world and that everything the business, and its people, do matters not only to the business but everything & everyone it touches. That running a profitable business is not mutually exclusive from running an equitable business – equitable to people. This is more about shared vision than it is any purpose, cause or social responsibility (although they can be part of it). Far too many businesses are under the illusion that their organization is aligned around not only ‘values’, but some shared objective. Typically, that shared objective is some tangible measured goal and, like a machine (or well trained team), the organization is striving to attain it. That is not vision, that is a warped leadership version of gamification. It is an attempt to even out uneven people. Instead, a business should share a vision, embrace progress and connect all activity with behavior people can be proud of within their home, within their community as well as within their business. In other words, benefit people.

at some point I wish we could just accept that people are an imperfect collection of ideas, attitudes, needs & desires and that coherence in Life is most likely attained not through success, but meaning. And that meaning, and coherence, is actually grounded in some version of doing. Ponder.

Which leads me to what a ‘good’ business is and how to make the business world be better tomorrow than it is today.

We like to think of good as solid, 100% defensible and, maybe most importantly in today’s thought, 100% recognizable. We would be wrong to think that way. Good is often nuanced with some subtle distinctions in practice. Good intentions can be perfect, but doing good is more often than embraced by not 100% good people (imperfect people) and actions are not always 100% right (imperfect implementation).

So where does “good” go?

I will say, pragmatically, business is always better if everyone single person is maximized. Maximized in being the best version of who and what they can be <this is not the misguided ‘bring your whole self to work’ concept>. Therefore. The organization that encourages the ‘least’ to become their the ‘mostest.’ This has always seemed more efficient &effective than top/down or even focusing on having best performers pull ‘up’ an organization. In my terms, this is personal progress. Progress in that a person can honestly say “I am better today than I was yesterday and tomorrow I will be better than today” (time increments are negotiable, but personal progress is meaningful and contributes to a better business).

As for morally, well, top down always believes “good” trickles down to help the most vulnerable. It doesn’t. “Top” inherently knows this because they create sub-programs to fill in the lack of trickle down. and, yet, day after day they do the same thing. Bottom up morality lifts everyone. The least become more & the more become morer & even the most are pushed to become better.

“if the people are engaged and focused on contribution they will be more productive, generate more high quality output, be brand ambassadors, be innovative (yes, they will want to contribute ideas to the business itself), be more effective in their behavior (service, customer interactions, vendor relationships, communications) and, you know what? … you’ll be more profitable too.”

source: Zach Mercurio

Or. As Zach Mercurio shared with me:

It’s actually a basic business principle that’s been dressed up by “thought leaders:” Purpose is contribution, or if you like, “value creation.”  Purposeful organizations and their people focus first on contributing and on creating value. They trust that the effects (results) will follow. As Drucker once said, “Profit is not the purpose of a company. It’s the test of its validity.”  The more valid your contribution, the more results you’ll see.  Every “financial result” is mediated through a human being. Human beings who experience meaningfulness and purpose are far better mediators than those who just “need to get the numbers up!” Frantic leaders (i.e. traditionally-minded business leaders) focus first on producing results, but the problem is you can’t have get an effect without a cause.  You can’t have a result without a contribution.

Anyway.

I will say this entire ‘better business for a better world’ topic is fascinating.

While we credit Millennials for the refinding of our business soul (its partially whatever we call Purpose, but it’s mostly a simple recognition that something is wrong in the way business is being conducted and there has to be a better way) the truth is that this has nothing to do with age or some generational labels. Mary Parker Follet in early 1900’s. Drucker in the 70’s. Toffler in 1985.

They told us the way to do business, but when we chose Friedman (with a good dose of Gordon Gecko) business started down the slippery slope of dollars over contribution and responsibility (not Purpose). The issue now is, as we all know, getting off a slippery slope is hard (you cannot climb back up off it, you need to jump off and restart or get pulled off by a helping hand) so those on it are, well, on it. I find while we suggest it’s a love of the status quo more often than not most business leaders know they are on a slippery slope and can’t get off it.

Yeah. A better way of doing business for a better world is a surprisingly, incredibly simple in concept but a surprisingly, incredidbly difficult, topic to navigate. A business first & foremost needs to be successful to survive and its objective is to do things to survive/thrive. And, yet, the path to do so is actually to NOT think about business, but rather think about people, attitudes and maximizing their potential. There is a delicate balance of two truths – a business needs to be in the business of doing business and people are at their highest engagement when they are doing things not because it is business, but meaningful. Therein lies the paradox. And within that paradox resides the potential for a better business narrative within which we can begin applying all those wonderful “things” I mentioned upfront.

Look. There has to be a better way and we know there is.

“If in a company you change nothing, you are sure to fail. If you change everything you are sure to fail as well. So the art of winning resides in your capacity to draw the fine line between what should be changed and what should not.  Same for a brand.  All brands are in transition.  You can’t build brands by thinking only in a linear way. You have to think of larger futures for them. And to do that, you have to use your imagination. A larger share of the future very seldom comes from an extrapolation of the present. And that is what Disruption is all about. Disruption is about discovering new futures.”

Jean Marie-Dru

Every job shouldn’t be a valuable job, it should be a valued job – valued by the one doing it and by others around. If you find you are valued for what you do, you will inherently begin seeking to be better (and do better) because we know we are contributing. That’s meaning. That’s purpose (with a capital P).

In the end.

I do believe 1000’s of plumbers, nurses, teachers, small business owners could teach us more about meaning in work & Purpose driven behavior and being a better business then any large business leader pontificating on some stage. They could do so because they understanding meaningfulness in what they actually “do” day in and day out. They know they will never be multi millionaires and understand the value in Life is found not in some unattainable mansion but rather the meaningful aspects they integrate into other people’s lives whether it be unplugging drains so the family can get on with being a family, hiring students to work in the restaurant and giving them breaks to study (and still pay them) or the nurse who spends the extra 15 minutes because that one patient’s father called worried.

It’s not profits in $’s, it’s in how the soul profited.

 But for business in general, who starts being good? Who leads being better? In a tragedy of commons zero-sum world no one wants to go first. Which leads me to something I wrote years ago “so shines a good deed in a weary world.” my point was one deed can make a difference.

“We must live in the best way this existence that has been given to us, embracing the flow of events. It is up to us to try in every moment of our life to do our best.”

The Branches of Time

This is where I would suggest ‘business improvers’ (consultants, gurus, futurists, etc) can step in and play a role. The majority of business fixers fall into one of 2 camps:

1. 1. The “let’s make your business run more efficiently” people. They’ll discuss process, simplification and digital transformation. Yes. They’ll couch efficiency in some nice fluffy narratives, but in the end they are simply suggesting the machine isn’t running as well as it could and needs to be finetuned or rebuilt. They see behavior as the be all end all.
   2. The “people potential” people. They’ll discuss, well, people. How to get people to work better together, how to build an environment in which they are engaged (with caring AND process/tools/digital) and how to foster a healthy culture. They see attitudes as important as behaviors.

I am clearly in the second camp and here is what I know. Ask any business leader and they will:

(a) always believe something in the business could be better, and

(b) always be seeking to make things better.

Period.

I do not know one true business leader who is completely satisfied or, on the flip side of the coin, believe their business is maximizing its potential and opportunities so the path to the bigger business narrative shift occurs in reshaping mindsets and attitudes, not specific behaviors or ‘things.’

Remember. Most leaders address a desire to be better transactionally (albeit they may, on occasion, frame it as a ‘structural organizational betterment’), yet, “better”, when one views it from a ‘world’ perspective, demands addressing structural elements. I would suggest younger people feel more strongly about structurally addressing this then older business people who have learned to suffer/live in the business environment and therefore feel more like transactional things are the most pragmatic ways to ‘change it.’

And while I believe most of the business world knows there needs to be a larger narrative change the issue is that the gap between ‘knowing’ and actually ‘doing’ is a real sonuvabitch to cross.

I would suggest the key to crossing this gap is not in the ‘specialists’ or the experts in how things are already being done, the key exists in people who know enough about some specific skill to lay a pragmatic foundation and have the ability to see a new way to build to possibilities. In other words, people with a vision to build a new business model.

I am suggesting a better business creates a better society. People spend a significant part of their lives working and that work establishes, as an adult, how they view how the ‘game of life is played.’ When business is dysfunctional or misaligned from ‘better’ values/ethics/behavior (playing fair, how you treat others, rewarded for good work, appreciated for potential not task achievement, progress over results, etc.) it creates a discord in how one views how community/society SHOULD behave. It creates a sensemaking (what makes sense in the world) dissonance and destroys the commonalities (a word Daniel Schmachtenberger uses) which offer some agreed upon beliefs and behaviors. When sensemaking falls part or becomes blurry choice making often steps on the slippery slope of moral compromise. I bring all of this up because business, like it or not, is often not only the model for how things work, but the glue to societal attitudes.

Yeah. I am suggesting business should assume its responsibility to society. I am not a Millennial and I have ached for changes like this forever. Drucker outlined all of this in New Realities 1990, Ewen in Captains of Consciousness 1976, and the Geckos ignored it and the non Geckos (like me) were not strong enough to fight it. I say that now we fight. And we fight by offering a better business narrative for a better business world for the actual betterment of people. To be clear, we need smart people with smart ‘things’ to improve the way business does the business of doing business, all I am arguing is that we need business to think about the overarching responsibility associated with the business of doing business.

Ponder.

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“When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”

John Muir

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“But every once in a while, pure chance intercedes to remind us that whatever structures of control we may put into place, however much we may mistake the illusion of choice for the fact of choice, randomness is the reigning monarch of the universe.”

Maria Popova

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People often ask me about purpose, meaning, contribution, ethics, well, a bunch of things which aren’t the ‘productivity’ word. I usually begin by suggesting in talking about them we ARE talking about productivity. Now. To be clear. I have bludgeoned the Purpose people, the ‘shared values’ people and the oft naïve ethics people. The truth is that if you are to speak of any of these topics in a business context, they are all hitched to productivity. The other truth is that talking about these things do no harm and actually have the likelihood to contribute to a better world. Suffice it to say I would rather be talking about them than not.

The reality is everything is hitched to everything. It is true that business cannot have a moral revolution until we actually attend to our ideological captivity to, and of, productivity. The reality is that the connection between the worker, the leadership and the institution IS productivity. It is the one commonality which allows all the powers to wrestle with each other. Any effort in social, or societal, regeneration will be smothered by disappointment and frustration if everyone doesn’t accept this as a reality. While we need to take into account how everyone operates in relation to one another as humans, in business it is a means to an end. That said. One cannot thrive without the other. Regenerating the moral compass – including meaning, purpose and contribution – is doomed without productivity and optimizing/maximizing productivity is doomed without regenerating the moral compass. By neglecting to see they are hitched to each other is to refuse to see either the needs of people or the needs of the business. That is absurdly stupid and non-productive and, yet, we continue to have the same conversation over and over again.

“Institutions exist for the sake of their own expansion and self-perpetuation; they are not subject to human control, but are autonomous entities vis-à-vis all human agency. Human beings often believe ‘that they control the institution; whereas, in truth, the principality claims them as slaves’.”

William Stringfellow

Well. I included the above Stringfellow quote not because I agree, but because he has a point. Businesses do take on a life of their own and they do have their own self interest at heart and they do find ways, methods and incentives/gamification to get you to buy into what it is they need you to do to, well, produce. It does have a slavish tinge to it but I know of few businesses who would embrace this type of thinking in its totality. What business tends to overlook about the whole meaning/purpose discussion is that most people love feeling wanted and business almost always rationally rewards the ‘wanting’ desire instead of triggering a deeper moral sensitivity of belonging and contributing. And, if we are honest, business takes advantage of this. They, frankly, do a bunch of shit that isn’t necessarily good for a person <beyond a salary>. If we are additionally honest, we would admit this all basically rewires our brains in some fairly unhealthy ways <for us and for society>. As business ties us into servitude to the business institution it isn’t that easy to turn off that ‘wiring’ when you leave the business day. What the business values you for starts seeping into what you see as how you should be valued in certain things outside the business world. “Certain things” can span from the occasional to the many, from individual actions to parental/relational actions <you actually start transmitting your beliefs of what is important and valued to your children and family>, but the amount matters less than the fact business has affected how you start valuing things. That ‘value’ equation then seeps into how well you like yourself, should be liked, and, well, its not that assholes or ‘morally challenged’ become successful, its success that makes you morally challenged. That’s what happens as business gets hitched to everything else in the universe.

“Our corporations have built a global production system that is so complex, and geared so tightly and leveraged so finely, that a breakdown anywhere increasingly means a breakdown everywhere.”

Barry Lynn, 2005, “The Rise and Coming Fall of the Global Corporation”

This ‘hitchedness’ creates an odd contradiction of resilience and fragility. Because people are so tightly intertwined into the business, i.e., the business has leveraged them finely, they create some resilience when fragile systems, already stretched, breakdown. Of course the exception is when the breakdown is everywhere, but, that’s a topic for another day.

That said. This “hitchedness” also spans moral, production/productivity and consumption and this span is so complex that talking about one, and not the other, is relatively useless. While it was John Kenneth Galbraith who told us the link between wealth and intelligence is specious at best, the thought is the same between moral worthiness and acquisition or consumption. The most obvious example of that is significant donations to your local church does not absolve you from reprehensible amoral behavior or less-than-ethical means of acquiring your wealth.

Business and society and humans are in a weird place at the moment.

In the world we live in today, being poverty stricken offers up some sense of lack of virtue (either accountability or work or ethic or something lesser than). Uhm. And having wealth earns you evidence of some virtue (no matter how dubious that virtue may be). At the center of this entire philosophical rambling is a person’s relationship with business or productivity.

Produce and the world thinks you are worthy in some form or fashion and do-not-produce and you are not worthy in some form or fashion <and all the dimensions in-between>. Once again, it is all hitched together. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this slightly circular logic also encourages us to consume beyond our means as a way of showing, in some way, that we have contributed (in some way). The doom loop of things hitched together begin crafting a flawed universe in which things gets produced, but meaning and purpose aren’t produced. In other words, the system is not optimized. In fact, I could argue the wealthier, or more affluent you become, the higher the likelihood you are simply a new version of poverty.

Anyway. With everything hitched to each other the truth of the matter is everything is stuck in the past, until it isn’t. The only way to get out of the ‘past trap’ is to have ideas, which, typically, will span a spectrum of oldish to newish, smash into each other in debate and spread out like a contagion throughout the universe. That said. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that, inevitably, all social revolution or social regeneration is local. What I mean by that is while an idea can float in the ‘cloud’ inevitably it will take a number of people sitting around <maybe several times> sharing ideas and ideas about those ideas to make any meaningful idea come to life in any meaningful way. Once again, webs of interdependence often shrink when it comes crunch time because that is the time when productivity is honed. And, yes, in this case I am actually even suggesting producing ideas on how to make contribution seen as important, and more important. The truth is any moral revolution or social regeneration <which is actually what all this purpose and meaning discussion is really about> will not happen unless we can all hitch ourselves to some common sense of agreement and then, well, do something. If you doubt this can happen I would refer back to the opening Popova quote. Often we find that randomness is the monarch of the universe and if we randomly, but smartly, place something within the universe, well, remember, everything is hitched to the universe.

In the end. Ideas are hitched to everything else in the universe, including productivity, and ,when hitched well, humans find meaning and purpose. I’ll end there because that is the formula to improve business and, inevitably, the universe.

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“Truth itself is an emergent distinction. It’s not a noun; it’s more of a verb.”

Peter Joseph

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A brief thought from Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century, that maybe we should all ponder a bit:

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“As observers of totalitarianism such as Victor Klemperer noticed, truth dies in four modes, all of which we have just witnessed.
The first mode is the open hostility to verifiable reality, which takes the form of presenting inventions and lies as if they were facts. The president does this at a high rate and at a fast pace. One attempt during the 2016 campaign to track his utterances found that 78 percent of his factual claims were false. This proportion is so high that it makes the correct assertions seem like unintended oversights on the path toward total fiction. Demeaning the world as it is begins the creation of a fictional counterworld.
The second mode is shamanistic incantation. As Klemperer noted, the fascist style depends upon “endless repetition,” designed to make the fictional plausible and the criminal desirable. The systematic use of nicknames such as “Lyin’ Ted” and “Crooked Hillary” displaced certain character traits that might more appropriately have been affixed to the president himself. Yet through blunt repetition over Twitter, our president managed the transformation of individuals into stereotypes that people then spoke aloud. At rallies, the repeated chants of “Build that wall” and “Lock her up” did not describe anything that the president had specific plans to do, but their very grandiosity established a connection between him and his audience.
The next mode is magical thinking, or the open embrace of contradiction. The president’s campaign involved the promises of cutting taxes for everyone, eliminating the national debt, and increasing spending on both social policy and national defense. These promises mutually contradict. It is as if a farmer said he were taking an egg from the henhouse, boiling it whole and serving it to his wife, and also poaching it and serving it to his children, and then returning it to the hen unbroken, and then watching as the chick hatches.
Accepting untruth of this radical kind requires a blatant abandonment of reason. Klemperer’s descriptions of losing friends in Germany in 1933 over the issue of magical thinking ring eerily true today. One of his former students implored him to “abandon yourself to your feelings, and you must always focus on the Führer’s greatness, rather than on the discomfort you are feeling at present.” Twelve years later, after all the atrocities, and at the end of a war that Germany had clearly lost, an amputated soldier told Klemperer that Hitler “has never lied yet. I believe in Hitler.”
The final mode is misplaced faith. It involves the sort of self-deifying claims the president made when he said that “I alone can solve it” or “I am your voice.” When faith descends from heaven to earth in this way, no room remains for the small truths of our individual discernment and experience. What terrified Klemperer was the way that this transition seemed permanent. Once truth had become oracular rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant. At the end of the war a worker told Klemperer that “understanding is useless, you have to have faith. I believe in the Führer.”

I would also note that this is how cults evolve.

Ponder.

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“Since corrupt people unite amongst themselves to constitute a force, then honest people must do the same.”

Leo Tolstoy

Today’s piece began with a stack of book and an idea.

The books were The Economic Singularity (Calum Chace), A Human Algorithm (Flynn Coleman), The Dictionary of Dangerous Ideas (Mike Walsh), The Alignment Problem (Brian Christian) and, well, Who Owns the Future (Jaron Lanier). In general, they are all filled with dangerously good ideas with regard to thinking about the future.

My idea is “the future will always arc toward humans and humanness (not necessarily humanity)”.

With all the dangerous ideas and my idea, which is probably dangerous in and of itself, I set off pondering what the future would look like and maybe more importantly how we would get there.

All that said.

I have altered my views on the effects of automation and robots over time. Suffice it to say I may have been a bit too ‘human-optimistic’ and now I still believe we will inevitably get to a good space, just that it is going to be pretty rough for humans until we get there. That doesn’t mean good things will not happen and there won’t be some benefits, just that the cost of running the gauntlet from here to there is gonna be high.

For some it will be about toys and enhancements but for many, many, others it will be about lost jobs and lost ‘meaning’.

** note: by ‘meaning’ I mean that society, and business, will be relatively flippant with regard to what humans actually do as they discuss what robots/automation can do making people feel like whatever skills they may offer doesn’t really have any meaning and make swaths of the population will feel either marginalized or villainized. As I have said before, “the ‘meanings of lives’ are at stake whenever we discuss the future of work, yet, far too often we speak of retraining/reskilling as if its changing clothes all the while ignoring the fact you are naked in between for all the world to see. Psychologically not something most of us desire.”

But when it is all said and done, I believe we will look back and:

• See we underestimated how important efficiency, and profit, was to business in an increasingly commoditized world
• See we overestimated people’s ability to improve personal choice against the onslaught of AI and internet bots
• See we were far too quick to adopt ‘new & shiny’ and be guinea pigs in real in-market trial & error (of things that had consequences far beyond the use-case)
• See that technologists, ones developing the AI/automation/robot innovations, consistently overestimated the value of what they brought to humans and underestimated the value of humans

I believe what bothers many of us, even those of us who view much of technology as having massive benefits for the human race and humanity, is that, well, a tech-apocalypse isn’t off the table for the future. This nagging feeling nudges at us again and again. And maybe that is our conscious reminding us of where I began today – corrupt people gather and, therefore, honest people need to also.

All that said.

The reality is ‘robots’ have already joined the human world – smart coffee makers, in car navigation, retail locator apps, drones (for shipping as well as war), self-driving trucks, “if you like this, you may like this” – seen and unseen – algorithms and even the ‘metaverse.’ It’s here and part of our lives. I imagine the only question from here on out is how far we permit it to go.

Given my opening, here are some scenarios:

Toddler-education.

I’ll leave older education to someone else. In my view we should focus on ‘pre-traditional school age’ children. Research shows time and time again the earlier you begin education the better it is for the child (and brain). At some point someone, some technologist, is going to develop a stuffed animal robot which will be able to interact with a child answering questions and offering contextual knowledge/information. The more and more successful it became the more and more technologists will view it as opportunities to offer “more” and they attempted to make this animal companion responsible for all education. This means some well-meaning technologist suggested it shouldn’t just be informational, but also ‘an emotional intelligence companion’ (attempting to help build the emotional underpinnings, EQ, to a successful human being). It will become a cross between Simon Sinek and Encyclopedia Britannica with a twist of Aristotle. Farther down this rabbit hole some entrepreneur suggested customizing the programming to match up with the parent’s ideology <religious beliefs, patriotic views, in other words, engrained existing biases> making this a business idea focusing on niche sales. Instead of broadening early education this furry likeable animal robot actually began constricting and indoctrinating. Here is the good news. After running this wildly unhealthy technology gauntlet, humanity will circle back and remind themselves that a curious young child learning more basic knowledge creates the foundation for a happier, healthier, productive citizen – of a country and the world. Children will have furry animal robots more like a librarian than some life companion or cult leader.

Where did the jobs go?

I firmly believe AI and robots will augment people working to the benefit of the worker, the consumer (whoever receives the outputs of the human-tech partnership) and humanity. But the path to that is not going to be easy. Business which for years has been neglecting value creation in its pursuit of efficiency (profit maximization) ended up relentlessly pursuing AI/automation/robots as a means to not purposefully replace humans, but to purposefully optimize margins within an existing cost structure. Sure they gave a head nod, initially, to human creativity and imagination, but eventually hunkered down and inevitably pursued AI/programming to replicate it (well enough) to feed incremental innovations well enough to maintain its place in industry (because everyone else was doing it). Business, as business does, embraced a zero sum tragedy of commons attitude and it was a race to see how much AI/automation/robotics they could use before the other guy used more. People simultaneously lost jobs in droves and by trickle effect depending on the industry. Uhm. But then we hit peak ‘where the hell did my job go’ status when board of directors realized they didn’t need an Elon Musk or Jeff Bezos-type running a globalized business, they just need a well programmed robot. Even the so-called business titans were out on the street. Capitalism crashed into robot commoditization and not only did business suffer, innovation suffered and, well, consumers suffered as a consequence because nothing truly got better. Oh. And entrepreneurs got the life sucked out of them because new only mattered if it could be quickly scaled or quickly replicated.

What I am saying is business will do what business does, go too far in their pursuit of making a business reliably and replicably profitable.

But here is the good news from the future. At some point business will realize what actually generates value and enables progressive value creation is, well, humans. The robots were redesigned, again but better, to not replace humans, but seek to have the same sized labor force as we do today but everyone is optimized because they work in partnership with some technology. Robots, automation and AI will simply make people better at what they do, businesses will be better in general and everyone is happier because productivity is enhanced BY humans simply being the best they can be.

Find the liars.

Half truth and half truth does not equal truth on green blackboard

I have said for years that we should be looking to the rising generation of people to solve, and resolve, the idiocracy occurring in the social media online world. I stand by that. But it is going to be a painful road getting there. In the future we will look back and laugh at the naivete of the general human population. We will wonder how humans accepted lying, and confused a lie with the truth, or just accepted ‘truthiness’. But mostly we will look back and wonder how humans believed technology, left unaccountable, was good for truth. Heck. We will look back and wonder how humans believed humans were good for truth. As the years went by slowly but surely even the people who said “no algorithm can tell me what to think and do” began to realize, well, yes, algorithms can shape what I think and do. And as they realized this, and how idiotic they had been, they will get angry. They got angry because if politicians perpetuate Big Lies with no consequences and bots share fake new/stories with no consequences, then they realize there is no trust. And no trust sucks. So, what ended up happening is a group of people, mostly younger people who craved some honesty and truths, said “dicks will be dicks and I cannot control what dick-like lies/half truths they will spin and say, but I can develop an app that filters everything it takes in and tell us when it is a lie or a half truth or even the good ole truth.” Now. It took years to work out the kinks, but the app immediately filters out the quacks, extremists, nutjobs, conspiracy theorists and trolls. That was a big win in and of itself. While everything was still overwhelmingly interconnected this “find the liars” software overwhelmingly made the truth connectedness more visible. While there could be an argument for whether automation should craft the news or humans, in the future we found that all people mostly cared about was the truth and being able to trust what they learned. The interesting thing about the future is that nutjobs and conspiracy theorists still exist, they just keep getting bludgeoned to death by the ‘find the liars’ software instead of some idiotic twitter feed argument. Humans saved humanity through, well, an app. Go figure.

Dude, where’s my car?

Self-driving, autonomous, cars/vehicles. I have changed my views on this over time. I used to think they were not only inevitable but that people would actually be happy handing over the driving responsibility to their car. I’ve rethought that. Anyway. Let’s look back from the future. Technologists, sitting at their desks envisioning a better world, collectively and relentlessly pursued a non-human vehicular world. They said, “what the fuck, we have cars, we have people, why are people driving them instead of doing something else with their time?”** and instead of replacing cars they simply said:

• “I bet there is a way to make some money off this”
• “we can make some cool cutting edge 5-dismensional metaverse AI systems” (which may make me famous)
• “people are always bitching about not having enough time, this gives people more time to use other social media/technology widgets we have developed if they don’t have to actually drive while in a car”
• oh, what about “safety”

** note: I would note that someone also thought the same thing with mass transit, railway transportation, shipping and planes, all of which are mostly self-whatevering, we still have humans in the control sections cockpits and in key segments have full crews.

Well. Setting aside that this whole idea takes an existing world (everyone owning cars) and simply looks at it in a fairly myopic way, technologists went to work. They quickly found simplistic effective solutions for getting cars from here to there. And the first ones to pay the price were the drivers who got paid for driving – long haulers, Uber drivers, delivery vans, etc. Businesses, eyeing autonomous vehicles through their own self interest lens, saw it as “let’s make some more money” and, well, human jobs bit the dust. But it got a little weird for everyone when really well designed autonomous vehicles were 99% incredibly successful – and that 1% was actually killing or injuring people, well, at about the same level as human drivers had been doing their past job, i.e., driving. This is where technologists went back to the drawing board and flipped the equation. They said “well, if safety is the primary objective, won’t we make money by doing that?” Ok. They didn’t say that. Ethel, at the front security desk, one of the few humans still working at the company, said it to one of the technologists as their security key card wasn’t working and she needed to re-key it for them. Anyway. This new drawing board developed smart cars with people driving which decreased human errors in driving situations and, well, driving became safer, traffic flows improved slightly <which in urban areas drove value through the roof> and people started enjoying driving a bit more. Humans will eventually take back control of getting from here to there but along the way a bunch of people are gonna lose their jobs and their lives.

Let’s make everyone in the company a decisionmaker.

The advent of the IoT ecosystem, forming a web of interconnected systems where objects and gateways will be able to interact using open standard protocols, enabled edge computing. Basically, it meant you could distribute effective decision making, not just decision making, because you could efficiently distribute data/knowledge/institutional wisdom to whomever was closest to the business decision/situation at hand. From there it began going a bit sideways. Initially, innovative leaders bought into edge computing. This was a business decision, not a human decision. The business world had been convinced that time was money and there was less time, and shorter attention spans (none true) and were convinced that, through technology, decisions could be made faster and better and they would make more money. So, they told everyone they were now a decisionmaker. Oddly, this wasn’t very effective. Most people on the edges of the organization had never really been enabled to make many decisions and ended up being slower, less risk taking and, well, actually bad at a lot of decisions.

Technologists seized this as the “Edge Computing 3.25” challenge and went to work.

They set up Cloud computing to become a ‘super brain’ and designed individual terminals to actually crunch data and issue dashboards personalized to each specific role. All that wasn’t enough. Some genius designed an ‘eliminate risk algorithm’ which appeared as a button on each distributed decisionmakers’ screen. Eureka. I get to make a decision, but eliminate risk. This algorithm calculated all possible outcomes given all the data it scooped up and offered up a guide to making the right choice. Leadership lauded the innovation and bought it up like children in a candy store. Several years later internal surveys suggested employees weren’t happy nor were the choices made extremely good. The employees were suggesting they weren’t really enabled to make decisions, the computer was, and they were simply implementing. Leaders took note and, well, fired everyone. They thought “well, if they really aren’t making decisions, who needs them (I gave them a job, they didn’t do it, fire them for cause).” Accountants applauded because all the Edge Computing was a sunk cost and employees just seemed like an inefficient expense. Several years later leadership noticed not only were many of the choices not so good, but some of them were extraordinarily bad. They brought in the now ancient technology futurist, Brian Christian, who chuckled and said “When a computer guesses, it is alarmingly confident.” At some point people started realizing risk actually increased because the algorithm simply picked yes or no even if all the data it crunched from the data ocean it had access to suggested one choice was better by 2% points (51 to 49). Business, never one to quit when a dollar is to be made, said “Wired Magazine still tells me bringing decisions closer to the actionable moments is good business so let’s bring back humans but make them smarter.” So, technologists sharpened some pencils and came up with a Brain Robot. It looked like a helmet but technologists convinced everyone it was a robot enhancing the brain. All employees wore these helmets all day long and the sensors in it collected any data anyone could ever imagine with regard to brain, physiology and neuroscience. Facebook came along and claimed “this is the metaverse.” Humans just thought they looked weird and felt weird but also felt better about making decisions. Problems began occurring when (a) employees started head butting each other with the helmets damaging sensors and (b) technologists started noticing that the sensors, when sensing the human being overwhelmed with anxiety (common with decisions) or overstimulated with too much information, crafted the most simplistic output possible. The robots, programmed to help make choices, designed output to ensure a choice was made. Similar to the ‘eliminate risk algorithm’ business leaders found, well, computers suck at making choices and decisions. Here is the good news. After all this investment in technology and firing/hiring people business finally decided that enabling people to make some decisions, not all, is good and people are actually good at it (and get better with practice). They also found it was cheaper and better to make people’s brains smarter by making them more data literate and craft dashboard summaries which offered an array of “approved by system” acceptable choices. They also found that value creation decisions are more often an accumulation of “art” decisions, not science decisions.

Nothing will ever be safe.

In the future business ideas actually become safer. Yeah. But, as business does, they didn’t reach that conclusion easily. This is actually about Quantum computing, but I will begin in an odd place – security. As I began this piece, there are good guys and there are bad guys and the bad guys will use whatever is available to do bad things if good guys don’t get their shit together and do something. The issue here? Algorithms running on quantum computers make nothing safer, let alone safe.

As one expert suggested: “quantum computing forms an unprecedented threat to one of these traditional strongest links in cybersecurity: asymmetric encryption”. Suffice it to say that quantum algorithms that can run on quantum computers makes what used to be difficult calculations become easily possible and impossible calculations become possible. When the first quantum computers became commercially available and security standard changes being time consuming, we (humans) of course fucked it up because a bunch of humans, technologists prompted by greedy business leaders, raced to do things with this new opportunity with their focus not on security, but making money. And while the good people went running after a shitload of esoteric, fascinating, possibly meaningful questions, the bad guys used this opportunity to, well, make themselves money. And make money in some not-so-ethical ways.  I imagine this all falls under the ‘cybersecurity’ heading and I know just enough about cybersecurity to be dangerous. That said. Viewing this scenario from the future one can clearly start quoting Frost “two roads diverged” and watch how quantum computing simultaneously enabled businesses to do some things they have never done before and make them even more vulnerable. We can see how business technologists gleefully embraced quantum computing because, well, “let’s make money.” The problem we will also see is that the bad guys are also sitting there going “let’s make money” as well as some of them will make money not just by stealing your money, but by stealing what you are thinking and saying. And they will not advertise they did so, yet, start using YOUR ideas in ways that you didn’t envision, faster and with the knowledge of what YOU are/were going to do <insert a business ’yikes’ here>. Technologists, huddled in their own little worlds, ignored the fact that what makes businesses successful isn’t technology – its knowledge. Over time, given that learning is truly the only sustainable advantage, the quantum thieves began to inherit the business world. Well. That is until they didn’t. We saw that not all the heads of CPG companies, retail companies and head of the IBMs lost their jobs to some robot and those that didn’t finally got their shit together and said “hey, this isn’t sustainable, having someone steal our ideas makes us losers, not technology winners.” Those humans then went out and out-quantumed quantum and wrangled back ownership and security. I bring this one up because humans are, well, human. We don’t care about shit until it affects us. Quantum computing is one of those “sound interesting but doesn’t affect me” things. In the future we will lookback and remind ourselves of a couple things that Norbert Wiener said in 1960 before quantum occurred: “It is my thesis that machines can and do transcend some of the limitations of the designs and in doing so they may be both effective and dangerous” and “As machines learn they may develop unforeseen strategies at rates that baffle their programmers.”

Business will get its shit together at some point because this isn’t really about security, its about humans. There is little that humans, at least in business, care more about than their ideas. This is because (a) being smart is one of the few feel-good aspects of business and (b) ideas mean money. But it is going to suck for quite some time because of quantum computing.

I need to call my doctor.

In the future we have resolved most of the health data privacy issues mostly because of two things:

• Early on there were initiatives like education partnerships to improve AI practices which embedded ethical, useful, practices for the medical industry
• Over time people recognized that businesses would actually pay more to the people who showed up more often healthy and productive. Incentive to do that they began wearing more health wearables, shared more information and actually, well, felt better and was healthier.

So, today, I’ll focus on robot physicians. Yeah. As in physicians that ARE robots. This slippery slope to robot physicians found its origins in, well, the healthcare system. While article after article was being written about how empathy was the key to great healthcare, people waited days if not months for appointments, hours in waiting rooms, reading Highlights Magazine or months old Good Housekeeping, only to see a nurse practitioner who handled the nasty details and then a doctor who seemed to try and care but was actually looking tired and wanted to cut-to-the-chase. In addition, we were more often walking into these appointments having spent hours of personal research online and more than willing to debate any solution offered us. Insurance cost an arm and a leg and the actual bills were undecipherable except the total which made us sick all over again. Against that backdrop the medical community diverted – one path offered the same shit and another path became high end, one-to-one, television doctor-like recognizable, service. The latter path began developing systems in which algorithms sifted thru reams of health data so that the doctor could simply share the best-of-the-best estimate of what was wrong and the appropriate solutions. As time went on the doctor became less a doctor and simply a chatbox for the AI. It was at this point that some entrepreneurial genius said “why can’t I just have everyone – the people still languishing on the other path – stop visiting real doctors and just interact with the AI/robot?” It is at this point where the half life of a doctor not only halved, but was snuffed out. In a matter of years, simply due to the sheer volume of human/robot interactions (because this path had 80% of the human population) that the robots could actually do the one thing doctors could still do – have conversations, recognize cues and offer the ‘care responses’. Well. They could do it well enough that humans started going to robots in droves. Heck. The robots even stopped by homes. The last nail in the coffin for doctors were the accountants. Let us not forget healthcare is a business and, well, making money and profit is good. No doctors, no/less malpractice, no human error, well, doctors are out on the street. Sure. Some of the humans raised some concerns but if you remember the origin story I offered, going back wasn’t that appealing to most people. This is where I offer up the word that became the savior for real human doctors – trust. I bring that up because at some point in our future as doctor robots were healing the shit out of the bulk of the human population, we began to find out that the manufacturers, who of course “want to make money” were accepting huge amounts of money from pharmaceutical companies to program these robots to dispense with advice that benefited that pharmaceutical company. Oh. Then we found out programs had been hacked and data was being used by, well, it didn’t matter. Anyone who hacks to get that information isn’t hacking for your benefit. This was all annoying until one election where all of a sudden the leading candidate had to deal with fake news about their health (or was it fake?). Nothing like a loud prominent voice blasting out all the niggling concerns we people were already having about this robot doctor world. Robot doctors, once the solution to all healthcare woes, all of a sudden were no longer trusted. Here is the good news. We got our doctors back, the human ones, and they worked with all the AI and robots and all the good stuff that technology can do for healthcare, they assessed it and talked with us. Yeah. Real conversations and real issues with better solutions (because of technology). Now. One would think we would have got to this point faster or even simply eliminated all the in-between stuff, but, remember, humans will always err on going too far before they find the right equilibrium. But. If I’m right. There is a chance for better healthcare at some point.

So, who owns the future?

As I finish this, I am reminded of the fabulous Theo Priestley Tedtalk, “Would you be happy to Follow a Robot Leader?” and think about what we humans will accept everywhere in the robot /automation world. What are our limits? In the end I will suggest in the short term we will almost always get it wrong. In today’s worldview with uncertainty abounding and the world seemingly becoming more and more complex it is incredibly easy to imagine a computer, or some well-designed technology, making better decisions than a human. And where we will consistently get this wrong, for a while, is thinking about this in a binary way – a computer versus a human. It will take us awhile to get to the level of understanding and consciousness in which we grasp that a smart, well-designed robot/AI augmenting a smart, human, decisionmaker – a partnership – offers us the best of all worlds to enable a better world.

To answer my own question, of course, humans own the future. We will just offload far too much of the future, and present, onto technology along the way to finally understanding, and accepting, this. Please note I am predicting nothing, only positing what will be given what I know about business. And maybe that is my larger point. Business is the fulcrum for our relationship with technology. They will be the ones thinking, innovating and producing the things which will impact us, as humans, and humanity. And given what I know about business, well, their idea of what benefits people and what actually benefits people doesn’t align until we make it align. In other words, we know the corrupt people will unite amongst themselves and the fate of our future depends on the non-corrupt uniting together. Oh. And let’s do our best to make sure the robots do not unite and own the future.

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“Technology no longer serves as a tool to improve human life, but is a prostitute to the drive for profits. Greed drives technology as businesses compete to develop new technologies in order to generate more profits.”

Dorothee Soelle

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“The corporation is not an independent ‘person’ with its own rights, needs, and desires that regulators must respect. It is a state created tool for advancing social and economic policy.”

Joel Bakan

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Let’s be clear. While globalization has fostered gobs of profits and revenues and wealth throughout all of business, global institutions are miserable business models for people. This has occurred because the businesses, and institutions in which they are in cahoots with, really have no one at its control nor anyone to truly control them. This means the institutions, or global capitalism, are driven by the imperatives of the market and, as a consequence, not particularly tied to the imperatives of people and humanity. To be very clear. This institutional power is not anonymous. It has names and faces and institutional design which is clearly designed for the results it is generating. As I will say again when I close this piece, if we desire different results, we need to design a new system and, as well, a design for how power is accumulated and used.

I begin there because simplistic descriptions of the miserable workplace and miseries of those who work within them, and even the costs associated to the current workplace life, will fail to remove the conditions from which that misery arises. I will also add here that even the most well-intended smart thinking about how to fix specific businesses are most likely doomed to fail because each of those businesses are part of a larger globalized business construct and design of which places its indelible stamp upon any business attempting to make its way in the business world. For example, I have said similar things to this piece, work environment’s effect on behavior, and agree with it all, but, I feel, in some way, that the idea of “Design to Put People in Control of the Work” is slightly naïve. While I agree with the intent, even the construct, it fails in some ways to acknowledge the people are in, and of, a system in which the objectives aren’t necessarily aligned with what is best for the ‘people in control of the work.’

Let me outline that thought a bit more. Because the conditions are a consequence of the construct and the power the construct has as the market, and as a consequence the business, becomes the organizing principle, people basically “downward level’ to the organizing principle itself. By default, this actually <paradoxically> becomes ‘principled behavior’ and all the people in control of the work are off to the tragedy of commons race. So. We need a comprehensive system reform, mindset shift and behavioral reset. Throughout the civilized world a developing sense of social responsibility has compelled the community to support, in some manner, its people in need – whatever the cause of their inability to support themselves.

Which leads me to why this sense of social responsibility hasn’t gain velocity.

Institutional power has its own purpose, the institution itself doesn’t need a purpose. Ponder that “purpose over Profit” people. Power is an objective that has a value in and of itself to some people, and many global institutions, because it is a means by which all objectives are achieved. Most battles, if we are honest, aren’t about good or evil, they are simply because of something – some objective, desire or perceived need including the desire for power. You stop looking ahead, you stop not only thinking about the future but caring about the future because it is within the here and now that power gets accumulated so that, theoretically, you can achieve whatever you want – good or evil – in the future. Power doesn’t really set you free or even open up possibilities, real power is about relationships some with people you don’t really like and some with others simply to get what you want. The reality is, once is gained, you are extremely hesitant to concede the ‘power’ and even more reluctant to let go of even the most corrosive relationships developed to gain that power. This hesitancy actually shifts into full-on “hold on with ragged claws” if you have mastered <or you feel like you have mastered it> the ‘useful flurry of power’ in appropriate ways and the business is getting some of the things it wants <more power, which is semi-control of its future, and more profit>.

The truth is power is that Faustian bargain you have just made IN those relationships and you are trapped – and velocity is unattainable even if there may be some ‘traction for good.’

That means society and business need the necessary incentives to untrap those relationships and secure a better business environment in which the depreciation of people, values/ethics or, just as humans, is not only reduced but removed. And, yeah, I just used “depreciate” with regard to humans. I am positing that global institutions, businesses in particular, are depreciating humans through creating an invalidity of their values, ethics and meaning. That said. Why do I posit this? If the worker, people, have become so dependent upon business for subsistence – moral and financial – that means their meaning <and ‘soul’ if I want to dig deeper> has become contingent upon work and the workplace. Yeah. Some people, particularly people of faith, will debate me on that and my response is, well, ‘prosperity gospel.’ If faith wants a signal for how far business and globalized institutions have seeped into the gestalt of humanness, they should take a good long hard look at how deeply financial corruption has infringed upon values and soul.

Which leads me to the context institutions survive and thrive within – capitalism.

Institutions, businesses, are not a person, or even a group of people per se, but rather accumulated property – wealth, capital and money. People may beget that, but it is a business, not a person, is the fact. This is an important thought because as institutions gain more and more power, and less and less accountability, human beings have even less say and influence over the direction these powerful entities decide to take us. Because business has no real conscious <or moral or ethics> other than to survival <growth & wealth>, because they are for the most part non-democratic, because they desire to guide human culture <because it benefits them>, because they influence government policies and even governments, these institutions are not only damaging, but dangerous, without accountability.

To be very clear. This is not an “anti-capitalism” piece. I support capitalism I am just suggesting that global institutions, and globalization, has hijacked it.

As I noted in “finding a better version of capitalism”; culture is created by, uhm, human beings. I say that not to be a smart ass but to suggest there is a real culture war in America, maybe the world, and it is occurring in the business world. I purposefully use ‘culture’ because it has to do with some ethics or moral fortitude, some personal responsibility and some pragmatic hope for the future. In fact, if we fix how capitalism works <systemic & infrastructure aspects>, the net result is addressing income inequality, wage stagnation and overall economic prosperity as well as some individual “self-stuff” <kind of all the big societal issues we tend to discuss>.

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Free markets, in order to function well, depend upon the virtue of their participants. The distrust engendered by vice raises wasteful transaction and monitoring costs to levels that can paralyze the marketplace. Moreover, vice leads to the phenomenon of “putting profits before people.” This can be manifested in a variety of ways: by taking imprudent and excessive risks with other people’s money; by selling products and services that harm consumers, families, and society; and by engaging in outright fraud. Today, of course, we are suffering from all of the above.

<opening sentence is Adam Smith, remainder is mine>

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Adam Smith clearly understood the link between markets and morality in his economic theory. He did not believe that a successful economy could arise from the raw, unbridled pursuit of self-interest. He maintained that self-interest could fuel a successful economy only if it were narrowed by the constraints of traditional morality. I mention that because it seems like today we are seeing what happens when these constraints are relaxed an large global institutions begin to dictate the construct of how ‘free markets’ are conducted. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the increasing complexity of globalization has only increased the pace of this activity.

Which leads me to what I mean by institutional globalization.

I tend to mean Institutional globalization in terms of business. Internationally <globalized> businesses which impact social, economic and political institutions as well as influence people in terms of culture, government policies and international trade. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that in their largeness, and power, they actually influence the construct and success criteria of even the non-transnational businesses. That said. What this means is, in other words, business not only prioritizes their profits and purposes <not Purpose> above anything else but subvert the intentions of everything else to their needs and desires. This is no nefarious cabal of business people just the fact that business rules through dictating decisions that benefit them – thereby, and as a consequence, casting influence over people. People work within these institutions, okay, maybe function within them. these institutions have taken on a life of their own in which their primary purpose, above any ideological Purpose (the nebulous “Why”) is its own survival, growth and, as an extension of both, power. The relationship becomes inverted and rather than institutions serving people the people serve the institutions. In other words, business ignores the fact their purpose is to benefit people, not themselves. **

** note: this is not some idealistic statement. It is a statement of belief that if a business benefits people it will benefit. Its purposes are beneficial and profitable. Profit is not an objective, but an outcome.

I bring up globalized institutions (transnational) because all of what I just suggested becomes compounded <if not exponentially at least multiplicatively> with size and scale. The stakes get higher and the need to influence is higher. Because of their increasing wealth, political influence and reach, the larger institutions drive increasing movement TOWARD globalization and their sustenance. Their own acceleration, fed by technology, accelerates their power <over resources and policy and wealth> at a pace where they can exploit faster than any people can fight back.

I imagine my point is that business should not have the power to make decisions that not only harm people, and the environment, but negatively influence the meaning and purpose of people themselves.

Given that power <which they basically have now> we can see only their increasing private wealth and influence and power – at the expense of greater inequality, less meaning in people and a greater sense of, well, lostness and its unique negative consequences, i.e., when people recognize they are losing power they actually give up hope, and sense of individual accountability, and ‘give themselves’ to the purposes of the institutions themselves as their path to Life.

Which brings me back to power again.

Globalization has seemingly boundless degrees. Not just for good or for bad, but creating excess & indulgence as well as poverty & beggars, brings out the best and some of the worst in the world, and it clearly has the inability to know the difference. Those who live the best are some of the worst. And some who live the worst are of the best.  The truly talented often do not get as much exposure as the wealthy moronic idiots.  All the while there was a general democratization of ‘everyday luxuries’ <almost everyone has a tv, air conditioning, car, etc.> as well as a perceived social mobility <somewhat realistic> built by the fact the working schmuck had such luxury available <Caribbean cruise vacation or boat in the driveway> it created social connection points to the wealthy in ways that blurred social classes of which businesses are quick to use to conflate wealth distribution perceptions versus a reality that is starkly different. I share some of that to suggest institutional power gains even more power as even small benefits of their power dribble down to make those being abused in the system actually feeling like life is better.

Which leads me to ‘business behavior.’

Much of businesses history is written in dubious ethical behavior and unless something changes, it will stay that way. The issue is we have become accustomed to it to such an extent we are not only used to it we kind of accept it as “business as usual.” We have become so numb to the scope and magnitude of moral degradation <despite all the ‘stated values’ pinned up on every wall> that we simply turn a blind eye to a system we know is not only flawed, but corrosive. In some sense it can make many of uneasy with a sense of being complicit or in our silence, or inability to do anything about it, that in some way we are consenting.

This stark reality is jarring to most everyday people because in our heart of hearts we know people are not that bad nor the number of ‘evil’ can count in any meaningful numbers. Just pick up a copy of Humankind (Rutger Bregman) and you will be reminded that while we are barraged with stories on how people’s behavior arcs toward unethical or uncompassionate, they are typically not true stories – at least as indicative of the majority of people. We only have to look to many of the indigenous peoples to view a society, or way of life. Which demonstrates that hierarchy, violence, exploitation and even ruthless competition is not integral to how people can thrive day to day. My point here is not that we should copy indigenous cultures, but rather that absent some institutional systems people are kind, generous and communities can coexist in sustainable ways.

So, if that is so then why does it feel like the arc of civilization is bending toward a not-so-nice place? Let us turn our eyes back to the institutions. For they are accountable, and yet unaccountable, for a number of constructs in which we, the people, seem to feel bound to. It’s a bit naïve to think businesses are just groups of people working together. Through authority and structure institutions can take on a life of their own with its own objectives and systems and culture shaping itself around those objectives. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out the larger and wealthier the business becomes the less control individual people have over the business. This gets compounded by the fact as a business grows those who rise to positions of authority tend to do so because they support and further the goals of the business – not the people. There is a ‘drop down’ consequence to this. As a business grows people invest their energy and resources to serve them, become loyal to them and even defend them. Over time this shifts into the business itself gaining the upper hand and gains power and authority over people – attitudes, beliefs and, yes, ethics. The survival and growth of the business itself supersedes any individual ‘purpose’ and, yes, even ethics.

To be clear. People permit this to happen because people are inherently social and prosper when organizing in some “shared interest” way. Humans have always evolved through communities, tribes, families, clans and finally arranging ourselves into villages, towns, cities, nations and global businesses. As the arrangements of ‘self’ have expanded we have continued to find ways to organize roles and divisions and even societies – all so it makes sense. These organized patterns and systems simultaneously help us thrive and, yet, empower the systems of organization with power to dictate the actions of individuals. What I mean by that is the exact same systems developed to nurture our thriveability ultimately morph into the structures and systems which begin to destroy ethics, values and self-purpose. In other words, the shared interest shifts from self-fulfilling to institution-fulfilling believing by fulfilled the institution the self will be rewarded in some way. When people serve the institutional objectives rather than live as free-thinking human beings there is imminent danger of, well, lack of accountability to anything other than the institution itself. The institution becomes the excuse for all behavior.

This is possibly captured the best by Steinbeck in Grapes of Wrath:

“And all of them were caught in something larger than themselves. Some of them hated the mathematics that drove them, and some were afraid, and some worshiped the mathematics because it provided a refuge from thought and from feeling. If a bank or a finance company owned the land, the owner man said, The Bank—or the Company—needs—wants—insists—must have—as though the Bank or the Company were a monster, with thought and feeling, which had ensnared them. These last would take no responsibility for the banks or the companies because they were men and slaves, while the banks were machines and masters all at the same time.”

—-

Which leads me to people as ‘individual moral beings.’

Most people hold an individualistic approach to morality.

“I choose these morals because they are right for me (in my opinion)”.

And moral relativism.

“There are no absolutes, it depends on the situation”.

So, with the institution in their moral hip pocket as an excuse for their own behavior, people begin the slide down ethical fading in subservience to the ‘good of the institution.’ Sure. We, humans, may justify it in a number of creative ways but if we were honest, absent of the institution in which our subsistence is tied to, we would make a number of different decisions. In other words, people have deferred their individuality to the needs of the institution.

While I could suggest this is kind of crazy, I will say it is sad. In the institution’s lack of accountability, we, humans, act no better than the institution which is treating us as if we were a cog in their machine.

I don’t think we are morally adrift nor do I think morality should be subjective it seems like when you drill down to its core morality, moral behavior should be fairly black and white.

That said. I still do not believe we are in any moral crisis.

People were no less greedy, ignorant, selfish and violent yesterday then than they are today, and no more generous, fair-minded and idealistic.

However, I would suggest <as did Peter Drucker> that the key institutions, stronger than the excesses of individuals, were usually able to contain and channel our natural tendencies to more useful ends in the past. In other words, human nature does not change, but social structures can, and they did.

To be clear. No business is perfect. But. In any business the survival (or thriveability in the market context) needs of the organization can usurp the formative original purpose for which it was created. Therefore, the institutional demands assume more importance and utilize most of the resources than even those better used to the benefit of people, society and environment.

This is to suggest moral weakness resides in the institutions of power – societies, ideologies, systems and businesses that influence, shape, inform and act UPON people. I say that because moral weakness and poor individual choices cannot account for the extent of the ethical degradation in the world. To acknowledge the power of the institutions does not excuse or absolve people of accountability for their actions but it does behoove us to reflect upon the relationship each individual has with the institutions. For by being part of the institution even one of good intentions can be drawn into moral fading in actions.

Which leads me to a dose of “ethical reality.”

We don’t really like to admit it but Life, in general, more resembles a constant teetering on the edge of a slippery slope than anything else (especially with regard to ethics, i.e., “doing the right thing.”). Life, and business, constantly, relentlessly forces you to make, well, ethical choices. Now. They may not look like ethical choices, but if you look real closely you will see the face of ‘right or wrong’ staring at you wagging its finger. We don’t look that closely because it would force us to admit:

• • Right & wrong is often contextual
  • Right & wrong is often not a clear black or white
  • Right & wrong is often measured, ultimately, in consequences not actions, yet, we are demanded to choose right or wrong and act now

You will most associate this constant teetering (also a recognition of being on the slippery slope of fading ethics) as “just this once” behavior. We don’t really like to admit it because ‘just this once’ tends to be used to explain away some of our more dubious behavior and decisions.

This ‘dubiousness’ gets couched in a variety of ways. Safety. Utility. Benefits (functional and ‘to me’). We find a lot of ways to justify our behavior, decisions and attitudes before we ladder up to ethics. Its not that we ignore ethics or even not care about ethics its just we prioritize a number of things before we get to ethics. This suggests ethics is not a foundation from which decisions emerge, but rather are a final, fairly wide, box in which a decision has to be checked against.

If that is true, then ethical fading is commonplace, yet, justified by ‘pragmatism’ criteria. I bring up pragmatism because, whether we admit it or not, unless you actually think about ethics, morals and values (in a non-meta philosophical way) then it becomes a little more difficult to understand how principles can play a fairly important pragmatic guardrail role. The truth is that ethics are constantly challenged, in context, by safety and utility. For example, would we steal to feed our children or lie to keep us safe. Sound moral judgment is rooted in strong values and acted upon by our ethics. An organizational judgement, a collection of these individuals, is herded in common principles.

Principles, yes, before you despair, principles guard against ethical fading. Principles are the cornerstones of your ethical building. Without principles you have no solid ground to stand on in a world constantly trying to tip you over into a variety of holes, slippery slopes and dead-end tunnels.

—

‘Principle’ is defined in Nuttall’s Concise Standard Dictionary of the English Language as, “n. the source or origin of anything; a general truth or law comprehending many subordinate ones; tenet or doctrine; a settled law or rule of action; to impress with any tenet; to establish firmly in the mind.”

—

Principles protect, in a very fragile way, against ethical fading.

They do so in a number of ways

1. They establish a foundation, or a moral filter, for ethical behavior. Maybe call them the ground rules of how you assess what is right versus wrong
2. Unfortunately, the foundation is a framework not a “how to do” manual. Therefore, upfront they help define exceptions to the ground rules and, yes, we will always find some exceptions. Some ‘blurring’ of the guardrails as it were.
3. Unfortunately (part 2), this blurring, while not always creating ‘just this once’ behavior, it CAN create just this once behavior which is, well, the slippery slope of ethical fading. In this situation principles can actually be the solid lily pads of ‘no more’ certainty from which one can stop the slide down the slippery slope of ethical fading.
4. Unfortunately (part 3), principles, while resilient, are not immortal. Facing the onslaught of ethical fading they can, well, fade and once they have made their last stand you are screwed. You are on the slope and the only question left to answer is how far down the slope you end up.

So, despite their fragility, let me talk about principles.

“The most important ingredient we put into any relationship is not what we say or what we do, but what we are. And if our words and our actions come from superficial human relations techniques (the Personality Ethic) rather than from our own inner core (the Character Ethic), others will sense that duplicity. We simply won’t be able to create and sustain the foundation necessary for effective interdependence.”

Stephen R. Covey

To me principles revolve around a discussion of soul (selling your soul ). Some people may disagree with me but, to me, soul represents the intersection of “I and We”. It gives us life energy (call it our subconscious passion). It what joins us together with an external shared common vision – kind of our common value proposition for Life. It creates a connective tissue for, well, acting in a humane fashion with other humans. It is within this intersection in which we seek the common ground between morals, ethics and value and arrive at a coherent principled behavior as a community or business organization.

And maybe that is where global institutions save themselves. Not with ‘Purpose’, or ‘shared values’ or even ethics, but with principled behavior. A pragmatic plan to create desired behavior in and of society. That is an important thought because the way business conducts itself echoes throughout homes, communities and society. To think business isn’t responsible, or plays a significant role, in inequality is absurd. So, while business may be showing profitability, high stock prices and growth, i.e., meet the measurements of business success, they are for the most part doing so not meeting the measurements of societal success. In fact, their success is killing society success. Yeah. I am suggesting money matters but I am doing so in a different way – tied to fairness, equity, productivity, all of which lead to meaning and mattering. Because isn’t that what inequality is really all about? Meaning and mattering? If business, where many people gain a significant portion of their identity, doesn’t offer up personal meaning <of which a component is equitable distribution of wealth based on productivity> then how can any society expect to create the attitudes necessary for healthy grounded meaning? Okay. You could, but it would be more fragile. And maybe that is my point. When business doesn’t get this right, it creates some unnecessary fragility to society. Ponder.

“In nature, change doesn’t happen from a top down, strategic approach. There is never a boss in a living system. Change happens from within, from many local actions occurring simultaneously.”

Meg Wheatley

Which leads me back to the title of this piece and what people, as individuals, can do – civic professionalism. At the heart of ‘civic professionalism’ is an awareness of the moral dimensions of work or as someone said “be business experts and citizens alike”.

“institutions that take their engaged mission seriously will need to employ a number of practices and concepts that come from community organizing and its adaptation to efforts at institutional culture change. These include understanding self-interests; building public relationships across lines of difference; working with and understanding power as an ability to act rather than an oppressive, unidirectional force; creating free spaces for people to work with power and confidence in more public fashion; addressing questions of work incentives and routines, as well as purposes and cultures of work and the workplace; understanding and embracing the messiness of change.”

To be clear. Being civic does not come at the expense of professionalism or the business of doing business. Business is, and will always be, grounded in productivity and value creation. Civic professionalism means being a professional to the benefit of the business and the civic world. Civic professional means accepting personal responsibility within the world of doing business while the business, professionally, is accepting responsibility for HOW it is going about its business of doing business and being profitable.

“The person makes sense of the world for the sake of acting productively on the world.”

John Dewey

I believe what I just shared is importance because, as I stated earlier, understanding the misguided nature of business and institutions does not absolve us of personal responsibility. In fact, it may increase the importance and it certainly offers another dimension in which we must consider mindsets, attitudes and behaviors. The moral drift or ethical fading only stops when we, the people, say it will – when we embrace civic professionalism. In that moment institutions cease to be entities in and of themselves, but shift back to ‘in and of the people.’ We shed either the passive acceptance or active participation in the misguided objectives of the business system and begin the transformation to a new and better system creating new and better institutions – and businesses. In this age of globalization institutional it is impossible to ignore or avoid the larger issues of the world. the global steamroller of business, political, economic/military institutions can destroy local movements, even simply ignore them or use their power to subvert its aims. It is imperative to learn about the world and use the world’ s issues, and understanding, to craft the solutions needed to make institutional accountability possible. This is possibly the only path to creating a balance of power – where no one person or institution has too much power and civic professionalism becomes the basis for how to conduct the business of doing business.

“Nothing is more destructive to a community, to creativity, than the desire to be seen as a good person and the deceptions that are mobilized to make that happen.”
Stephen Berg

Which leads me to where we are in the business world.

To me where we are is not an economic crisis, but rather a moral crossroads. Or maybe it is an ideals crossroad <they are simply derivatives of each other>. And it is a precarious crossroad.

==

“Human attempts to construct moral order are always precarious: If righteousness too often leads to self-righteousness, the demand for justice can lead to one guillotine or another.”

Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists

==

It is precarious because the groups work along parallel paths towards a world that is what ought to be rather than settling for the world as it is. One group seeks the ‘ought to be in’ new and the other groups seeks ‘out to be’ in tried and true past thoughts. And yet neither group denies that public morality is frayed. I think it is important for everyone to STRIVE for moral clarity, but not to assume they will have it.  In fact, I think it’s fairly dangerous for anyone to be certain they have moral clarity. Moral clarity isn’t a moment of instant enlightenment, but something you should work for all your life. In fact, you have to continuously work at it because there will still be many times when you are not sure what the morally right thing to do is.

Every situation and every dilemma needs to be thought through individually.  That’s what moral clarity, as opposed to moral simplicity, demands. As a corollary, this suggests for a globalized transnational business this will not be solved through some broader narrative <albeit that will be needed> but brought down into the business of doing business in the system design. I would suggest the easiest way to do so would be to embrace “the law of the situation.”

All that said. This is difficult and will be difficult <for obvious reasons>.

==

“Right or wrong, right from wrong, right and wrong? I ‘d always been confused about that kind of stuff, that stuff troubled me, the legal and moral aspects of things. There are good deeds and bad deeds. A good person can do a bad thing and a bad person can do a good thing. But I never did get to fix the line.”

Bob Dylan

==

This suggests that the moral, ethical, stuff is really hard. This is not to suggest that material wellbeing is not important, but economics is as much about self-respect and dignity as it is about consumption and earnings. To be clear. Work is the main way in which people generate income to meet their needs and flourish in life. And depending on the work relationship, it can contribute to a range of benefits such as healthcare, childcare and housing support. But work can offer non-economic benefits as well, such as a sense of purpose, social relationships, self-development, status and autonomy. Often a source of personal identity, work develops character and habits and affects physical and psychological health. Globalized transnational institutions tend to forget this or when they do remember use it to justify some fairly miserable business practices.

Look. Of course, the idea of business globalization has validity. The market dynamics, as such, is an efficient and effective way of providing goods and services in most contexts and industries. In addition, competition, globally, can create some incentives that benefit people and society. Within the system as it exists businesses can make a profit and facilitate the economic growth which enables people to not only meet basic survival needs, but a bit more. The trouble is when the system becomes an ideology and institutionalized it seems to have evolve into a system that is neither completely sane or realistically positive – it becomes more like a cult of business than value creation. It becomes a system in which economic principles are taught as ‘economic laws’ or as ‘laws of nature’ <which they are not>. In doing so they become how one views reality and the ends justify the means – as the law predicates it should be.

===

“The first and most important thing an individual can do is to become an individual again, decontrol himself, train himself as to what is going on and win back as much independent ground for himself as possible.”

William S. Burroughs

===

Which leads me to my last thought.

In the end we all know moral responsibility attaches to the individual.

Not society, not others, not ‘the system’, not some business institution, us.

You and I.

We may shirk our personal accountability on occasion under the auspices of some version of ‘tragedy of the commons’ but at some point, everyone needs to say “it stops here.”

We have to understand that without some moral compass, and ethical stop signs, we will lose our souls, whatever we take our souls to be, through simply working and earning a living.

Simultaneously, we have to understand that if we lose our moral footing, we doom our young to a similar fate.

As I stated upfront, the global economy, and economic construct, is a system which is generating exactly the results it was designed to generate. If we want different results, the system itself needs to be redesigned and the power needs to be diminished or, maybe, dispersed so that the ‘civic professionals’ can guide us to a better business world.

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Last year I abstained
this year I devour

without guilt
which is also an art

Margaret Atwood, in Circe/Mud Poems

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“When all the world’s a lock, you don’t find a key, you become the key.”

Rachel Caine

=====

As we wander into 2022, lets take a moment and think about what we learned from 2021 and some things that maybe business should be thinking about for 2022. As everyone knows, I dislike predictions, so this is more reflective and applied reflective thinking.

Which leads me to disruption.

Disruption, inevitably, is about the rhythm of a business. If something changes the rhythm, its disruptive. If it doesn’t, its not. Maybe that’s too simplistic, but it surely does feel valid.

** note: self inflicted discordance, i.e., poorly implemented change, protocols or products, is not disruption, it is simply self imposed dysfunction which ‘wobbles’ the rhythm of the business.

2021 should have made everyone rethink what they think disruption is. Ok. Maybe they should be thinking about the difference between false disruption and real disruption. For years pundits have been plastering “disruption’ and ‘disruptive’ in PowerPoint mastheads, headlines and speaker presentation titles. The pandemic was real disruption, 99% of everything prior was not. This matters because false disruption, mis-viewed, leads to methods of analysis, planning and speculation that will open the doors for even the most farfetched ideas and an ocean of possibilities any business can drown in. It also cloaks the fact most businesses will, well, “être à armes égales” or ‘to fight with the same weapons’ because it isn’t true disruption and doing the same shit with similar tools, just a bit differently, makes everyone feel good.

But. Where all this false disruption has to led to is a business employee world cloaked in anxiety and fatigue, simultaneously amused and intimidated, and plagued by a general sense of impotence. People have been existing under a state of such interminable disruption warfare that it seems normative and dysfunctional. So, while people hope for better things and a better business, they have been bludgeoned so many times with false disruption, and servitude to all that is technology, that hope for better is being annihilated. This is a semi-important thought because regardless of real disruption or false disruption, the main principle that governs any business is its own survival. Since ultimately an institution, regardless of its claims of goodwill, must perpetuate its own survival, everyone who lives within the organization must commit themselves to the survival of the institution in some form or fashion. Therefore, if the institution has stripped hope from the people within then it simply becomes an ‘outcome objective’ entity <with, of course, some trappings of empathy and culture>. This should make everyone think about the uncomfortable thought that each person with a relationship to an institution is expected to some degree to sacrifice himself or herself to the perpetuation of that institution and the systems that create the output which sustains its survival. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out that this is actually the opposite of what is needed for real business progress as well as human progress (in that rather than have the business benefit people the people find themselves enslaved/ensnared by the systems that enable the business). False disruption simply amplifies that belief system in that if you are impotent to make things better you simply make better what is <the existing system and outcomes – regardless of the means>. Ponder that.

But let me get back to business rhythm with regard to disruption.

All businesses have ‘pace layers’ as well as ‘paced nested systems’ all of which, working in some sense of coherence, generates an overall rhythm for a business. The rhythms are asynchronous yet create arrays of symmetrical patterned behaviors/efforts to the benefit of the business.

What that means is most of what is falsely called ‘disruption’ simply gets absorbed and assimilated within parts of the nested systems<existing rhythms keeping pace>, and the system, as a whole, isn’t really disrupted. It chugs along and the economic objectives are still met (as they are the overriding drivers of what will change and what will not) and because it is simply so-called disruption the slower, foundational, parts ignore it and remain steady because the true nature of things hasn’t really been affected. The internal dynamics of the business may <maybe> shift a bit but the external dynamics, the dynamics WITH the external context when implemented, don’t change in any meaningful way because the market dynamics haven’t really changed. Let me be clear. This mainly translates into a belief that most companies do things that make them feel like they are better <internal dynamics>, but don’t really significantly positively affect what matters – the dynamics WITH the market. I would suggest a shitload of business leaders came to this realization in 2021 and, yet, will continue to do so in 2022.

This is where false disruption can actually do its most damage. Absorption of false disruption is done not through learning, but by economic success. The business simply accommodates the ‘new’ shifting a bit to maintain its economic objectives. What this means is that the organization doesn’t really improve, doesn’t really learn anything truly useful for the future, simply learns the bare minimum to maintain the course. Its an economic company, and model of which outcomes and output are all that matters. False disruption gets devoured by the existing conserving aspects of an institution. That is what we should have learned in 2021.

Which leads me to justification by economics.

Economic justification devours everything. It swallows up change, transformation and even real disruption. Just watch. Economic growth will be fantastic in 2022 and 84% of businesses <you will see why I offered that number in a second> will simply surf the overall growth with basically the old way of doing things and claim success, i.e., economic justification. So why 84%? A Deloitte study released in May 2020 <during lockdown, peak pandemic, and high uncertainty over what the future would consist of> stated just 16% of business leaders expected to invest in the reinvention of their workforce. Yeah. 16%. Status quo devours anything new as long as it can be economically justified.

As we move into 2022 the gap between those who understand what needs to be done and are willing to do it and those who simply hope for a return to “business as usual” is frightening. And while a large number of employees may have a niggling sense this isn’t the optimal path an even larger number of employees, and far too many business people in general, have been constantly and incessantly assailed with the belief that the ultimate moral significance of their individual lives is embodied in and depends upon the mere survival – this includes survival of economic objectives – of the business and its ‘way of doing things’. This means as the systems assimilate most ‘disruption’ they do so not to improve, but in justification of service to the (a) productivity objectives, (2) reward incentives and (c) outcomes which keep attention off of them – economic justification.

** note: I worry about 2022. A lot. The combination of “getting back what was lost” economically and economic justification doesn’t bode well for ethics, values and, in general, better business behavior. In a tragedy of commons business worldview every business will be fighting for their ‘fair share’ in a zero-sum worldview. My only true prediction for 2022 is we will look back and find ‘ethical fading’ was more the norm then the exception. It will be a bad year for ethics and those of us fighting for a better way of doing business.

What this means is that most ‘disruption’ doesn’t disrupt, it gets assimilated or dissipates within existing systems focused on meeting specific objectives and outcomes – not improvement. I will end this section with where I began: economic justification – economics of a business can devour everything.

“There is no ‘complete recipe” for avoiding human extinction by technological means. We can specify only the human qualities required: patience, flexibility, intelligence.”

John von Neumann

Which leads me to framing.

In this case, for today, framing has to do with how one thinks about their business – systems and how systems work against market dynamics (and to fend off economic justification). Far too often we permit framing to be defined as some nebulous idea. And in doing so we talk about framing a shitload, but never really seem to get around to doing everything that needs to be done <implementing it in an effective way>. This doesn’t mean that leaders are not truly trying hard to bring about framing. It’s just that their attempts get trapped in the wretched hollow between ‘ideology’ <conceptual shit> and the practical <which is by no means easy or simple>.

And it gets even more complicated if the leader can only envision what is <the current system> which leads only to tweaks & improvements. The best framing leaders not only see the system that exists, but also envisions a system that does not exist.

** note: “a system that does not exist” is a fairly important thought in that one of the most used conceptual thinking tools is “where are we and where do we want to be”. Envisioning systems, within the present and not in planning, is actually an acceptance – to some degree – that you will never truly clearly see where you want to be. Ponder.

For it is within that understanding in which a good framing leader can break what needs to be broken, keep what needs to be kept and tweak what needs to be tweaked. Inevitably successful framing is a reflection of several things all embodied in a process of information, education, dialogue, and ultimately, the insights generated from the process which will drive the choices. Framing is, in its art form, the law of the situation combining informal and formal organizational systems as the situation dictates <not as management mandates>. What I mean by that is I believe it was in Blind Spots in which the authors state: “formal systems are the weakest link in an organization’s ethical structure.” I believe this is also of any system. Formal systems, for the most part, are not natural, but artificial. Over time the consequences of this artificiality comes to life in terms of laziness, complacency, rote behavior and non-thinking.

2022 is going to run face first into this.

On the other hand, a business’s informal systems have evolved tracing their roots back to the needed mechanisms, and accepted behaviors, of what a system needs to do to guide transactions and efforts to successful (economic) outcomes. I say this because when a formal system is decoupled from, well, reality, say, like with a pandemic, the systems begin to fail. Formal systems are not built to anticipate how people will respond to true disruption, only to accepted market behavior dynamics (within a range). In Nassim Taleb terms, formal systems are fragile and informal systems are antifragile.

This fragility is actually created by what I believe is called ‘bounded awareness’, i.e., the formal system encourages one to only know what one needs to know. This gets exacerbated by pockets of power. As a corollary, these informal pockets of power may also actually be the key to an organization’s survival when true disruption occurs. And this permits me to circle back to framing. Framing ‘unbounds’ existing awareness.

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“No sort of scientific teaching, no kind of common interest, will ever teach men to share property and privileges with equal consideration for all. Everyone will think his share too small and they will be always envying, complaining, and attacking one another.”

Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Brothers Karamazov

—

This makes framing complex and simple. Thought leaders from all over the world have created sophisticated frameworks designed to help leaders grapple with strategies at an abstract level. But the reality is that strategy succeeds or fails based on how well leaders at every level of an organization integrate real, useful, insights into day-to-day operations.

It is as complex, and as simple, as that. Framing is, well, as Machiavelli would suggest, power. And there is no school for framing. You either understand the power of framing or you, well, fail. Failure can come in a range of of ways but let’s say, at minimum, it is limiting potential and, at maximum, the business dies. So. Power resides in clear understanding of the moment and the moment that is coming. To be clear. This does not mean you are in control. You are subordinat­ing yourself to the necessary and the situation and power comes from recognizing what is necessary and executing it within the correct context (frame), i.e., the Law of the Situation as it were.

To be clear. Reframing can absolutely be derived from math, data and research, but those tend to be seeking to develop a new formalized system (or tweak an existing one). I delve into the art. The feeling that a business leader has that something could be better. Something you cannot quite put your finger on that no amount of analysis can solve. I would be remiss if I didn’t point out, in my biased view, that more businesses should be delving into the art of business more than the science of business.

Which leads me to thinking about 2022.

Truth be told, the pandemic didn’t really affect me businesswise much. In fact, the market came to me and I was as busy as I have ever been. Let me explain. I, for the most part, am in the ‘framing business.’ Business people who feel like there is something that could be better about their business, even if it is being successful, work with me to try and put their finger on what that could be. Typically, it just means a business needs to view their business from a slightly different point of view <kind of like stepping a bit to the side so they can see some things a bit clearer>. I help frame that view. They see the world as locked and I am a key.

That said. This is more difficult than you may think. While businesses have a rhythm, a cadence, for how they interact with the market, changing a business’s rhythm ain’t easy or for the faint of heart. As noted earlier, a business isn’t one steady rhythm, it’s actually a combination of a number of different beats within the organization working in a coherent fashion to effectively work with a market. As long as the business is effectively effective <in some form or fashion>, well, the beat goes on. The pandemic changed the beat, if not stilled it in some way. The market came to me. The pandemic began reframing the business of doing business to business people. Half my job was done <maybe the most difficult part>.

So, yes, it is my belief that inevitably business is about framing <systems and process and outcomes exist within a frame>.

If you don’t frame what you want to do, hopefully frame the market well <the law of the situation>, and what the market will permit you to pursue effectively, you are screwed. That said. While some people devour technology and other devour ‘humancentric’, I devour the space, the liminal space, in-between. It is in this technology/people inbetween space I devour what Taleb called “half invented ideas.” What I mean by that is I have never really seen the need to create something new when a business seeks to find a new rhythm. The odds are some half-invented ideas laying around in someone’s office or mind having been discarded at some point as ‘not efficient or effective or whatever” or, even easier, the ideas lay in books all of us should have devoured by now from Alvin Toffler, Cluetrain Manifesto, Ralph Stacy, Mary Parker Follett, Drucker and more recently Jaron Lanier, Brian Christian, Bazerman, Flynn Coleman.

Look.

2022 is going to look like an awfully good hand to be played for most businesses. This is opposite the larger business truth that business mostly demands doing the best you can with a bad hand. The issue is, and will remain, what will business compromise within the means to the ends in order to attain the ends it desires? To be clear. Compromise is not a dirty word if it means forestalling a situation worse than what non-compromise would create and, frankly, a lot of leadership work in business is involved in simply preparing for the moments when fortune favors you – moments in which you take the win and take everything you can. In other words, you devour an opportunity in totality. And maybe that is my point for 2022. Opportunities will abound for business and businesses in 2022 and it will be easy for a business to be devoured BY these opportunities. I, on the other hand, believe fortune will inevitably favor the businesses who will grow and become better by devouring opportunities through the means which will stand the test of time. And devouring will not demand any false disruption charlatans, just some good old smart, ethical, thinking.

Have a good 2022 and I hope you learned a lot in 2021. Be the key. Devour.

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“Making a product is just an activity, making a profit on a product is the achievement.”

Amit Kalantri

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Author’s note:

I originally published this in 2018 and decided to repost given all the discussion about supply chain issues and inflation/inflated costs. While I believe it is fair to discuss inflation in a variety of ways, I believe it is business & economic malpractice to discuss inflated costs (to the consumer) without discussing how distribution issues effect costs. What I mean by that is even the smallest changes in distribution costs can make overall costs increase additively/multiplicative. Regardless. As I open this piece, “everything is about distribution.” Call it supply chain issues if you would like, but it is just good ole distribution.

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This is about distribution, therefore, it’s about technology, the internet & the transfer of goods & services.

Everything is about distribution. Everything.

Ideas.

Thoughts.

Attitudes.

Things.

Products.

Services.

Monies.

Material.

Data.

Information.

Think of each of these things as containers – containers to be shipped from one place to another. This is different than transactions. Transactions are the outcomes of distribution, i.e., I cannot make a transaction unless it can be distributed.

Now. While anyone can use this new Distribution Revolution world we live in you have to earn the income, revenue & profits, they don’t just come to you, i.e., simply accessing the construct doesn’t mean you will benefit from it. I believe that point is why much of the business world is struggling with what exactly technology is and whether it truly has offered any increased economic productivity. It gets discussed as “just another channel” or a social amplification tool or an efficiency creator or, well, the laundry list of labeling is massive. To me it would make much ore sense if we simply thought of it as a distribution infrastructure change from which people should start thinking about the repercussions to people, organizations & businesses.

Given this view, one would note the internet changed the world in a couple of ways that often don’t get discussed:

• Until the internet came along “everything is connected with everything” was more of a philosophical concept with strings of truth. Now, with the internet, it is truth which we need to conceptually, get a philosophical grip on it.
• Until the internet came along everything was physically distributed now many things can be virtually distributed.

Within this context of these two things, retail discussions, data distribution & digital transformations, are simply smaller battles within the larger Distribution Revolution. We discuss companies as disruptors or legacy businesses all the while neglecting the fact business is always about transactions of value & distribution enables the value items to exchange hands. Business is ultimately about transactions of value, and, distribution is all about enabling the value items (goods & services & payment/$) to change hands as efficiently to as many markets as possible.

Regardless.

Think about the internet as distributing containers – of information, monies, data, goods, services & transactions.

Original container revolution:

The container revolution started by giving businesses a way to distribute existing products faster and cheaper. Over time it allowed business to make and distribute new products and develop new business models. Containerization not only made shipping cheaper & faster it also completely changed the whole structure & mindset of distribution. In 1956 it cost $5.83 a ton to load loose cargo onto a ship in the United States – today it costs around 16 cents a ton (36x less expensive).

The new container revolution:

The internet is doing exactly the same thing. It gives people an alternative way to distribute existing products (physical and nonphysical) and enable businesses to create and distribute new products and develop new business models.

The Container revolution brought trade to previously out of the way places which before had been too costly to distribute. Similarly the internet has made it possible to not only distribute products & services but actual work (outsourcing). The internet can distribute in a variety of ways – physical logistics as well as digitally. This creates an entirely new industry for entrepreneurs to develop products & services which can be distributed anywhere at any time.

Think value on the move.

The essence of distribution is enabling value transactions to happen as cheaply and efficiently as possible beyond simply moving value from here to there, from seller to buyer, the internet actually provides opportunity to add value to the distribution process itself.

FYI. This can also be physical non internet products & services. For example, FedEx/UPS permits you to track your package via the internet. A logistics supplier who distributes nothing they actually create adds value to its own service simply thru distribution transparency.

All that said.

Digital is just a tactic within the revolution. Internet is the enabler of the revolution

What this distribution revolution has done is attack distribution in a variety of ways:

• Digitally unbundling value.

If distribution is value on the move it also means value can be unbundled (which has potential positives AND negatives).

Simplistically value, in the past, was created in a stacked layered way. Value was built layer by layer so that when assessed the value was seamlessly embedded in the total. The inherent strength of this methodology was value was constructed like a building in which parts were dependent on other parts.

In the new distribution revolution, the value is unbundled in a more linear way so that the individual parts can be maximized for its singular value. On a continuum both efficiency (time & investment) and effectiveness (ability to enhance value) can be manipulated on an ongoing basis, therefore, the value components can be constantly adapted to maximize the total value.

Productivity:

Theoretically, possibility of increased productivity occurs in 2 ways:

• Value gets driven up higher, in totality, by maximizing the individual parts with the highest value (this can be contextually different based on unique buying experiences). Productivity gets enhanced by more effective focus on things of highest value.
• Innovation opportunities are identified as discrete parts which can be pursued with the intent to either enhance structural (overall) value creation or intent to pursue a new transactional value creation opportunity (a ‘part’ of the value creation uncovers a new opportunity to produce something new)

• Localized relevance/personalization.

Local, or localized, connectiveness is a powerful aspect of providing value to distribution. People get absorbed, and sometimes overwhelmed, by the global scope of the distribution and localizing is an easy way to make it a little less overwhelming and more, well, personalized. Which leads me to personalization. To be recognized and acknowledged as a unique individual, or a distinct one, within a huge global distribution model, triggers one of the most basic human needs (recognition as an individual). Conversely, this is the underlying belief that while being acknowledged as an individual in a huge distribution world of anonymous impersonal interactions even a little nod to who you are, your identity, your specific needs, elevates basic distribution to personalized.

I would argue this is as far as you need to go (beyond maybe “you bought this so you may be interested in his” type personalization). The latter is acknowledgment you have had a relationship with that distribution but doesn’t overstep any ‘creepy’ boundaries.

Productivity:

We often conflate personalization with customization. Personalization, in general, creates a level of value to the functional & brand value. The productivity opportunity resides in the customization halo of personalization. In other words productivity can be enhanced if the productivity doesn’t simply ”chase” personalization but rather uses the personalization to assess either additional products or innovations which offer complementary products (which you can sell more of at a higher price).

• How does digital transformation fit in?

Digital transformation is a means to an end – an infrastructure decision. It should be viewed as “how can I distribute what needs to be distributed to either enable structural value creation (of what exists) or how it can create new value creation toward corporate vision.”

The value creation insures it meets business objectives and corporate culture (because, remember, digital transformation is dependent upon not mastery or implementation but rather culture – culture at scale means digital simply scales with culture).

In other words, unless you decide what you want to distribute and to whom and when, you cannot effectively implement digital transformation.

Productivity:

Digital transformation, implemented correctly. Offers two productivity opportunities:

• Transactional productivity (sell more of individual products)
• Structural productivity (cross selling of more products at a higher price – or higher profit margin)

• Where does the revolution go? New business models using New old products & services

We need to stop talking about Amazon and retail industry and focus on “how can this new distribution revolution be leveraged to meet our business objective (and what business do I want to create in which the objective can be met thru this distribution revolution>? There are few capacity issues/limitations associated with this distribution revolution so if the distribution helps you meet a viable business objective you know live in a ubiquitous world.

What I mean by this is there is an entire world of existing products & services which can become a new product or service simply by viewing it thru a distribution revolution lens.

Airbnb is simply a hostel-like concept enabled by tech

Uber was the eastern european transportation model but enabled by tech

Old ideas brought to life in a new way as information, value and transactions are exchanged.

Productivity:

There is nothing more profitable than selling more of something you already have and know how to produce efficiently. Theoretically businesses should be able to assess stagnant or dormant brands/products and evaluate whether a new way of distribution would reinvigorate sales & engagement.

Lastly.

• Not the customer Revolution, organizational revolution

I would encourage everyone to think of this Distribution revolution as having an organizational consequence (which will inherently affect customers but it is the deliverer of customer products/service which is impacted most). I would argue this is where the greatest productivity increases will appear.

The main reason we have not seen the expected economic results predicted with technology is lack of alignment between organizational design and technology benefits. One of the largest benefits of an information distribution revolution is the ‘knowledge worker’ (as defined by Alvin Toffler) can now have all the information necessary to make decisions wherever they sit with whatever title they may, or may not, have.

This is where the distribution revolution is easing its way into a distributed decision making & leadership business model. Distributed decision making inherently has economic benefits and increases productivity. The main proof point for this is “The Added Value of Buurtzorg Relative to Other Providers of Home Care: A Quantitative Analysis of Home Care in the Netherlands” (KPMG: Jan 2015).

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Buurtzorg appears to transcend the usual trade-offs in health and social care: it is cost efficient and yet the ratio of nurses to clients is purposely kept low in the interest of care continuity; it generates a healthy surplus even though it employs a significantly larger than average number of highly-qualified staff remunerated at a higher than average level; it achieves higher than average employee productivity figures without centralised systems of employee control; it achieves higher than average quality of care at a cost level that is below the industry average.

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Now. This organizational design actually increases in productivity if more information, and relevant information, is distributed to employees.

This leads me to note simply removing hierarchy isn’t enough. Hierarchy has conditioned the everyday employee to not assume risk and middle management to be, well, anal. In addition current measurement models restrict decision making rather than enhance freedom necessary to make the best decisions at any given point in time. Frankly, most of us are conditioned to be passive and compliant. Successful self-managing companies have very clear structures but, culturally, are constructed with more of a belief in people taking responsibility & being accountable. Applying the Distribution revolution with a distributed decision making organizational model demands a mindset, leadership, culture and the human skills necessary to facilitate a much deeper level of productivity.

Productivity:

Organization change is a means to an end. Change for change sake is wasted energy. Therefore, the distribution revolution leading to organizational revolution needs to have productivity revolution consequences. Internet, to date, has not produced substantive economic growth.

I would argue that is because there has not been an alignment of business & how the internet distributes information, ideas, knowledge & things to date. Some businesses have utilized aspects of technology and distribution opportunities to make some successful economic forays into the marketplace. But I struggle to find a business that has aligned all aspects to maximize economic productivity, enhance value and, well, sell more at the highest price possible.

Conclusion.

Distribution is inherently about the transfer of goods & services. I have simply expanded the definition of ‘goods & services’ based on technology. I believe it is helpful to look at technology as a Distribution Revolution because, as I have been reminded over & over again, technology should be a means to increased economic productivity & enhanced value creation.

When viewed under that microscope it becomes more obvious there is a lack of alignment to best utilize the distribution of goods & services. We will not reap the larger economic benefits until we stop viewing technology as, well, technology and begin viewing it simply as a distribution model from which we align all phases in the distribution from creation to implementation.

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Thanks to Joost Minnaar (Corporate Rebels) and Wiemer Snijders for some valuable thoughts as well as an older J. Walter Thompson white paper on technology.

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“The path is always right beneath your feet.”

Issan Dorsey Roshi

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Ok. This is a quasi-rant on hope.

We often speak of hope in big sweeping terms. We talk about  scanning wide open aspirational horizons for something better. Yet. The boring truth is that more often than not the reality of hope resides right under your feet on a path you currently stand, walk, ride or run.
Yeah. Not exciting to think about. But your choices, decisions and where you elect to place one foot after another is where hope resides.

It’s not found within a thankless society, a selfish culture nor an ever increasingly appearing unstable world … it is within us.

That’s why whenever I hear anyone say “the American dream is dead” I want to say “fuck you.”

And I want to say that not just for some esoteric American dream, but rather for anyone’s dreams & hopes in any country.

Huh?

I just want anyone & everyone to stop fucking with my dreams and my hopes.

Now.

I won’t argue that the world today is challenging enough to make it feel more despair than hope, more bad than good, and that the system makes it more difficult for individuals to attain some of their hopes & dreams, but that is external stimulus; not internal resolve. And I, frankly, don’t want to give my dreams and hopes to some external cloud storage system for care … I want to store them in me.

They are mine to protect and project.

Which leads me to destiny, fate and hope.

Well.

What I am suggesting this means is that I believe we make our own destinies. Every day we are presented with choices. Some we don’t even recognize. Some we don’t even see <until they are past>. Some we see and make a choice. Our destiny is a reflection of these choices — made and not made.

Our hopes and dreams are made right there.

This does not mean our independence is not interconnected in an interdependent fashion in some ways … just that in order to cut through the spiderweb of random things you may be dependent upon you have to independently make choices and decisions.

If you do not?

Well. That makes your own hope also dependent upon this spiderweb of … uhm … shit in the proverbial shithole around us. And who the hell wants that?

This all means that I believe we assume, and have, responsibility — as in responsibility for your own actions <and hence your dreams, fate, destiny & hope>.

Not everyone will embrace that thought.

Today it seems more likely someone will suggest their behavior, mistakes, flaws and even their dashed dreams & hopes are a reflection of outside influences, a ‘lesser than’ home life experience growing up, poverty, ethnicity, or some painful experience that impacted us in childhood.

Some people that is what they learned.

And some people were taught otherwise by their adult mentors. Some learn that when you screw up it is on ‘you’ and no one else.

Some learn you can be frequently wrong, frequently stupid, but if you have been taught to be accountable and to admit to your accountability, you may get some shit from people but you will also be known as someone who is accountable for their own actions. And you will also have assumed accountability, and responsibility, for your own hope & dreams.

I am in the latter group. I assume accountability & responsibility for my hopes & dreams.

So … please, PLEASE, don’t try and tell me my dream has been killed.

You are fucking with my hope.

And you are fucking with people’s minds.

To be clear. Someone trying to fuck with our minds matters. It matters because, well, Susan Neiman, a social philosopher, said it maybe the best:

“As long as your ideas of what’s possible are limited by what’s actual, no other idea has a chance.”

Someone may suggest a dream is owned by a country or a business, but they are wrong.

Someone may suggest hope is in the purview of some mystical leader who can deliver it in some way upon us, but they are wrong.

Someone may suggest both my dreams and hopes are at the mercy of some system or obstructed by some evil activity in my past, but they are wrong.

They are wrong because the moment you actually agree you have permitted your ideas of what is possible to be limited by what appears as actual <and let me tell ya … ‘actual’ is a moving target in and of itself’> … and no other idea … no dream … no hope … has a chance.

My hope is my hope.

My dreams are my dreams.

Quit fucking with my hope.

Quit fucking with my dreams.

They are mine.

And the path to them is right underneath my feet.

The only thing stopping me from taking one step closer toward my hopes & dreams is me.

The only thing getting me closer toward my hopes & dreams is me taking one step forward on the pat … that path right beneath my feet.

Hope is mine. And keep your grubby hands off it.

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“Because we are ‘free’ to be hateful, members of traditionally marginalized groups suffer.”

Laura Beth Nielsen

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The other night I watched a documentary called Can We Take a Joke?  which claims to be ‘an examination of Western society’s apparent contemporary intolerance of edgy humor by comedians’. But, instead, it is a thoughtful exploration of how we often take the easier route of attempting to shut down things we don’t want to hear rather than debating those things.

I admit I don’t get ’cancel culture’ (I cannot figure out who actually gets canceled) and ‘woke’ seems like a blanket term for certain types of political correctness. All that said. There is a weird battle among ‘snowflakes’ <another term I think has to do with being overly sensitive but I am not sure> in which everyone seems constantly outraged at something someone else said. It’s a bipartisan shared stupidity. And while it may have its roots in something meaningful it is has been hijacked by performative politics. And that is where it starts getting really weird. Politicians, using words to create outrage have made words, well, meaningless <and that should be a crime>. At exactly the same time they are making the constitution meaningless or, at minimum, warped to whatever outrage they have at the moment.

Free speech offers everyone the freedom to be stupid, say stupid, but not be free of the consequences for stupidity.

I admit that I struggle to explain the boundaries of free speech to anyone. Despite the 1st Amendment, local, state, and federal laws limit all kinds of speech. We regulate advertising, obscenity, slander, libel, and inciting lawless action to name just a few (but for some odd reason, not politics). Hate speech is hateful, but legal. And maybe that is where ‘cancel culture’ steps in. just because it is legal doesn’t mean it shouldn’t have some consequences. it can be legal and we, the people, can ‘cancel them out’ to show their stupidness, hatefulness or basic lack of decency has some consequences.

That said. Just as I suggested with regard to political correctness, what we consider ‘hateful’ has expanded to include some fairly silly things. By the way, just because I used the word ‘silly’ doesn’t mean that they cannot be important and representative of some serious discussions/issues, but, almost any ‘obia’ with regard to people is going to be hateful to some people, and representative of some people. Do I wish it were not that way? Sure, I do. But with 7billionish people in the world and a belief I don’t think everyone should think exactly the same things, there will be some people who will always think differently. I can’t ‘cancel’ them, I can’t suggest they are ‘woke’ and that’s stupid, all I can do is live with them, talk with them, listen to them, and recognize, for the most part, whatever the part I ‘hate’ is just part of who they are. And maybe my point within that is we shouldn’t make anyone voiceless. If we do, how can we hear what they have to say and offer some dialogue around what they say? Silence, voiceless, does not seem an option.

Now. To be clear. Hate speech is rarely just hate speech. In many cases it is representative, and embodies, actual behavior. So that ‘speech’ embodies tangible harm and a desire to subordinate another’s views <if not subordinate a cross section of a population>. Hate speech perpetuates actual behavior – discrimination, division and inequality.

Here is where I will run into legal issues. There is stupid speech and there is hate speech. The difference to me is one that embodies hateful behavior and the other is simply performative**. Stupid is the latter; hate is the former.

Now.

Some legal scholar is going to come out of the woodwork and challenge me. I am all ears and I am up for the debate.

Some non-legal everyday schmuck is going to come out of the woodwork and challenge me with some simplistic empty constitutional meanderings. Shut up. I have no time for you.

To be clear. Anyone can, and should, suggest protecting hate speech is consistent with and even central to Constitutional founding principles. Where I will debate is when they argue regulating hate speech is a ‘slippery slope’ of overreach <I would like to point out that there is no slope, we – as people – are quite capable of making one-time decisions, and choice making is kind of what makes people people>. Hate speech, tied to behavioral aspects, cannot be trivialized. It cannot be because by association the behavior also becomes a freedom – tied to the free speech. I don’t say this as a ‘snowflake’ but rather as a concerned citizen concerned with societal norms and a better society.

We should not remove voices, simply outline consequences if you use your voice.

We should all remember the right to speak already is far from absolute.

We should take note that often hate speech tends to put disadvantaged members of our society in situations with serious consequences.

In the end.

Words have meanings. Words are ideas. Words shape attitudes. Words inspire behavior.

We should debate meanings robustly.

We should debate ideas robustly.

We should debate attitudes robustly.

We should make people accountable for behavior.

Don’t remove voices, don’t make people voiceless, hear what they have to say and robustly – as is YOUR freedom – debate the accountability for what they chose to say with their freedom. Ponder.

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** performative: this is another slippery slope but let me suggest people with a larger platform have a higher responsibility than other people. A politician should not have the same level of accountability than an everyday schmuck like me – theirs should be higher. Their ‘performative’ is signaling to a crowd of which someone in that crowd could be inspired to act. There should be accountability.