We Are the Fox!

 We are the proverbial fox guarding our hen house -- the Earth -- it’s no wonder we’re losing egg production. What the hell am I talking about? Let me connect the dots. Our planet is deteriorating rapidly. Without humans, it would probably rebalance itself just as rapidly, but we’re not planning on going anywhere. While the population is declining in places like the United States, elsewhere, no such decline exists.

Our strategy seems to be to consume our way out of this problem. We’re building newer and more efficient stuff. We blame big corporations for pumping greenhouse gases into the atmosphere and using vast resources and energy. Corporations make an easy scapegoat. We envision a few cigar-smoking men in suits laughing as they destroy the planet.

In reality, we are the cigar-smoking suited men. Most of us work for those companies, or they are the largest customers of our smaller companies. We don’t want to lose our jobs. And, while we may not smoke cigars, we are them! While there are a few “tree-huggers” out there who have dedicated their lives to bringing down “the man,” we are, for all intents and purposes, “the man.”

Consumers control everything. Without us, there are no corporations. Want to put Amazon out of business? Stop buying stuff from them. Don’t just buy it somewhere else -- give up the stuff! What’s that? You don’t want to? I get that. You’d rather just keep feeding the machine that is destroying our home.

To be completely transparent, I’m “the man,” too. If you are reading this, it is because you are using the internet, one of the largest energy consumers on the planet. And hold onto your butt because AI is poised to jack those numbers up tenfold. Nobody wants a return to the old days when we didn’t need the internet. We are the fox. Maybe our technology can save us somehow. More likely, we’ll go on raping and pillaging our planet until some cataclysm wipes out a large portion of humans. Those who remain may be returned to the dark ages.

They may learn from the horror that they experienced. But we humans are good at forgetting. If the solution to sustainability requires self-control, I’m not optimistic. As is often the case, what makes us great is our greatest Achilles heel -- we want more eggs! 

Conservative Perspective of a Revisionist

Most of us tend to take up the politics of our parents. It's hard to grow up in a house listening to people taking one position and then change that position later (Andrew Breitbart tried, but couldn't). It happens, but not often. I grew up in a house with two very liberal parents.

I like to think of myself as an independent thinker. Unlike most people, I actively seek out the viewpoint of all sides of any issue. The challenge with this is that the underlying philosophies that inform any particular issue are different. Without the right context, it's always easy to see the opposing viewpoint as tainted.

Realizing this, I've been doing some reading lately to gain a better understanding of the underpinnings of the conservative viewpoint. I've come to realize that there are some stark choices one must make before taking one side or the other. I've tried to sum these differences up in simple terms. Here's what I've got:

Conservatives: believe in freedom first. To have freedom, individuals must own the responsibility for their lives. If more successful people are able to shape the playing field because of their power to do so, those who do not have power must figure out how to play on their playing field.

Liberals (I prefer this to Progressives): believe in fairness first. Those with power stack the system in their favor and make it harder for those without power to gain it. Therefore, the system must have safeguards to even the playing field.

My suspicion is that few conservatives or liberals would argue with these definitions. If you are a liberal, you will see the conservative premise as flawed and vice versa. If I'm right, this is a great start to understanding.

Conservative Roots

So, here's where I think the conservatives have the high ground. When this country was founded, the men who conceived it had lived under the tyranny of a government that imposed themselves on their lives. Our founders sought to create a system in which the people would have ultimate control over anything the government did. They set up a system that would be prone to gridlock right from the start, knowing that these counterbalancing structures would ensure that the government couldn't run away with their power.

Since the states began life un-united, leaders of each wanted to make sure that the Federal government could not wrest too much control from their lives, so they kept as much power in the hands of states as they could. This would ensure that each state could shape the lives of their citizens according to their local desires.

All of this made perfect sense in a new land full of untapped resources and virtually unlimited opportunity. It is in this context that we must understand the mindset of the conservative viewpoint. Every conservative scholar that I've read refers to these roots as the driver of all philosophical positions.

Liberal Revisionism

The liberal view of the world did not even exist in the beginning. While there were differences between parties back in the early days of the union, I suspect that there was little argument about the principles discussed above. So, what happened?

I can only speculate about the origins of modern liberalism. There are undoubtedly too many variables to classify. I believe there are two biggies that ought to be near the  top of the list:

• Globalization
• The Federal Reserve

Both of these are game-changers that bring into question the logic of the conservative viewpoint. Let's just take these two apart to see if we can find some justification for the liberal viewpoint.

Globalization

Large ships, then large airplanes and now the Internet have connected people around the globe in ways that our forefathers could never have imagined. It would be unfair to have expected them to understand what the world would become when the economies of different nations developed the level of interdependence that we see today. If they had, what would they have done differently?

For starters, they may have given the Federal government even more power over commerce and regulating the economy. If they had allowed states to have most of the control over commerce, the "United" States would have not been very united in the eyes of foreign governments. At best, this would make our country a very difficult trading partner.

Most importantly, money flows almost seamlessly from one country to another. This means that government policy plays a very complex role in the health of our economy because capital seeks the best ground and that may not be ours. Key decision-makers in large corporations now control, with there choices about money flow, whether our economy does well or not.

The Federal Reserve

As the Industrial Revolution began gaining steam, the most successful entrepreneurs of the day (also known as robber barons) saw trouble on the horizon. By the way, that nickname is interesting because barons were European royalty and one could argue that they were U.S. royalty. Visit some of their ancestral homes and you will discover that they are castles. The parallels are considerable.

They realized that if the government was allowed to control money, they could disrupt the empires that they had built. With all their power, they created the Federal Reserve, which is a quasi-governmental organization run by bankers. The president is allowed to hire/fire the head banker, but he/she must select from leaders in the banking industry if they make a replacement. Essentially, the bankers are in control of the money in this country. Period. Full stop. No argument.

The Federal Reserve controls how much money we have and the interest rates at which it is distributed. These are the only two levers by which money is controlled. Thus, the government holds no levers to control the medium by which our economy functions.

Why is this a game-changer that motivates liberals? Because, without governmental controls on money, modern-day robber barons can endlessly stack the deck in their favor, thereby leaving everyone else further and further behind and more and more under their control.

The Decision

Each of us needs to decide between idealism and practicality. The ideal of this country lives in the hearts and minds of many of us. We long for the life that the framers promised and we believe that by rolling back the insidious changes made by the revisionists, we can get back to that ideal.

Others look at the reality of today's world and believe that it can't be undone. There are too many factors, which cannot be controlled which make it impossible to recreate what we once had. Further, half measures only seem to make matters worse. Thus, trying to roll back and failing puts us further and further away from the goal.

If you believe we can successfully roll back, you will continue to fight for the conservative attempts to make the government smaller, reduce regulatory control over our lives, and put more money back in the hands of the people who earned it. If you don't think that is possible, then you will want to take steps to level the playing field so that those who have benefited excessively from the changes of the industrial and information ages do not wrest complete control away from the rest of us.

My View

As much as I, too, long for the good old days, I don't think we can go back. Most of the really rich in the world are no longer contained by a single country. Multinational corporations can shift their economic interests to the highest bidder in a global competition for economic resources. If we were to roll back the Federal rules that contain them, they would strip our country of resources and send the money offshore to avoid whatever taxes we decided to charge. As our infrastructure crumbled, our overpopulated workforce may once again become attractive because they would have to work for third-world rates. 

What made us great the first time around was that we led the world in industrial and technological advancement. That is no longer the case and no matter what we do, it will never be the case again. It's too hard to keep secrets anymore and it's too easy to copy what someone else is doing.

Just look around. The countries that have the most growth are the ones with big labor pools willing to work cheap. Do we want that for ourselves? I think not. Our problems are extremely complex and we will need complex solutions or we will need to re-imagine our whole system. Nobody's even talking about the latter option. At least not in Washington.

Humans: Out of Our Depth

Anyone who has hopes for humans to evolve past our primate proclivities could only be disappointed by recent events. It's not really all bad news because people are far less deadly than they were only a short 1000 years ago. Even looking back as little as 100 years ago, times have improved. Maybe it is because of our strides that there are so many more of us who have lived a life almost devoid of daily violence and death around them.

The relative lack of violence in our personal lives makes the daily violence in others' lives all the more distressing. At the same time, our distance and lack of connection to the suffering people we observe, makes us less sensitive to their plight. Chimps don't care what happens to other groups of chimps.

Someday, just maybe, the world will get small enough that we will value all beings on the planet equally. Until that time, maybe we could find a way to help spread some peace. In the last century, the Europeans pulled the middle east apart. They knew what they were doing when they drew national boundaries that split tribes, while pushing separate tribes together. It was the perfect way to ensure that the once great Persian and Arabic nations didn't become great again.

Isn't it time to undo this tragic manipulation of so many people? What is needed is an area summit to redraw national boundaries that reunite the tribes and provide them with the autonomy so many have died for. If we really cared, we would be trying to fix the mistakes of the past. The fact that we are indeed doing things that have caused further destabilization in the region suggests that we (the United States Government) still likes it that way. Maybe we, the people, still do, too.

Meanwhile, our own country is getting hollowed out. The generational poor in our country are cared for at a level that is superior to those in most of the rest of the planet. However, there is a growing population of people who have worked most of their lives and have a sense of identity that includes providing for their family.

One job at a time, capital has sought the most efficient way to profit (just like economists say it should). The most efficient way is capital expenditure for equipment that replaces humans. So far, most of the machines we've built have taken jobs from people who work with their hands. The net effect is the decimation of manufacturing and construction jobs. Politicians blame bad trade deals and cheap foreign labor. Wake up and look around! The number of people it takes to make a car or build a road is a tiny fraction of what it took only 30 years ago.

For every job that equipment replaces, a rich person gets richer. In the next few years, we will see the jobs that require a human mind get replaced, too. We already have very sophisticated automated phone systems that listen to and understand questions and actually provide verbal answers. These systems have replaced rooms full of people who once used their brains all day. IBM's Watson has started providing medical diagnosis and medical robots can already collect vital statistics from a patient. Lookout! They may be coming for your job next.

Basically, the technology available to us today has outstripped out social evolution. Our primate drives cause us to abuse the very capabilities that could make a better world for everyone. If we were evolved enough, each of us could focus on making everyone else's life better, but we still basically care only about our own and those close to us. Fix this and all our other problems simply melt away.

Some say that the profit motive is the only thing that drives progress. I call bullshit. If that's true, we have enough technology to put it in charge of making better decisions than that. Here's a formula for you: people are suffering, therefore do something to end it. Wow! That's complicated. How so, you ask? By a bunch of rules we made up to make it that way. See. Bullshit.

Voluntary Redistribution

I read an article yesterday in The Economist about how global fiscal policymakers are running out of tools to fix the next economic downturn. Interest rates are near zero and even negative rates have limited potential. All the levers of control have been pulled and yet, here we are -- facing sluggish growth that threatens to stall. Government spending means more debt and nobody seems to have the stomach for that either.

I’m a self-confessed Trekie. In Gene Roddenberry’s series, capitalism has been abandoned. Capitalism is a dear old friend that has been the best way for humans to exchange the things they need with one another. It is the best system we know for managing scarcity.

WHAT IF SCARCITY HAS BECOME A MAN-MADE CONDITION?

We assume that scarcity is an underlying fact of life on Earth. Is it? Are there any problems of extraction, reclamation, production and distribution that couldn’t be collectively solved with a combination of innovation, initiative and resources? Is it possible that unnatural divisions between us are the ultimate cause of scarcity?

If we all worked together for the common good, what could we accomplish? It seems to me that this initiative would need to start with the rich and powerful (who are usually one and the same). In 2013, the Forex currency exchange was trading $5.3 TRILLION per day. At that time, the daily global trading of goods and services was estimated to be 25 times less. That’s just currency folks! This does not take into account money sitting in banks or in other trading accounts. None of this money helps real people with real problems. I suspect it causes them.

It seems like it is the nature of the rich and powerful to hold onto what they have for as long as they can. When the system finally collapses (which it always has eventually), they are left with nothing. Frankly, in times past, they often ended up with their head in a basket, swinging from a rope or some other sudden and violent death. We like to think we’re more civilized now, but one only needs to follow the news of the day to know that’s just wrong.

What could rich and powerful people do if they took their money off the sidelines and put it to work? For starters, they could build infrastructure. Ideas already exist to build a global “enernet” that would provide cheap power wherever it is needed. We could build new transportation infrastructure on top of the old such as that proposed by SkyTran. Most importantly, we could fully fund (and thereby accelerate) research to address every unsolved problem facing humankind.

Just try to imagine what would happen if the global economy was 50 or 100 times more effective than it is now. What could we do? It seems we’d have virtually unlimited ability to create the golden age of humankind that we all know in our hearts is possible.

Behind it all are a few extremely powerful people who have convinced themselves that changing the system would be disruptive and destructive. They believe that from their vantage point, they see things more clearly than the rest of us. They understand about forces we know nothing about that would derail any attempt to create a better world. They are wrong. They are part of the same cycle that humankind has repeated over and over since the dawn of civilization. If they put all their power and resources behind a transformation. They could make it happen. They could own the creation of a future that unbinds us from the shackles of the past. It would take courage. It might even get messy at first. But, what better legacy to leave behind?

Going Private: The New Going Public

Rarely does one get an opportunity to see the effects of “going public” so starkly. My wife worked for Whole Foods Market (WFM) for 21 years. When she started, the company was still privately held. It was a gem. Employees were given extensive training, had substantial autonomy in performing their jobs, and were held accountable to their results. Using an organizational structure modeled on Gene Roddenberry's Star Trek, teamwork was highly valued and encouraged.

Most importantly, quality and stewardship were valued more than profits. That did not stop profits from coming. In fact, Wall Street could not wait to get their hands on those profits. Eventually, they won out. Many early employees who were granted substantial stock options cashed out and left the company. What happened next was a slow decline into corporate ordinary-ness.

I will not bore you with details as you can get those elsewhere. What I can tell you is that Wall Street forces all of “their” companies into a straightjacket that is not good for them, not good for employees, not good for customers, and not good for society. It is designed to be good for investors and thus they are the only ones who ultimately benefit...for awhile.

For certain, pumping more money into a company can help it grow faster. In the early stages of public life, this can be a huge boon. With the pre-public structure that brought them still in place, newfound money means more of a good thing. Unfortunately, companies can’t and shouldn’t grow forever. Eventually, they reach the optimal size. For WFM, it was when they had put stores in all the carefully vetted locations that fit their model.

Wall Street is a hungry beast that is never full. They demand either growth or increased capital efficiency. Once a company gets on this treadmill, it is a matter of time before they must tear down the very edifice which allowed them to go public in the first place. For WFM, it means putting stores in locations that don’t fit their model, thus forcing them to abandon that model which was so successful. For others, it is expanding product lines into unfamiliar areas with stronger competition.

First, the employees start to notice the difference. Empowerment becomes a catchphrase with little substance as “corporate” starts pulling back control from the field. With a return of control to the central authority, there is less need for high caliber employees, so they leave. This creates more mistakes, which encourages the central authorities to pull back even more functions. Of course, this precedes another round of layoffs. Layoffs create badwill (the opposite of goodwill).

As the organization continues to have fewer people with less time to reach out and touch consumers, it becomes an empty brand without its original substance. What large publicly held corporation hasn’t gone this way? Oh sure, they try to put a human face on it. You can put lipstick on a pig, but I wouldn’t want to go to work for it (or kiss it).

The answer, it seems to me, is for publicly traded companies who want to get their soul back to go private. This can be done and it is a win-win-win-win situation. Private equity investors get a better company, consumers get a better company, employees get a better company and Wall Street loses one more victim.

Michael Dell has tried to take Dell Computer private. Before John Mackie retires, he should take Whole Foods Market private. Really, any CEO/major stockholder who really cares about what he/she has built ought to go private. Better yet, don’t go public in the first place.

Corporatocracy's Icy Grip

Why did we go to war in Iraq when we were attacked by the Taliban out of Afghanistan? Why are we stripping the Amazon rainforest when we know it is the lungs of the world and the source of immense biodiversity (some of which may hold the cure for various diseases)? Some individual or group is making these decisions and their reasons are not very transparent.

We get our information about these decisions from the mainstream media. We assume that the media is free and independent. However, mainstream media is now generally owned by some of the largest corporations in the world. So, the media are corporations. As such, they have the typical self-interests of any corporation. In order to satisfy those self-interests, they need support from the government.

Further, the government is largely made up of the most successful individuals from the corporate world. I’m not talking about politicians (although some of them are from corporations), rather the policy makers. They’re the ones that write the scripts for the politicians. They’re the ones who provide the options and recommendations from which the politicians choose. They pull the strings. They are almost exclusively from corporations. Go ahead, look it up -- I’ll wait…

Okay, so now you know that government and corporations are essentially one big entity. Author John Perkins calls this the “corporatocracy.” The term lays bare the most important fact about our global society. It is run by these people. They have self-interests. Those self-interests do not usually align with those of “we, the people” (or the 99% as some would call us).

What we know is that we have enough food to end starvation. We have enough drug making capacity to end the diseases that kill the vast majority of children and women who die daily. We have the technology to end the use of fossil fuels in the next 10 or 20 years. There is so much we could do to make this a better place to live, but we don’t. Why?

The answer almost always comes down to one factor - economics. The financial factors are not controlled by “we, the people.” They are controlled by the corporatocracy. They are the “they” which we often talk about when we discuss the things out of our control. What reason could “they” have for not solving the world’s major problems if the solutions are within reach?

We can choose to believe when “they” tell us “it’s complicated,” there must be good reasons why they don’t do these things for us. What if the truth is simply greed? How would we know? Is it fair to assume that someone who has climbed -- no -- scratched and clawed their way to the top of the corporatocracy’s food chain has self-interest deep in their heart? I think so. Surrounded by like-minded people, it is not hard to imagine what sort of decisions they make.

Take a look at the world in which we live. It’s not hard at all to imagine. The evidence of their decisions is all around us. Can we take back control? Maybe, but first we will need widespread awareness. Spread the word. The corporatacracy does not have our best interests in their hearts. We need to control the conversation with posts like this one.

Barriers

Our founding fathers were mostly entrepreneurs. Sure, many were doctors and lawyers, and some of them inherited their businesses from their fathers. Back then, all it took was a good idea, determination and persistence to have a good business. That doesn’t mean that some businesses didn’t fail even back then, but the entrepreneur always owned their failure.

Fast forward to the 21st century. Things have changed for the worse. It seems that there are a lot more barriers to success and far more barriers to entry. Let me give you a quick example from my own family. Years ago, my sister became a certified midwife. We come from an entrepreneurial family, so after working in a clinic for some time, she wanted to start her own practice. She had suitable partners among her colleagues, a proper location and the capital to start the business. Finally, she got around to insurance. Because they were not planning to have a doctor on staff, the insurance rate was going to be in excess of $1 million per year. The alternative was to pay less insurance and a doctor they didn’t need. It was mostly a wash. They abandoned the idea.

I have another friend who is a clinical psychologist. His education debt is so high that he will never be able to pay it off. Instead, he is forced to work for a public institution for a decade after which time they will forgive his debt. Needless to say, he will not be having a private practice anytime soon.

It seems the barriers to pursuing happiness are getting higher and more numerous. Education is more expensive, regulations mandate additional expenditures for compliance, and insurance companies exact an increasing toll. If you ask them, they will tell you that trial lawyers are the problem. Since lawyers were granted the right to advertise in 1976, the number of cases both legitimate and frivolous have increased dramatically. It is common knowledge that even a settlement can return massive financial rewards by middle class standards. The temptation to sue is so great that we have erected our own barrier while money flows to lawyers and insurance companies.

In industries that contain multi-national players (which is quickly becoming most of them), the big boys erect their own barriers to entry. Monsanto has been attempting to eliminate small farmers that don’t use their seed by suing them when genetic drift causes their intellectual property to show up in a neighboring field. The major players in the fast food industry have utilized their economies of scale to drive the margins down so low that it is difficult for a single location operator to make a profit.

I could go on, but you’re probably already bored with all the examples. There are businesses with low barriers to entry. You could be a web developer. Hey! There’s only about 10 gazillion of those. How about a personal coach? That’s great, but what are you going to do when you’ve finished coaching all your family members? I know! You could be a business consultant. Wait while I check LinkedIn to see if there are any of those...I’m back! And, you’re in luck because there’s only about 133,000 of them listed. Jump in line.

The American Dream is still alive and well. There are just a few more barriers to get past. People with a good network and financial resources have a much better chance. If you don’t have those things, you will need to make some sacrifices just so you can risk it all. I guess it’s no wonder most of us are working for someone else.

Who Lobbies for Us?

One exercise that I like to do when trying to understand a situation is to try to imagine what I’d be thinking and feeling if I were the other guy. To that end, I sometimes imagine what it must be like to be a Washington lawmaker. Members of Congress probably have very full days. Because they are members of their party and the ones who decide what laws we will have, what programs we will fund and what governmental agencies will and won’t do, there are lots and lots and lots of people who would like to talk with each and every one of them.

These people who want to talk with them are mostly paid to do so. It is their job to gain access to lawmakers for the express purpose of influencing their thoughts about a particular area of interest to their employer or client. If a company or group has enough money to employ a lobbyist full-time, they will have a person on The Hill every day trying to get appointments to talk with lawmakers or their staff.

Let’s pause and think about this. We’re talking about an entire industry. According to Wikipedia, the modern source of truth, there were over 12,000 registered lobbyists in Washington as of 2014. There are less than 500 lawmakers. You do the math. Between actually spending time on the floor and in committee, they have a continuous stream of professionals coming through their offices.

Each lobbyist is trying to persuade lawmakers to craft (or support) legislation favorable to their particular mission at the time. Some of these missions might actually be helpful to us regular folks, but most of it is favorable to the industries and groups that fund them. These generally break down into two major classifications: industry groups and citizen groups.

Citizen groups are supposedly lobbying for us, but here’s what they have to offer a lawmaker:

1. Ideas
2. Ability to help get support for other favored agenda items

Industry groups, on the other hand can offer:

1. Ideas
2. Ability to help get support for other favored agenda items
3. Campaign funding
4. Financial support for pet projects
5. A job if and when the lawmaker decides to retire from public life

This explains things like why medical insurance companies still exist after healthcare reform. Did you know that 62% of all personal bankruptcies are caused by the inability to pay medical bills? And, 78% of those folks HAD medical insurance. Insurance companies make huge profits. They do this by using very creative tactics along with legislative support so that they can legally get away with said tactics. On top of corporate profits, they employ many expensive people as executives and lobbyists.

Nobody wants to put a whole industry out of work, but we’ve done it before and we will need to do it again. How many whalers do you know? The fact is, when an industry is sucking the life out of the economy, it’s value proposition needs to be reevaluated.

It won’t be. Because there is no lobbyist in Washington with the resources to compete with highly profitable industries like medical insurance. It starts with election finance reform. In 2010, the Supreme Court ruled that corporations are people. This put the nail in the coffin of any hope that we could stop industry from funding elections. Winning an election requires lawmakers to be pragmatic. You need to take care of the folks that are buttering your bread. Until that’s an average citizen, citizen lobby groups are at a serious disadvantage.

Since corporations are now people, you’d think the limit on personal campaign donations would apply, but until we eliminate soft money, there will always be back channels. The other option would be to ban lawyers from being lawmakers. Of course, if we did that, we might not be able to find enough willing individuals to serve in Washington.

UPDATE

This morning, only one day after writing this post, I came across a new initiative that is starting to take hold in the medical insurance industry, which I used as an example above. It is called value-based insurance design (V-BID) and elements of it were actually included in the Affordable Care Act. It's a step in the right direction and will make a significant difference if it is widely adopted.

Work Fun Balance

Recently, the New York Times published an article about the competitive work culture at Amazon and how Jeff Bezos, the president was pushing people to work long and hard in the pursuit of excellence and innovation. Nobody can deny the success that Amazon has had in online retail innovation. Their list of firsts is unchallenged in the industry. Many acknowledge that they single-handedly put the largest book seller, Borders, out of business.

The NYT article quoted former employees who spoke of broken home lives and grueling joyless work days. Is this a case of the ends justifying the means? Can the success of the company be attributed at least in part to this work culture? Or, is their success in spite of it? Since we can only travel on one path in life, it’s hard to say.

Companies like Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon have some inherent advantages, not the least of which is their first mover status. They have been very successful at recruiting the best and brightest from universities. As a small businessperson, I have not enjoyed these benefits. Yet, I must attract the best people available and get the most out of them.

Back in the slavery days, a simple whipping was all that was necessary to motivate the “staff.” The threat of “no food” was almost as effective. Unfortunately for modern managers, indentured servitude and corporal “motivation” are no longer an option (although EDS did try a form of indenturing with their mandatory personal loan co-sign technique). Nowadays, it’s all carrots and no sticks.

Don’t get me wrong, I love carrots. Heck, by the time you get to the stick the situation is usually unsalvageable anyway. In Daniel Pink’s Drive, he discusses how studies have shown that carrots (extrinsic rewards for the technically minded) can have the opposite effect on workers who must engage their creativity and judgment in the line of duty (i.e. white collar workers).

In my experience, the smaller the reward, the better. I used to keep some $25 gift cards in my desk. I liked to hand them out randomly when I caught someone doing something extraordinary. People always seemed so appreciative. Far more than when their bonus was direct-deposited into their bank account. It seems that rewarding specific behavior spontaneously and on-the-spot means more to people.

More than carrots, the culture can be the biggest motivator. Sometimes I really needed people to work longer hours. The best way I’ve found to do that is to create a fun environment. That means flattening the organization -- and not just in name only. It means removing fear from relationships. I encourage what I call “healthy disrespect.” I’ve had employees come to me and ask me “why do you let that guy talk to you like that? He works for you.” I need to explain to them that I work for that guy as much as he works for me.

If I alienate him, he might not feel free to tell me what’s on his mind. I can’t do my job to guide the company if I don’t know how people are feeling and what is troubling them. Keeping the lines of communication open means removing fear from the relationship and that’s not easy. We’ve all been programmed to fear “the boss.” Bosses hold the keys to our professional future in their hands. We think that if we tell them something they don’t like, especially about their own bad behavior, the repercussions will not be good for us. It takes a lot of work to convince people that they have nothing to fear; that if they’re doing a good job, they can say whatever they want (within accepted social bounds) with no negative consequences.

Building that sort of trust in an organization has many dividends. People will work harder. They will care more. Most importantly the honesty surfaces issues quicker and suppresses bad ideas equally fast. The thing about balancing the joy of a great working environment with the work is that it emerges naturally. Any attempt to modulate it will be disruptive. As a matter of fact, I have been known to be the head joker. Sometimes people get a little too serious. So, my business advice for today is from the immortal words of Sgt Hulka in the movie Stripes, “lighten up, Francis!” You’ll live longer and have more fun in the process.

The Mind, Body & Spirit of an Organization

The other day I was having a conversation with a coworker about what had gone wrong with his grand vision for a technology platform we are implementing.  He was frustrated because he had employed excellent architecture and even did the legwork to implement it to the point at which the concept was put into action.  Nonetheless, he was meeting resistance.

This gentleman (we will call him Abe) is a very pragmatic fellow and a brilliant technologist.  His ideas always seem to me to be well thought out and backed by a solid scientific and logical foundation.  This one was no exception.  Where did Abe go wrong?

If ideas represent the mind of an organization and implementation the body, then what is the spirit?  I would contend that every organization has a culture that transcends the mind and the body.  It is this aspect of an organization that forms its spirit.

Like many spiritual pursuits, organizational culture shares a certain amount of ambiguity that requires both knowledge and faith.  It requires one to have a deep understanding of the past in order to be able to properly interpret current events.

That’s why within an organization, there are those people who have been around a long time who are the keepers of the faith.  Sure, there may be some “non-believers” who have resisted the corporate culture for a long time, but most people eventually see the righteousness of the path of culture.

When the spirit conflicts with the mind and body, it usually wins.  Logical arguments don’t hold up well in the face of spiritual pursuits.  It is best to accept them and find a way to work within the confines of the spiritual tenets of your organization’s particular denomination.

This was the advice I gave to Abe.  Abe worships at the altar of the mind -- a true humanist.  However, the people he needs to convince of the righteousness of his path are believers.  They see the world differently and Abe will need to live in their world if he wants to influence it.

Meritocracy

All but the most cynical among us believe that if we work hard and do well, we’ll get ahead.  The reality is once removed from that ideal.  See, the problem is: we rely on other people to get ahead.  Their goal is to…get ahead.  Until we live in a society where people care more about others than they do themselves (see altruism), we need to look at our prosperity in the context of those around us.

Sometimes, the smartest and hardest working people appear only as threats to their less capable superiors.  Threats are to be eliminated or at best subdued, not enhanced.  This is the fundamental flaw in thinking that the best people should rise to the top of any organization.  Naturally, some organizations are headed by true leaders.  Anyone who has spent some time reading about Warren Buffett knows that he exhibits the integrity and trust in his management team that causes good people to want to be around him.

Sadly, the reasons why most people strive to gain a leadership position are not psychologically healthy.  Some are driven to control an environment that they cannot control.  Some just want wealth and still others want pure power.  Any of these reasons ensure that the employees they manage will be unfulfilled.  As we all know, excrement rolls downhill.  Bad leadership begets bad leadership and the people performing line functions suffer.

How we pick our leaders is as much our fault as followers as it is theirs for leading poorly.  We have a choice to collectively reject bad leaders, but we are drawn to them like a moth to flame.  They are often tall and attractive people with soothing voices.  Their physical presence appeals to us on a visceral level that we don’t understand.  The alpha male is now the “alpha person.”  Unfortunately, the qualities that make a good leader are not perceived as attributes of the strong individual by traditional (caveman) standards: humble, empathic, thoughtful, caring…who would promote such a character?  …Certainly not a traditional leader.

So what’s the answer?  Reject bad leadership.  Workers of the world unite!  Let’s teach leadership skills in our schools.  Let’s demand real leaders even though our gut may be drawn to the bad ones.  If entire departments simultaneously threatened to quit unless bad leaders are replaced, good leaders could be forced on companies.  I have reserved the domain www.mybossisadick.com.  I think it’s time to call these people out.  It’s not their fault.  We put them there; so now we need to fix the problem.

Backfire!

In a small enterprise, the leader can hand select each employee.  If she is a good judge of character, she will select wisely and the enterprise will prosper.    Being prosperous seems like a good thing, but like most good things, it comes at a price.  The price is loss of control.  Prosperity brings growth.  As any of my readers know, I am aware of the Small Giants phenomenon, but most enterprises choose to grow to whatever degree their prosperity will take them.

As long as the right people are selecting the right people, the only thing that prevents the organization from taking care of customers is lack of empowerment.  This leads me to a story of a complete breakdown of both, brought to you by our friends at DirectTV.

To start with, I’ve been a loyal DirecTV customer for many years.  Since I live out in the boonies, I don’t have much choice in the matter.  When it first started out, DirecTV was rough around the edges.  However, I noticed a significant improvement in performance over the years.  The frontline people seemed to have enough empowerment to satisfy a range of situations.

Behind the scenes, the management of the firm has decided to play a nasty little game with their value conscious clientele.  Here’s how it works:

1. Customer calls disconnect group and says he’s quiting
2. Customer service rep asks “will you stay if we give you $10 off?”
3. “No.” says the customer.
4. “How about $20/month?"
5. “Throw in six months of Showtime and Skinimax and you got a deal."
6. “Done,” says the rep.

Then, six months slip quietly by with only a $2.35/month rate hike.  BAM! The bill jumps up $20 per month.  So,  this process repeats until someone, in this case – me, gets fed up with the game and just wants the price drop “forever.”

Now, you have some grasp of my state of mind when I began my fateful call.  Oh, one more thing:  It seems that DirecTV really appreciated my patronage, because they not only sent me a postcard offering me a free movie, but they also posted the offer on their website.  The postcard apparently had some mysterious instructions on it, but frankly, when I saw the offer online, I threw the postcard out.  The instructions (condense to the essentials) were as follows:

1. Select a movie from the designated channels
2. Watch the movie
3. Your account will automatically be credited

This seemed pretty straightforward to me, so I watched Invictus (pretty good movie).  Now, it just so happens, this all happened in the same month after the last six months had expired.  So, when I found the charge for the movie on the bill with the post-special deal rates bringing the damages to just under $90 (with no Internet service), I was ticked to say the least.

I start out going through the regular drill.  My objective is to bring my bill back down into the low $50’s.  We were just coming up to step #5, “Jane” offers me a different package that will get my rate where I want it.  

“I’m on the site now, tell me where I can see the channels,” I ask.

“It’s not on the site.  It is a special package for [customers who bitch up a storm],” I paraphrased Jane.

“How can I see what channels this package has,” I asked?

“What channels are you looking for,” she asked?

“Cooking?”

“No.”

“SciFi?”

“No.”

“Comedy Central?”

“No.”

“I want to cancel,” I proclaimed.

“You have a two year contract, so you will need to pay a prorated termination fee for the time between now and Nov. 1^st.”

“Alright, I’ll take the crappy package! But, you need to take the $5.99 charge off my bill for the “free” movie you offered me.

“How did you hear about the movie?  Did you get a postcard, Jane asked?

“Yes.”

“Did you follow the instructions on the card?”

“I used the instructions from offer on your website, which I am looking at right now.  Let me read it to you.  It says watch the movie and you’ll AUTOMATICALLY credit my bill.  Where’s the credit?”

“Yeah, but if you got the postcard, you gotta follow those instructions.”

“Are you authorized to give me a credit?”

“No,” responded Jane.

“I want to speak with your supervisor”

“Sir, you cannot…”

“I’m not talking to you anymore.  Get me your supervisor.”

“I will need to put you on hold for 3-5 minutes.”

“Fine,” I said.  I said it again five minutes later and again five minutes after that.  At the end of the third five minutes, I’d had enough.

“The supervisor is still busy, do you want to wait some more?”

“What if I don’t?”

“You can call back later.  We’re real busy right now.”

“How is that my problem?  You should have enough people to staff your peak periods effectively.”  I don’t think she grasped this aspect call center design.  “Fine, just do what you’ve got to do.”  After I hung up, I immediately called my bank and restricted their access to my bank account, which they had been tapping monthly for many years.

So, this thing is not over, but they will need to call me to settle up.  My guess is, they will turn it over to a collection agency eventually.  They will call and threaten to report me to the credit bureau, but not before I make them leave several messages.  Only then will I negotiate a substantially reduced settlement, which I will have the satisfaction of knowing also cost DirecTV the cost of the collection agency’s fee as well.

If I were consulting with DirecTV, I would charge them $250 per hour to tell them how to avoid this situation.  As a customer, I offered it up for free, but alas, there’s nobody listening.  Well, if DirecTV loses customers one at a time, it will be awhile before they start faltering.  Online options continue to expand.  DirecTV’s failure in both the personnel and empowerment categories will continue to haunt it.  I will be haunting them for a little while longer.

Whitehall Weekend

Last weekend, we stayed at the White Swan Inn bed and breakfast in Whitehall, Michigan. It told our hostess, Cathy, that I would blog about it. I usually don’t carry on in my blog about my every day experiences because…because I want my blog to be different than all those other blogs that carry on about every day experiences. So, I’m not going to ramble on about what we did or how crappy the weather was on Saturday. It’s not my style.

Instead, I’m going to talk about passion. There is nothing finer in life than crossing paths with someone who is doing what they are passionate about. I don’t care if it’s a hardware guy, like my friend Mike at Stadium Hardware in Ann Arbor, who is the greatest hardware man I’ve ever met, or Cathy at White Swan Inn, who has spent god knows how many years collecting lamps and paintings, and umbrellas and…well whatever she can find that has a white swan on it. These people love what they do and they pour themselves into it in a way that can’t help but create some enthusiasm within the people they cross paths with.

I’m not sure that Capt’n Ron, Cathy’s husband is all that passionate about the B&B business, but he sure is passionate about boats. He’s launching a new career (pun – as usual – intended) as a charter boat captain. But, his passion for boats is clearly not new. I saw some of his handiwork making model boats around the house. They were quite remarkable. I asked him if he had ever had a commission and said as a matter of fact, he is working on one right now. He disappeared into the basement and returned with printouts and plans and the hull of an unfinished work. He explained his process and how he only builds models of real boats that have some history. He had an article about the boat he is currently building. He didn’t know if we wanted the level of detail he offered of how he makes boats or not. I don’t think he cared. As it turns out, we probably didn’t need the details, but I did enjoy his passion.

I enjoyed watching Capt’n Ron enjoy sharing his passion. I think it is infectious. As a business person, I think that companies run by leaders with passion, tend to seek out employees with passion. This creates companies like I wrote about in my Small Giants post. When I need services, I always look for people who are passionate about what they do. They just seem to do it better than people who aren’t. Even if they don’t, I still like the idea that they care more about it.

Cathy asked me if we had any dietary restrictions when I made the reservations. I told her that Susan is mostly vegan and that I need to keep an eye on my cholesterol. She made a special breakfast the first day that addressed both of our concerns. That day, Susan mentioned in passing that she likes beans for breakfast. Next morning – you guessed it – we had beans on the menu. That’s not just customer service – that’s passion.