We all know that technology accelerates during wartime and that a war is a series of campaigns. I’m fascinated by the wartime mentality, whether or not it occurs in combat, so let’s call it a campaign mentality. The campaign mentality sets in when a group feels so strongly about its mission that it transcends the usual carping, grandstanding, empire-building and pettiness that marks so much of enterprise. It’s invigorating.

War is the easiest way to produce the campaign phenomenon, and gets the most attention. But the mentality is not unusual. Every time a plane takes off or a boat launches, its occupants share a campaign mentality as to the importance of arriving gently on dry land. In the startup companies I’ve started or helped, a campaign mentality was expressed by the participants’ olympian willingness to work harder, longer faster–and cheaper–than people in established companies.

Political campaigns are the best non-combat examples of the campaign mentality. And they’re an interesting counterpoint. The aim of war is to blow things up, so war technology is designed to blow them up more accurately and cheaply. The aim of political campaigns is to build consensus, so its technology is about building consensus faster and more cheaply.

I’ve felt for a while now that a smart mob is in the process of stealing the Dean campaign, because the smart mob is growing faster and more intelligently than any campaign’s ability to manage it. As Doc suggests, the competition will learn how to use the tools that Dean is using, but what will they get for their trouble? A campaign like Dean’s, where the people manage the dialogue, a decidedly counter-Rovian management style.

Massage the Medium

If the people take over your campaign, what have you got left?

• The campaign blog with staff personalities and volunteers’ comments is the Sunshine law of backroom politics. You lose control of the process and start to host the kind of dialogue that the front runners have never wanted.
• Your Contribute Now link attracts a zillion people who think they have a stake in your campaign just because they charged 20 bucks to their Visa.
• Rank experts set up their own campaign sites and then open source hobbyists invent a whole new set of tools to let the sites talk to each other and all their users blog and then let them vote on the ideas they like best, just like it was a participatory democracy rather than a Tory republic.
• People dream up new ways to give you money and then bitch at you if you don’t put up an automatic donation tool in a week. (Zephyr? Bobby? Anyone there?)
• People start chatting online with the campaign manager, taking valuable time away from the important work of writing ads to get people interested in the campaign.
• Instead of making up your own mind about fundraising tactics, you end up having to ask the donors if they’re ready to give another half mill you hadn’t counted on.
• College kids and even high schoolers (high schoolers!) run their own sites without asking permission, (the high schoolers patiently explaining that half the kids in high school will be able to vote in 16 months). They’re so insistent that the candidate feels obligated to shuffle off to Buffalo between Oklahoma and Iowa. The kids even organize their own ride board, fer chrissake!

And these people think that, just because they replace the PAC and National Committee and corporate soft money that they should have as much say in your administration as those they replaced. They feel entitled just because they bought their own votes!

Remember that part about users voting each other’s ideas up the queue like a bunch of SlashDotters? That’s the Knowledge Base tech that everybody’s been talking about but not getting around to. It’s the campaign mentality! These amateurs may not even think they’re inventing new tech and may have never heard the endless conversation about how to turn blogs into knowledge. Just like WWI for aviation and WWII for atomic energy, this campaign is spinning off blog-to-Knowledge Base tech.

Democracy, the Killer App

And blogs-to-knowledge base is the end of politics as usual. With citizen blogs and preference-registering knowledge bases and interested amateurs taking ownership of government, democracy becomes the Next Big Thing. The campaign mentality works like it always does, pushing tech to the limit. Special interests realize they’ll never get everything they want so they start to get real about what’s possible, so NYC Democrats cheer for a balanced budget pitched by a rural-state Guv who opposes national gun control.

It wouldn’t make sense unless they felt like they own the guy.

11:37:18 PM    

Frank Patrick’s Focused Perfomance blog is a reliable source of wisdom on what works in business processes and what doesn’t. When I rant on about the failings of large organizations, he gently hauls me back by reminding me that what seems like wasted effort is the natural result of supporting the truly effective people with those who do the less-than-excellent work that the stars simply can’t get to. He knows that companies can only avoid the over-use of great resources by backing them up with “good-enough” resources.

Now Frank has taken on a project that deserves a great resource like him. It’s called A Global Virtual Classroom, a continuation of a successful AT&T project linking elementary and secondary school classes from around the world in collaborative “virtual classrooms.” It’s a little like the Xpertweb concept, on the basis that what needs teaching in your school may be available elsewhere, in classes which have mastered the challenge you’re most interested in. Think of the real life Jaime A. Escalante who was the inspirational Math teacher in Stand and Deliver, one of Doc‘s favorite films.

Apparently AT&T has other fish to fry and has turned over the project to the Give Something Back International Foundation. The AT&T foundation has provided a small grant to re-start the initiative, and Frank is looking for additional support for his client and talent to get the tech part right. Check it out. It’s a chance to be part of something bigger than your local school bitchfest.

1:30:53 PM    

What if someone could use scientific research to divine the sure winner of the 2004 election?

I love it when someone finds valid patterns where everyone else sees chaos. I even love it when someone pretends to find valid patterns where everyone else sees chaos. Today’s report is courtesy of Doc, who sent me a link to research reported by Eric Schulman, Ph.D, an astrophysicist who probably understands math better than Doc and I combined. But Eric is also a humorist who has authored a book, A Briefer History of Time and a number of articles spoofing the world of research. My favorite title: “The History of the Universe in 200 Words or Less in 30 Languages or More in Teeny Tiny Type“

Schulman has devised the Electability Formula, which looks at candidates’ years of experience in various public roles, and the actual results of campaigns:

12:31:24 AM    

My uncharacteristic silence is a result of a lot of travel and having so many things going right with my projects that I hardly know where to start. I’ve also had a writer’s block on a rant regarding the nature of organizations in an open source economy. More on all that later.

The Futures of Terrorism

DARPA‘s on-again, off-again market for information on terrorism inspired an interesting blogalogue. Doc pushed back against it, attracting claims he was trashing something Clueful. From an intelligence standpoint, PAM, the Terror Market Bimbo, immediately howled out of existence, would have been a good idea if you believe in efficient markets having perfect knowledge. (Of course there is no such thing as perfect market knowledge, despite the brilliant people who have made a career selling the theory to amateurs hoping to beat experts at their own game.)

ENRON and WorldComm and their ilk suggest that terrorism would find better funding and planning if it had its own futures market. It would increase our predictive skills, and it would increase terrorist activity.

But that wasn’t the real reason PAM died at the box office. Every society has limits on what it conceives and the ideas it pursues. So we do not support public hangings or cane-lashings or stoning adulterers. Those things and millions of others are, literally, unthinkable to us, and it’s right for a society to not use tools and weapons it finds inconceivable.

Toward an Aesthetic Culture

Steve Jobs famously told Bill Gates that the problem with Microsoft is that they have no taste. Software is routinely released by MS that would be inconceivable at Apple, based on its appearance, its function and its bugginess. The two companies simply have different tastes in what’s acceptable. So it is with cultures.

Any student of cultural aesthetics would observe that ours has grown a lot uglier in the last two years. Winston Churchill or even Tony Blair would have forged a stronger society upon the anvil of our post-9/11 rage, grief, and world sympathy. Our illiterate leader and his opportunistic handlers have contrarily cheapened our demeanor and savaged our international reputation. Compared to the rest of the civilized world, this administration, literally, has no taste.

It’s absurd to wonder if we could somehow develop better cultural taste, and agree to look beyond our petty concerns and agree on a society more pleasing to the spirit. But a guy can dream…

It’s the Opportunism, Stupid

Politicians are naturally opportunistic, but at each point in the trajectory of a nation’s evolution, there are levels of opportunism that even they won’t sink to. For two centuries it was inconceivable that states would operate a numbers game because property owners prefer not to pay for proper schooling. Lottery income isn’t a fiscal necessity, it’s the product of a lack of the political leadership to lead people to pay for what’s important in an informed and civil society.

Since the phone tap was invented, it was literally inconceivable that the government would eavesdrop on your line without a warrant. That’s a nicety that evaporated when our TV culture got its high-profile WTC face slap.

Just as opportunists in state government couldn’t resist the siren call of lottery profits, so too was the big-gummint temptation too great for the opportunistic Ashcroft, Bush and Cheney. Like any government, they want to control our lives, ensure their power and shrink the opposition into oblivion. The odd thing is that they claim to be conservatives while violating the conservative aesthetic of small government, fiscal responsibility and avoiding foreign entanglements.

About that Face Slap

What if our 9/11 tragedy wasn’t? I hate to sound harsh about our losses, but has it occurred to anyone else that running airplanes into buildings might not have been the logistical masterstroke of the century?

I’m suggesting that there was an operational hole in our hijacking prevention system and that some passionate Arabs got lucky and managed to kill some of us. I’ve got about 2500 hours in a Boeing 707, and I’m sure that a couple hundred hours in Microsoft Simulator would be enough for the average person to switch off a 767 autopilot, turn left and crash into the Twin Towers. The fact that they did some actual flight training in a Cessna seems irrelevant.

There’s almost 300 million of us. On 9/11/01, those Arabs killed a little over .001% of us, fewer than die from smoking every week. Instead of panicking, we could have started locking cockpit doors, continued to keep guns off airplanes, and we’d have plugged that loophole.

Perhaps 9/11 was more spectacle than significant. Of course, there’s a war on terror, but we’re the foot soldiers in that war, and we should acknowledge that some of us are going to get hurt. It’s a war, fer chrissake! I’ve been traveling a lot lately, and as most of us know, the airport precautions are more charade than anything else. We all understand that we’re not significantly safer than we were before. Feeling safer is not the same as being safer.

What we might have done in the middle of September 2001, if tough-mindedness were part of our national makeup, would be to say,

“OK, you motherfuckers, you got lucky once. We’re not changing how we live our lives, but we’re changing how you live your lives, starting with Saudi Arabia, which is the obvious catalyst for this foolishness. We’re going to do the thing you can’t stand us to do: Freeze your assets, dictate what we’re willing to pay for oil, and spend those saved billions on energy independence and telecommuting technologies. Any company that resists that initiative will be exposed for its un-American activities. Now you guys fix that Taliban problem or we’ll get really nasty and put an embargo on bizjets.”

That kind of thinking arises from my sense that we spend most of our lives flying into large mountains avoiding small bullets. I learned that lesson when I saw a guy do that very thing in Viet Nam, so clanked was he about the idea of someone shooting at him that he ignored the reality that airplanes and mountains are a bad combo.

Yeah, yeah, I know, we can’t dictate market forces. But if OPEC can, we can. Of course we’d only do that if we had confidence in the resilience of the American people and if national security were more important to us than oil company profits. Our homeland security problem is that the American Oil Industry benefits from artificially low prices as much as the Sheiks of Araby, as ex-CIA Mideast specialist Bob Baer points out in Sleeping With the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude, cited today by Salon,“the real war we should be fighting is not in Baghdad.”

Small Minds, not Small Government

Maybe we got it wrong. We thought the Bushies were about small government, but perhaps it was only about their small mandate. Maybe they were fixated on what everyone seems to ignore: without extraordinary measures, they’re unlikely to get more votes than last time. The opportunity the Bin Laden family handed the Bush family was to paralyze our culture so ordinary electoral logic would not apply.

“Lucky me. I hit the trifecta,” Bush told [Mitch] Daniels shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to the budget director.
                         – Miami Herald , Nov. 29, 2001*

These cynical points have been made by smarter people than I. I’m just riffing on the role of our cultural aesthetic and high tolerance of cynicism. The political cynicism we’re seeing is related to the cynicism of public companies and TV evangelists and the media. Our cultural taste no longer reflects the high personal values most of us hold, regardless of our politics. Instead, we’re gripped by the opportunistic economic aesthetics of large groups, where anything goes as long as it increases stock values or electoral votes or collection plate revenues.

1:26:17 AM    

It’s rare when an institutional need meets a personal opportunity so elegantly as the one that’s now open to IT professionals.

About six weeks ago, some of us conceived the idea that the Dean Campaign could enjoy what no organization has ever experienced: IT Nirvana. What would happen, we wondered, if some of the people working on the Americans For Dean project went up to Burlington and did whatever it takes to make the network, the computers and the software run like a Swiss watch. Though we’d never seen it happen, we knew that there was plenty of geekpower available to make it so.

Have you ever seen the flashbacks on West Wing to the early days of the first campaign? Have you ever wanted to put yourself in a position to–just maybe–have a beer or flip a frisbee with the next Toby, Sam, Josh or Donna?

How’d you like to experience the excitement, drama, people and spirit of an historic presidential campaign while it’s still small enough to be personal and fun? If you’re a qualified geek, you may be able to. And as a geek volunteer, you’ll have the gratitude of the people you help, and represent the leading edge of the most important revolution in governance since . . . since . . . well, you pick the last time power moved away from the politicians and toward the people. My answer seems too dramatic.

The Dean Campaign has accepted our proposal from last weekend that Tech volunteers spend a week at a time helping the campaign with its IT needs. Like any organization, the campaign staff needs help with keeping the computers running, the network up, the new Ethernet nodes installed, routers set up, and anti-virus software kept current.

There’s also the kind of stuff that turns crazy employees into happy campers: how do I format this table in Word? How do I create new mailboxes in Outlook? And on & on.

And there’s an army of geeks around the country ready to support you around the clock. Instead of soldiering through some software problem alone, post the issue to the mailing list and see it jumped on by the Dean Tech Dream Team.

Campaign HQ is in Burlington, Vermont on the shores of Lake Champlain. Where would you rather spend a week in August?

Here’s You. There’s the Plate. Step Right Up.

Think of it as an Adventure Camp for IT Pros.

The first two volunteers are invited to arrive in Burlington as early as Sunday, August 3. We’re developing a rotating schedule so that the two volunteers share a motel room near the campaign HQ, arriving Sunday by noon and leaving Sunday afternoon, so the outgoing team can brief the new one.

This is a true volunteer project. The volunteers will pay for their travel, room and board and expenses. You won’t need a car unless you want to see the sights. Heh. Like you’d have time.

10:24:37 AM    

Jason Kottke has a terrific post about a sidewalk stand that increases profits by improving trust.

“Next!” said the coffee & donut man (who I’ll refer to as “Ralph”) from his tiny silver shop-on-wheels, one of many that dot Manhattan on weekday mornings. I stepped up to the window, ordered a glazed donut (75 cents), and when he handed it to me, handed a dollar bill back through the window. Ralph motioned to the pile of change scattered on the counter and hurried on to the next customer, yelling “Next!” over my shoulder. I put the bill down and grabbed a quarter from the pile.

I walked a few steps away and turned around to watch the interaction between this business and its customers. For five minutes, everyone either threw down exact change or made their own change without any notice from Ralph; he was just too busy pouring coffee or retrieving crullers to pay any attention to the money situation.

Ralph probably does lose a little bit of change each day to theft & bad math, but more than makes up for it in other ways. The throughput of that tiny stand is amazing. For comparison’s sake, I staked out two nearby donut & coffee stands and their time spent per customer was almost double that of Ralph’s stand. So, Ralph’s doing roughly twice the business with the same resources. Let’s see Citibank do that.

When an environment of trust is created, good things start happening. Ralph can serve twice as many customers. People get their coffee in half the time. Due to this time savings, people become regulars. Regulars provide Ralph’s business with stability, a good reputation, and with customers who have an interest in making correct change (to keep the line moving and keep Ralph in business). Lots of customers who make correct change increase Ralph’s profit margin. Etc. Etc.

And what did Ralph have to pay for all this? A bit of change here and there.
                         (thanks, Roland!)

Ralph the Coffee & Donut Man has done two things to improve his business. First, he’s put himself at risk rather than the customer (caveat venditor). Whether it’s a hard-headed ROI calculation or a social statement, he’s come out way ahead. Second, he’s changed the character of his relationship with his customers. Instead of insisting on a simultaneous exchange of coffee and cruller for cash, he delivers the goods and ignores the mechanics of the transaction. He’s depending on reliable protocols for the money side of the deal. To his “business logic” (as the consultants call it), the money’s an afterthought.

Many of us, like Roland, see the similarity between the Ralph protocol and the Xpertweb protocol. Once the order’s delivered, the vendor’s free to start on another revenue cycle. Upon delivery, the customer is trusted to pay according to his satisfaction.

In both environments, the delivery and the customer’s response are visible to bystanders, which probably reinforces compliance, but the urge to treat fair work with fair payment is probably genetic, since animals do the same thing.

Trust. You can take it to the bank.

11:13:04 PM    

I’m privileged to be the Senior Lurker and Occasional Contributor to the team that’s building AmericansForDean (A4D)–Zack & Josh and all the rest. After having my open source sensors tuned up at OSCon last week, it’s fascinating to watch these guys re-inventing democracy out in the open.

These truly are the best of times, because our tools have become permission-free. Just as there is no way to stop us from Purchasing the Dean Campaign by buying our own votes, there is also no way any force on earth can keep citizens from giving themselves the tools to contribute money, ideas, talent and shoe leather to the political activity of their choice. A4D is building an open source toolkit. I call it Campaign-in-a-Box (notice that little RSS Feeds widget in the center):

There’s an interesting aspect to all open source tools: These are commodities that, like Google or the ‘Net itself, stop working if passionate people don’t show up each day, as Tim O’Reilly pointed out in his OSCon keynote. You may have all the money in the world, but unless you invest yourself in the results you promise to the world, there’s no there there.

The scarce resource is NOT capital, but rather the ideas and energy to make commodity tools do insanely great things. Once there’s a resource scarcer than capital, are we still practicing capitalism? I’m not sure.

Mistake-based Talent

Different organizations treat mistakes differently. When I flew airplanes for Uncle Sam, we always talked about fuck-ups. They are the raw material for all aviation stories, since aviation is hours of sheer boredom punctuated by moments of stark terror. We all agreed that aviation rules are just a collection of be-nos.

Yeah, be-nos. As in “There’ll be no more of this and there’ll be no more of that.” Every action you take in an airplane is surrounded by the hundred ways you could screw it up with spectacular results. You’re never on course, you’re correcting back to course. You’re never on time, you’re adjusting to make your ETA. And bombs dropped by humans are never right on target.

I saw that kind of approach in my consulting to a couple of university medical departments. Every week, they hold an “M&M”–Morbidity and Mortality Conference about what went wrong the previous week. Doctors talk proactively about mistakes for the same reasons pilots do–their mistakes are so obvious and so significant. Perhaps Dr. Dean will talk about mistakes as well as successes, for how can anyone enjoy success without committing errors?

The same is true for engineers and programmers. Programmers write code and immediately list all the things that are wrong with it. A group of programmers talks about what’s wrong, ways things can be done better and then they go away and do real work to improve performance the next day. Here’s the kind of thinking you get from a programmer:

I did this in perl, and I can probably port the code, but I don’t quite know what
sort of modules are available in php for mail header construction/deconstruction.

I added these notes here:
[URL for the Dev wiki]
Please tell me if I’m way off base here.           
(from an A4D volunteer email just in)

Perfection-based Companies

But that’s not how most companies behave. Companies never tell you what’s wrong, though it’s obvious that things are haywire. Instead they minimize problems and deflect criticism and suggestions. We’ve built a business culture focused so much on appearances that reality is nowhere in sight.

Most corporations only know how to talk in the soothing, humorless monotone of the mission statement, marketing brochure, and your-call-is-important-to-us busy signal. Same old tone, same old lies. No wonder networked markets have no respect for companies unable or unwilling to speak as they do.
                                 — Cluetrain

It should be no surprise that, when a President campaigns as our CEO, his spin can outweigh his facts, causing some people–curmudgeonly sticklers for detail–to mistrust the spin behind the recent hostile takeover bid for a long term, low cost oil lease in the middle east.

Mistake-based Democracy

You don’t collect Internet clues if you’re in denial about your mistakes.

“The clue train stopped there four times a day for ten years and they never took delivery.”
                                 — Veteran of a firm free-falling out of the Fortune 500

There’s a current notion in the body politic that it’s unpatriotic to discuss problems. Finding faults in America is equated with finding fault with the American experiment. Of course that’s just silly. We’re making mistakes every day because this nation is a human enterprise. People with an America–Love It or Leave It bumper sticker apparently can’t live in an imperfect world, preferring to be coddled in some theme park America where you’re surrounded by uncomplaining, politically passive citizens.

Doc writes today about the Dean Meetup he attended last night in Santa Barbara:

The main attraction for the event, from what I gathered from a few conversations, was a pitch passed among friends by email and phone: Maybe Dean has the best chance of dumping Dubya. The assumption seemed to be that Dean was the one Democrat who was not only taking clue train deliveries, but laying as much track as possible. This, of course, is why I’m so interested in what the man and his campaign are up to.

On Tuesday Doc quoted his Cluetrain co-author:

Go back and read what Dr Weinberger says about “management.”

Every company already to one degree or another is a hyperlinked organization, although management may not yet know it.

…(get) out of the way. It’s not your job to create conversations, to create voices. It’s your job to listen to the conversations and voices alread
y there.

The web is remaking business in its image. This is a bottom-up, distributed network of people creating their own loose structure. You’re not in charge anymore. Resist the reflex to reassert your control.

Here’s what’s cool: What’s happening in slow motion to business is happening rapidly to politics. So far the Dean people are taking advantage of the change.

Wow. “What’s happening in slow motion to business is happening rapidly to politics.” And then I got it: Politics is like war, where you improvise within a tactical framework, without the luxury of endless staff meetings.

Unlike past campaigns, Dean’s Campaign Manager Joe Trippi is running one that doesn’t claim to know it all. He acknowledges that he’s learning from the comments posted on the campaign’s blog. The campaign’s bloggers, Zephyr and Matt and Joe and (oh yes) Howard, are having a conversation with their supporters, speaking in a human voice:

Doonesbury Getting Local with Dean Again
I haven’t been linking to every single Dean-focused Doonesbury because there are too many — but I can’t resist this one. Dean supporters organizing with the Get Local tools are featured again.

Technology happens fastest in war and communications technology is happening fast in this campaign. The campaign has built a rapid feedback loop that’s not going to disappear after the election. These donors will be just as demanding of the President they bought as any other donors. And that’s where the A4D network comes in. Remember that widget called RSS Feeds in the network graphic?

It’s a technical breakthrough in campaign organization, a chaordic disruption of party politics, and another genie freed from its bottle. This is a big deal:

• The campaign (or resulting presidency) can’t ignore the comments posted to its own blog
• Interesting comments rise through the Dean sites to reach a broader audience
• More information moves to the campaign than from it
• More initiatives and work get proposed and acted upon from outside the campaign than within

Consider these two comments (of 127 so far) to the blog announcement that former Senator Howard Metzenbaum (Ohio) is supporting Dean. This is the kind of ferment that’s not unusual in 19 minutes of Blog For America comments:

__________________________________________
Hi bloggers etc. –

I have an idea that may sound strange, but I’d like some feedback. We’ve been doing a great job of getting the word out digitally, but I’ve become increasingly convinced that it will be our success outside the digital-world that will define this campaign. The thing that has been so great about this campaign, however, has been our ability to use the internet to do real grass-roots organizing and keep everyone engaged and excited.

I’ve been thinking that we could probably use computers to organize a huge outreach effort by building a one-to-one non-digital action database.

It seems like there are plenty of supporters who would be happy to make a few calls a day or write a few letters a week.

It also seems like we can (as a group) probably identify a number of the people who would like to hear from Dean supporters, (from Democratic mailing lists, friends, family, folks we talk to who want more information but can’t get online).

If we can employ a Database for sharing information about who we should call or write to, then we can be more efficient about using our people-power (letting the people who know a lot of interested people, but don’t have much time, share those contacts with people who have exhausted their personal resources but have plenty of time to help.

I’ve been moved by the effectiveness of the one-to-one campaigning, and since we definitely have the people power we’ve got to use it.

I worry about security problems etc . . . What does everyone think ?

Posted by Anne Bradley at July 17, 2003 04:53 PM
__________________________________________

Response to Anne: Yes, capital idea. Logistically a bit of a problem, and perhaps security a bit of a problem also, but probably not insurmountable. The letter-writing campaign is a great idea, and many hands make light work. Computers might make a distributed mass letter-writing campaign possible.

How about it, Joe? Figure you can ramp it up? Let’s see; if 200,000 people each write one letter a week for six months, that’s 5.2 million letters…for Howard Dean and other Democratic candidates as well. And it’s on the cheap. No number of $2,000 hot dogs could buy it.

No other candidate can offer that level of assistance to state and local central committees.

Posted by Alan Barbour at July 17, 2003 05:12 PM
__________________________________________

“Since we definitely have the people power we’ve got to use it.”

Has that kind of dialogue ever been conducted by anyone but campaign staffers? Have two voters ever designed a letter-writing campaign and ragged on a campaign manager to provide the contact data so they can get out the vote? But it gets better. The campaign staff is surely overwhelmed with the mechanics of the campaign. Will they be able to respond to Anne and Alan’s initiative? It’s not certain.

Has a campaign ever enjoyed the resources represented by A4D and thousands of other experts who consider it their obligation to manage data on behalf of the campaign? Experts with the means to design the data base, the User Interface, and acquire the data for their fellow voters to write letters and to report which letters have been sent and which calls made?

How does a conventional campaign, no matter how rich, respond to such passion? It’s a big challenge in a world where passion and smarts is the apparent successor to capital as the dominant force in our economy.

10:20:03 PM    comment [commentCounter (177)]

On 7/15/03 at 1403 EDT, the DeanTechTeam made its first support call.

[Q: How do you start up in OS 9 rather than OS X? A: hold down the option key.]

What’s the DeanTechTeam you ask? It includes everyone who:

• Has above average computer and Internet skills
• Wants to meet her neighbors
• Wants to help his neighbors with computer issues (hey, we all got issues!)
• Wants to show that Howard is people-powered, not spin-powered
• Has registered as a DeanTechTeam support staff

How the DeanTechTeam works

A DeanTechTeam volunteer puts the word out that s/he’s available for free tech support.

Here’s an idea for a flyer:

When contacted, the DeanTechTeamMate starts solving the tech problem, without boring their neighbor about why they’re doing it. If they make a house call, they wear a Dean button, perhaps a special DeanTechTeam button. (Yeah, we know. House calls raise liability issues. Evil people are everywhere. Fear everything. Do nothing. Rely on authorities. Let’s all stay home and watch TV. Don’t skip the commercials.)

The message is that process is more important than ideology. We’re not here to lobby you because there’s already too much lobbying (33 lobbyists for every member of congress). Instead, let’s just do something useful. We’re happy to be helpful.

3:24:18 PM    

It’s not confusing to most folks, but it bothers me a lot. The conventional wisdom is that we’ve got the best of all worlds–freedom to innovate and be a winner, in a free-market orgy of talent and capital and consumers. The only problem with the dance is that it’s so hard to find anybody that’s actually made it work for them. Even those who seem to have it made will–with little prompting–spill out a tangled web of possessions and obligations and stresses that are suffocating them. And for most of the few who have made it without an ulcer or a coronary, there’s been a lot of history that they don’t want their kids at boarding school to know much about.

Managerial Capitalism – the Rule of Meritocracy

Free-market capitalism is neither aristocracy or democracy. Its special “ocracy” is meritocracy – those who are most able rise to the top of the pecking orders of multi-national corporations and their management teams, not determined by any static biases of family, ethnicity, national origin or even gender. But the lack of those perceptible biases doesn’t mean there’s a lack of bias. The bias is for a special blend of intelligence and energy called merit. Most of the significant wealth is managed by corporations which need a steady supply of hungry young tigers with big brains and bigger egos to attack markets and destroy competition and launch killer products to conquer market segments. It sounds as brutal as feudalism. The expendable foot soldiers of these campaigns are people from the same social classes as those who rise to the top. The difference may be in their genes–their hearts don’t seem to be in the unending fight–and at some level they know they’re expendable as soon as a wave of re-engineering or acquisition dictates. There’s been a steady increase in the level of commitment, intelligence, energy, ambition and ruthlessness required to rise to the top of any corporation, so the few who make it are reaping greater rewards compared to the people who fight in the trenches. And that’s why they’re in the game.

Money, not nobility, is the only way to differentiate oneself from the run-of-the-mill. The stock market wealth engine has reduced the process to a formula: Own stock or options in a company; build the company (perhaps from scratch); buy another company or be bought out; own stock and be perceived as instrumental in building the new organization; buy another company or be bought out… That process builds the winner’s web of wealth. Stock is never given out of generosity, so folks who don’t negotiate hard have a more constrained web of wealth. If they are downsized, they are separated from their web of wealth, perhaps before they have any significant bit of other people’s productivity.

Meritocracy’s profound, counter-genetic shift

Historically, those chieftains who were woven into a web of wealth maintained a web of support for the many whose productivity they laid claim to. In our time, technology means that more productivity does not mean more workers. The genetically based contract – that the powerful protect the weak in exchange for their productivity – has broken down. It would never occur to a king or noble (or silver-backed gorilla) to estrange a loyal and hard working serf simply because there were harder-working serfs. This all changed with the pervasive application of the Net Present Value calculation.

With no alternative in sight and general agreement that capitalism won the battle of the isms, no one seems to see any alternative but to keep carrying a heavier load each year, like the farmer carrying a calf around each day until he falls under an unsupportable load of bull.

Perhaps this is not the final system. Perhaps there’s life after meritocracy, especially when one observes that the products and services produced by the meritocrats are not always satisfactory. Just because these hard-charging companies are defeating each other in the market doesn’t mean they’re winning customers’ hearts and minds. There’s something about large organizations which squanders most of the participants’ time and energy in producing motion rather than progress. Too often, they seem as competitive with customers as they are with competitors, designing byzantine structures to lock a customer into a complex dependency when all the customer wanted to do was surf the net or call home.

Some day we may discover that our suspicions were correct, that, during the years surrounding the beginning of the third millennium, only 10% of our efforts were producing value but we were going crazy with the cultural and economic myths surrounding that 10% of our effort. All it took was to change the work protocols slightly and people once again were able to turn most of that wasted 90% into a real life.

I believe that Xpertweb provides those protocols, but we shall see.

The Tyranny of Net Present Value

All capitalism is based on a single strategic algorithm: calculating the Net Present Value (NPV) of a series of expected cash flows by discounting each cash flow (cf) by a percentage (discountRate) over time:

NPV=cf1*(1-1*discountRate)+cf2*(1-2*discountRate)+…cfn*(1-n*discountRate)

Why would this dry formula be so important to every one of us?

The NPV calculation lies at the center of all resource allocation decisions

You may resent it, but all your economic possibilities are defined and constrained by this simple calculation buried in the computers of people you will never meet. It is what they are talking about when people say “Follow the money.”

The greatest civilization in the history of civilization has been reduced to this single formula. If in the beginning was the Word, then in the end there’s only the Net Present Value formula. With it, managers and financiers and governments and pension plans compare any set of cash flows to any other set. Then they sell the lower one and purchase the higher one. Even though it ignores the sweep and drama of the rise of civilization, it’s a democratic yardstick. It’s also the basis of meritocracy.

It is the process of “capitalizing” every cash flow, whether it’s an inflow (customer payments and collections, bond yields, corporate earnings) or an outflow (employee salaries and benefits, supplier payables, social security payments). Corporate managements have an uneven track record in growing their revenues but they are masters at reducing their expenses and making optimistic forward-looking statements. A company’s stock market valuation is some multiple of forecast earnings. To increase the value of the shareholders’ (i.e., management’s) stock holdings and options, the best strategy is to reduce expenses, which appears to instantly increase earnings. As available capital exploded in the 20th century, every discernible cash flow opportunity in the economy showed up on someone’s radar screen and was targeted for assimilation or annihilation, whe
ther it’s mom & pop retail sales in rural Arkansas (a Wal-Mart opportunity) or a 48 year-old engineer at Chevrolet (a GM expense).

The logic of meritocracy says that an engineer may be a star at 27 but a liability at 48. This is the basis of the pervasive, subconscious grievance against meritocracy, even when it’s not framed in those terms. The conventional wisdom of the age is that everyone needs to re-train themselves on a moment’s notice to become a software programmer or help line staffer or home health care specialist.

The question is, what is the obligation of an economy to consider and support the preferences of the majority of its participants? Naturally, the “moving hand” school of thought is that the market economy is driving all these choices, and complaining about it is unreasonable, as G.B. Shaw pointed out. Even if individuals can adapt as quickly as proposed and remain employable, they are repeatedly separated from their last company’s web of support and their only opportunity for a web of wealth–often, it’s obvious, by intention.

I have no answers for the meritocracy dilemma, but it’s obvious we have an economy that freezes out most of its participants. The resentment’s not boiling, but it’s building. That inequality has been embraced and extended by most decision makers in our government, and they seem to think it can go on forever without repercussions.

We shall see.
12:16:59 AM