Planning, Startups, Stories

Announcing the Energy Climate Era: Hot, Flat, Crowded

The buzz is growing very fast on what might have been the keynote speech at the Aspen Ideas Festival last week. I picked it up at Huffington Post, in a post titled Thomas Friedman Calls for Green Revolution. Here's the lead: 

At the Aspen Ideas Festival Thursday, New York Times columnist and The World Is Flat author Thomas Friedman gave a preview of his new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded: Why We Need a Green Revolution — and How It Can Renew America, which comes out in September. The book's main argument is that the convergence of global warming, global flattening (the rise of middle classes all over the world), and global crowding (the population boom) is driving five key trends that will define the 21st century.

Friedman argues that those five trends — energy and resource supply and demand, petro-dictatorship, biodiversity loss, climate change, and energy poverty — have all been driven past a tipping point such that they have created a new era of history: the energy climate era.

I heard second hand, from someone who was there, that all the buzz was about that speech. The summary on Huffington today includes three short videos you'll want to see. Here's the link again: Tom Friedman Calls For Green Revolution.

Picturing Excess. Imagining Unimaginable Numbers.

Statistics. Picturing large numbers. Communicating numbers. Some of the numbers in this 11-minute talk are just amazing. He asks: "have we lost our sense of outrage?"

If the video here doesn't show up -- technical details -- the link is Picturing Excess. Or, alternatively, here is the video, from Chris Jordan, speaking at TED.

Google, Zen Master of the Market

In today's New York Times, Steve Lohr writes:

"Google’s market power, it seems, is the economic equivalent of what in foreign affairs is called ‘soft power,’ a term coined by the political scientist Joseph S. Nye Jr. This is the power to co-opt rather than coerce."

That's in an analysis titled Google, Zen Master of the Market. Comparing Google's market success to Microsoft's, and then looking at possible antitrust implications, the piece starts with Microsoft and how Microsoft rode to power:

Microsoft was a master practitioner of “network effects,” the straightforward precept in economics that the value of a product or service often goes up as more people use it. There is nothing new about the concept. It was true of railways, telephones and fax machines, for example.

Microsoft, however, applied the power of network effects more lucratively than any company had done before it.

In context, he's talking about how in computers and software, you build the platform that everybody uses, and the world follows the bandwagon. DOS and Windows, then third-party software development, and then the whole world.

Google, in taking over the Internet like Microsoft took over the PC, is working in new ways in a new world, but also building on network effects.

Michael A. Cusumano, a professor at the Sloan School of Management at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, sees the difference in terms of what he calls “direct network effects” and “indirect network effects.” The direct effects, he says, include software document formats and technology standards that are owned by one company and that are incompatible with a rival’s technology. The indirect effects, he adds, include large numbers of users, the ability to learn from those users, the power of a well-known brand and user inertia.

“For Google,” Mr. Cusumano said, “the indirect network effects are very powerful.”

Google, however, has learned from Microsoft, and is managing the potential antitrust implications skillfully. U.S. law generally looks at antitrust as having 70 percent of a market. Google has more than 60 percent of the search market and about 70 percent of the search ad market.

Still, dominance alone is not an antitrust problem. The issue is the powerful company’s behavior, says Andrew I. Gavil, a professor at the Howard University School of Law. “You have to be big and bad, not just big,” he said.

That's Google, Zen Master of the Market. It's a good read.

George Carlin's Last Interview

I always liked George Carlin, even if not every routine he ever had. I liked his off-kilter anti-establishment viewpoint. I think the world, and especially our world in the United States, needs dissenters. And it needs good writers. So I'm very sorry to see him go.

Brian Clark at Copyblogger posted George Carlin on Writing, with a couple of good quotes from the much longer post George Carlin's Last Interview on Psychology Today Blogs. Here's one of the three Brian included:

“One of the voguish terms, which is so repellant to me, 'thinking outside the box.' To settle for that kind of language is embarrassing. But that’s a very useful picture. I try to come in through the side door, the side window, to come in from a direction they’re not expecting, to see something in a different way.”

Here's the link to the interview on Psychology Today.

The World as We Know It

To me it's creepy when doom and gloom predictions of a generation ago are obviously coming true today. This TED talk (if you don't see the video below, you can click here for the source site) by Alicia Miller is an articulate and very visual reminder of how badly our U.S. news reflects the rest of the world. When I was in grad school for Journalism 37 years ago, experts were talking about how, if trends continued, news coverage would grow steadily thinner and more provincial.

And here we are today, with this TED talk showing us how news coverage is very thin and very provincial.

Who is "Small Business Owners?"

Pardon me, but there is no "small business owners" group. We, the people who run the so-called "small" businesses, are a bunch of wildly diverse people with very little in common. We don't vote as a block, we don't do things as a block, and we don't think as a block. As a matter of fact, I'll bet we're more diverse than most of the artificial groups that pollsters glue together.

In recent news:

San Francisco May 27, 2008 Small business owner optimism continues on a five-quarter decline, according to the recent Wells Fargo/Gallup Small Business Index (Index) survey conducted in April. The Index score dropped to 48, the lowest level reported since the surveys inception in August 2003, when the score was 69. The most recent results represent a 35-point drop from the previous survey in January 2008, and a 66-point drop from the Index's highest score of 114 in December 2006.

This is interesting news, but hardly surprising. And, getting to the point of this post, I'd bet you could poll any group -- home owners, adults, butchers, bakers, left-handed gardeners, renters, automobile owners, college students, retired people -- and get roughly the same outcome.

I enjoy the use of language too. Did you notice in this press release that it isn't pessimism increasing, but rather optimism declining?

For about six months now I've been trying to post on a small business angle to the 2008 presidential race, but I just don't see how small business owners come together as a group on anything. Who is the small business candidate, now that the race is down to two main candidates: Barack Obama or John McCain? I don't think their politics or your business ownership dictates that. I think small business owners vote like anybody else, according to their very distinct and heterogeneous views of the world. 

For example, most of the pundits seem to assume that small business owners are against taxes and spending, against any law regulating the relationship with employees, and against any increase in minimum wages. Do you think that's true? I don't. I think the politics of any specific small business owner depends a lot more on her politics than on her business.

I'm a small business owner, and my optimism or pessimism, and my politics, aren't a function of my business; it's about who I am, and what I think, and how I vote. And I don't vote for my business; I vote for myself. From what I've seen in more than 30 years as a business owner, other owners do the same thing.

I think we are not a group. We don't have group opinions, or group politics. We are a lot of individuals. What do you think?

(note: I posted this a few hours ago on Small Business Trends. I'm reposting it here on this blog for my subscribers' convenience.) 

Turning Green from Overuse

A picture from Spain. The caption says "so natural that even the bottle is green." OK, here we go ... green goes the way of "user friendly," or "lite" or "all natural;" tired, overused words and phrases, so diluted they end up meaning nothing. So who isn't green? Who isn't natural?

Memorial Day, Draft Lottery, Reality TV, Flags

I woke up yesterday in Portland (OR), in a condo near the top of W. Burnside. The area has a series of cemeteries, dark green rolling hills, breaking up the otherwise thick forested landscape. It had rained all night, so there was a thick mist cushioning the quiet hills. It was early Sunday of Memorial Day weekend, not a lot of cars around, very quiet. Through the mist I could see the U.S. flags dotting the graves on the hills. Random patterns. A lot of the graves have flags today.

Later in the day we drove by, commented on the flags. How many from this century, Afghanistan, Iraq? Hard to tell. They'd be so young, somebody said.

Whether they died in 1943, or 1969, or 2007, they were all so young.

Switch to reality television. 1969. The draft lottery. They put the 366 possible days of the year in transparent plastic eggs, one each for each possible birthday. The put them all into a giant transparent barrel like we see in lotteries these days. They spun the wheel. They drew a date. Those of us born on that date got a number.

My number was 243. I didn't get drafted. I didn't go to Vietnam.

By 1969, most of us opposed the Vietnam war. We talked about what we'd do if drafted. Al became a conscientious objector, emptied bedpans for two years. I was engaged to be married, but that was not going to get me out of the war. But a January birth date did.

It turned out later that somebody did a statistical analysis on the draft lottery and the dates. They started on January 1 and threw them in from there day-by-day to December 31. The later birthdays tended to be on top. Or so I read later.

But we didn't oppose the people, our peers, who fought. Whether it was their choice, or not.

Few in my generation chose to go to war. One who did, who graduated with me from Notre Dame, chose ROTC. Traveling around Europe, he collected military paraphernalia. His father was in the army. His grandfather had been in the army. He volunteered to be a helicopter pilot, and he died in Vietnam. In his helicopter. We weren't that close, I heard about it later. My memories of him are of a 20-year-old kid having a wonderful time during a year in college abroad, laughing, drinking Austrian beer, learning; as alive as any memory could be. What a terrible loss.

Memorial Day, patriotism, flags, wars. Protests, anti-war, opposition. Memorial Day isn't about war, or politics, or patriotism, or whatever might be the opposite of patriotism. It's definitely not about flags. It's about young people who died, and the people left behind who loved them. And all the people who endured it, risked their lives, went through the hell of it, for whatever reasons.

I lucked out. I won the reality TV of the last half century, the 1969 draft lottery. And I thank God for that. And honor and respect the ones who went, for whatever reasons. And hope that we can end the present war without causing chaos, and more death and suffering; and that we never fight another war again.

Politics, Advertising, Magic

As I start my rainy Western Oregon day today, cup of coffee in hand, I checked Facebook -- not my normal behavior, but one of my daughters mentioned she'd commented on a picture I posted -- and there was Barack Obama on the front page.

Today is our deadline, in Oregon, for voting. We all vote by mail. Today at 8 pm is our deadline. Most of us have already dropped the ballot in the mail. I tossed my ballot into the downtown drop box yesterday evening.

To me that's another reminder of how cool the Web is, how much we can target our ads if we're really doing it right. For those of you who grew up with the Internet, you have to realize that just a couple decades ago advertising was like fishing. We had to choose the medium, make the ad, and then hope. Like throwing a line in the water. And we rarely got to know. The waters were murky.

Contrast that with this ad. First, it knows I'm in Oregon. Second, it knows today is our deadline. Third, it knows I'm likely to vote for Barack because I've identified my politics (part of the Facebook profile).

Living in the times we do, we suffer the down side of it all, the war, global warming, tough times. At least we should occasionally step back and enjoy the magic of it too. And this, the ability to tailor an ad that exactly to the audience, is magic.

Lies We Tell Kids

Paul Graham's May essay is Lies We Tell Kids.

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

There may also be a benefit to us. We were all lied to as kids, and some of the lies we were told still affect us. So by studying the ways adults lie to kids, we may be able to clear our heads of lies we were told.

Interesting. It's a long, thoughtful essay.