General Motors, perhaps the greatest symbol of American manufacturing and business, filed for bankruptcy this morning amid a firestorm of massive debt, union disagreements, federal bailouts and gross mismanagement. A company whose stock was once synonymous with risk-free investing has vanished from the Dow Jones Industrial Average, its shining blue and chrome nameplate now tarnished, hanging crooked above the wreckage of a vacant factory in middle America. In many ways, a bittersweet victory for the grand theory of systemicide.
It seems fitting on this occasion of corporate failure to release to the world the Systemicide principles of un-management: a manifesto of business that casts aside traditional notions of order and hierachy in favor of an organic, natural, and reasonable code of human productivity that reflects a desire to create a happy, sustainable, and hyper-productive workplace.
- Divide the work calendar into manageable chunks.
People like university schedules because they are comprised of finite units with tangible outcomes and a foreseeable ending. Upon completion, they know that they will have sufficient leisure time to recharge their intellectual curiosity, to reflect upon what they have learned, and to celebrate other, often more social, aspects of their lives. This seems to create an environment where people are motivated to produce interesting and useful work, where they can see the rewards of that work, and where those rewards are directly tied to the quality that work. If a student finishes a particularly difficult semester and is rewarded with exemplary marks, the positive reinforcement is immediate and gratifying. The student will take the skills and strategies learned during that semester and identify ways to leverage them toward further success. Conversely, a student whose grades have suffered because of faulty or inefficient strategies is likely to identify the causes of poor performance and work to improve them in the future. This assumes, of course, that the student is interested in receiving the reward of good grades. Though this may not always be the case in a university setting, when we replace academic success in the form of grades with financial success in the form of monetary compensation, we find that the person in question will almost always be interested in the reward.
Why the business community has chosen to abandon this construct in favor of a never-ending cycle of homogeneous toil makes little sense to the manager interested in maximizing the potential and sustainability of his employees' efforts. Just like a university schedule, the business calendar should be divided into manageable chunks with substantial scheduled leisure time between them. While the exact structure of the calendar will undoubtedly vary based on the type of enterprise, the ideal structure is four quarters with at least two weeks of time off between them. While the thought of giving employees eight weeks off will cause most American managers' heads to explode, I'd be willing to bet that such a schedule would yield more productivity than the traditional American schedule. With strategic goals set for each quarter, projects that require completion within specific timeframes, and evaluations at the conclusion of each time chunk, employees are naturally incentivized to work hard, meet deadlines, and care about performance.
- Pay for performance, not time.
This one seems so simple, and yet it may be the most grossly misunderstood principle of productivity. If you pay people for time, the are naturally inclined to work slower. This lowers the effort they need o expend while at the same time increasing the amount of compensation they receive. Creating a system that rewards employees for producing less lowers profits, bores employees, stagnates growth, and stifles innovation.
This doesn't mean that employees need to be paid like contract workers who receive compensation only when they finish a project - that arrangement may encourage employees to rush through projects in order to buy groceries for the week, degrading the quality of the finished product even if more projects are accomplished in a given time. It simply means that you let employees go home when they're done. In almost all work situations, some days are lighter than others. Making employees stay until an arbitrary time won't increase productivity. More often than not, peer pressure will dictate when employees head home anyways. A focused, productive, and efficient day of work should be rewarded with an early dismissal, not penalized by an arbitrary chronology. Creating a culture where work is done in teams will serve to organically eliminate slackers, or at least to highlight their incompetence. When they make themselves visible, under-performers should be fired immediately. No performance, no pay.
- Incentivize ownership and reward success
The more connected people feel to their work, the better their work will be. Whenever possible, give employees the chance to take ownership over a task or project. In particular, allow junior employees to take leadership positions on projects that include senior employees. This serves several distinct purposes. First, it encourages junior employees to work hard because they won't want to appear incompetent in front of their higher-ups. Second, it gives the most talented employees a chance to separate themselves from the pack organically, without the divisive and poisonous effects of traditional hierarchical promotion. Third, it forces managers and senior employees to understand the strengths and weaknesses of junior team members, allows them to leverage their experience at all levels of the organization, and fosters an environment in which everyone, regardless of rank, is continually pushed to improve their skills. Lastly, it allows young, ambitious employees to feel as if every project is a new chance for success. Those who take ownership of projects that turn out to be exceptionally successful should be rewarded financially, optimally with a fixed percentage of revenue generated by their work. Rewarding success with money is important, but the reward must be directly proportional to success. Adherence to that simple rule of bonuses might have saved more than one Wall Street hegemon.
- Don't fight the seasons.
Despite a highly-technical and impeccably-engineered work space, and despite America's insistence on an anti-natural economy, humans are fundamentally affected by the seasons. Daylight savings time was a step in the right direction, but businesses can do even more to reflect these seasonal changes to keep their employees happy and productive. Shifting hours back in the winter time and forward in the summer (say starting at 10:30 in the dead of winter and 6:30 in the heat of summer)makes perfect sense from a physiological standpoint. Before the advent of the industrial revolution, this took place naturally - the sunrise would dictate the start of the work day. Recreating this cycle attaches people to the natural world, allows them to spend daylight hours with their friends and families when the weather is nice, and breaks up the mental drudgery that and monotonous delirium that accompanies most corporate schedules.
The type of work being done can also be segmented by season. Save the more clerical, dense, and grind-it-out tasks for the winter, when distractions are fewer, and utilize the spring and summer months for the more creative, innovative, and hands-on projects. Strategy and planning are best held off until the fall, when the days get shorter and humans are naturally prone to prudence and practicality. The human animal has been around much longer than the modern workplace, so why not change the latter to suit the former, instead of trying to reverse three million years of evolution?
- Engage and leverage your employees' other interests.
This doesn't mean simply encouraging them to read books in their free time, nor does it mean that blatantly unrelated tasks should be tolerated during work. Instead, employees should be prompted to find ways their outside interests can be related to their professional lives. Is World of Warcraft related to Financial Accounting? Probably not. But the expansion of virtual communities like W.O.W. and the market for virtual goods certainly is. How do we calculate inventory of virtual goods? What happens to the cash cycle when no physical product exists? Is computer software an asset, or a cost? And how does one calculate the liability of a flaming lava sword?
Even if they appear unrelated to core products or services, employees' interests can provide new and refreshing contexts within which to explore concepts and ideas that an organization encounters every day. Whether it's W.O.W., whitewater kayaking, knitting, or fiction writing, chances are there's a lesson or mantra that can be applied to whatever business you're in.
Ask employees to think about and look for these connections, however vague they may seem, and encourage them to present these 'case studies' of sorts, to their employees. Aside from getting them to think outside the box, it encourages team bonding and can be a nice way to break up a busy work week. And talking about what makes them happy makes people happy.
- Don't confuse ability with experience.
One is learned, one is innate. It's impossible to say which is more important, and valuable arguments can be made in favor of either. But they are distinct traits to be recognized and separated when possible. In sports, the difference between the two is easy to recognize. Sometimes a young superstar will blaze past an experienced defender on his way to the goal, or the endzone, or the basket. Other times, the experienced defender will take a better angle, or make a craftier play, and nullify the superior ability of his younger counterpart. Millions of examples of both instances exist. The winner is determined by circumstance, the equalizer. In business, the two are sometimes harder to differentiate. Experience can be the key to crafting a successful, stable deal, or finishing a project on time and on budget. Or it can be the blinders that prevent a manager from seeing the new and innovative methods his competitors are employing. Ability can be the incalculable intangible that pushes an stagnant company into the stratosphere, or it can be the hubris than plunges as sustainable one into debt.
The important thing is to realize that past experience doesn't always translate into future success, just as inexperience doesn't necessarily translate into certain failure. As with the sports, the results are largely situational. But remember, ability only gets experience when given the chance.
In retrospect, perhaps GM should have relied a little more on ability and a little less on experience. In the end, reliance on the tried and true formula turned out to be its failure. And as with the banks, it has taken a crisis to get the machine to stop moving long enough to assess its overall health. This is why the system is prone to crisis. Predisposed to catastrophe. Predestined to period failure. The successful and sustainable business of the future must take the time to pump the brakes and change the oil every few months. Just like the natural world in which it exists, it must recognize that seasons come and go, that cycles begin and end, and that value is neither created nor destroyed, but simply changes form.
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Showing posts with label environment. Show all posts
Monday, June 1, 2009
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
To Retrofit or Rebuild
In 1960, there were slightly more than three billion people living on planet Earth. In less than fifty years, that population has more than doubled. The size of the Earth and its bank of resources, of course, has not experienced such remarkable growth. This fundamental conundrum presents our species with a challenge that would doom any other creature we know of to population decline and near-certain extinction: too many people, not enough food.
Yet because our species has been given the power of the rational mind and the ability to anticipate the future we may be able to accomplish in the impossible, turn back the clock on our collective doom, and salvage a pattern of existence for our species that is communal, sustainable, and healthy. The key word, however, is may. Our planet is wounded, the victim of an overaggressive carnivore species who has battered its fragile systems, the offenses myriad and scattered like so many bits of destructive shrapnel. Each of these wounds, the isolated environmental abuses we see mounting in size and scope each day, deserve our dedication attention. But as with a slashed artery, attending to these before stopping the bleeding seems to skip past unwise toward downright foolish.
The task is, by nature, too broad, too basic, too general. It will not be accomplished by traditional means, must not be approached as other problems have been, for one simple reason. The methods we have of solving international dilemmas – depression, world war, nuclear standoff, genocide – are incompatible with the environmental emergency we face today. The basis for international law and regulation, the basis from which we derive a system of global capitalization, and the basis for most of our social institutions (perhaps with the interesting exception of spiritual ones) is predicated on a paradigm of exploitation, use-value, and profit. These institutions and practices not only encourage environmental degradation; they cannot survive without it. How can we solve problems from within the very system that mandated their existence?
This view does not mean that the entire system of regulation, distribution, and domination must be torn down in some sort of grand expression of rebellious anarchy, nor does it mean that such measure are entirely unwarranted. Everything that can be done from within must be tried, and with haste. But it must be understood that ultimately these solutions will fail unless they are overwhelmed in the reasonably near future by a shift in mindset that transcends all systems of power and classification, be they monetary, national, racial, gendered, or otherwise. There are ways to make the current system more efficient, but as with retrofitting and existing building or machine, nothing can replace that gains to be made by rethinking the entire process from the ground up. What follows is an examination of some of the most successful attempts at piecemeal reform, what I’ll call retrofitting capitalism, and a few ideas for how to start fresh where and when we get the chance, called building a new humanism.
Retrofitting Capitalism
There are several successful examples of how to make capitalism less detrimental to the environment or how to use market principles to mitigate the destruction. While some are more successful than others, they provide insight into the type of reform necessary in the short term as we struggle to shift toward a sustainable human lifestyle.
The first and perhaps most appealing is the internalizing of externalities, most notably in the form of a carbon tax but extending to other reforms like higher tariffs on imports and more emphasis on transportation expenses passed on to the consumer. Because capitalism essentially fails to compute the worth of natural resources, the price point of the goods they are used for rarely reflects their actual human value. Not only does this encourage exploitation of resources at a grand scale, it promotes processes that create waste, what businessman Ray Anderson calls “throughput” – that portion of resources which is used but creates no value. Internalizing the cost of this throughput would mean higher production costs and higher prices at the purchase point – a boon to the consumer and producer alike. But as profits decrease capitalism can become our ally; firms will find ways to become more efficient and waste less or they will perish, victims of perfect competition. As the European Union’s carbon taxes and trading programs extend in scope and size, businesses are become increasingly aware of their CO2 emissions, as they would be any other increase in total costs. While the system has been only mildly successful at achieving significant reductions in total emissions (more credits have been allocated than necessary) , the ability to implement and enforce a such a system has been effectively proven. Excellent results are certainly possible within this approach, but they will be dependent still on the ability of the market to police itself through government regulation and enforcement. While providing the possibility for immediate reforms the ultimate effectiveness of the a cap and trade system is inherently limited because it seeks only to curtail current practices and makes little effort to create new ones. We must, wherever possible, strive to create change that is holistic and interdisciplinary, making new roads instead of retooling old ones.
Building a New Humanism
When we are presented with opportunities redefine the way we live in the world as a set of sustainable relationships with our environments and each other, we must understand how large and valuable the opportunities for wholesale change in lifestyle and process can be. We are given few chances to start fresh and must capitalize on them if we want a noticeable redemption of the natural environment.
The physical construction of new buildings, communities, and cities is perhaps the most obvious arena to enact these kinds of wholesale change, and yet it may also be the most effective and important way to begin a larger movement. As demographics continue to shift toward urban living arrangements and populations continue to grow, the way we structure our built spaces will have enormous repercussions for our physical and social patterns of behavior, our mental and spiritual relationship with the natural environment, and the size and type of impression our species leaves on the planet with each passing generation. If we can structure our living spaces to reflect a worldview and lifestyle that is sustainable, healthy, and integrated with our natural surroundings, the results can be enormous. The concept, though it may sound flighty and optimistic, is far from abstract.
The technology exists to create buildings that not only do less harm to the environment, but none at all. In fact, we have found the techniques to build homes and offices that actually create energy surpluses that can be fed back into the main grid. Greenhouse and hydroponic technology allows the cultivation of produce at latitudes and seasons previously unconscionable. A wide of array of environmentally friendly products and services are now available for construction and development projects, their costs decreasing every day. In simple terms, the opportunity for a sustainable future is on the table in front of us, we must use every tool we can find to make it a reality.
New buildings alone will not be enough – of that much we can be certain. By structuring built environments in ways that promote community, activity, and connection with natural elements, however, we can hope to move beyond physical change to social change. Imagine an inner city neighborhood in Calcutta or Hong Kong or New York. Imagine the same city with buildings that allow light to filter into the street, a park every two blocks, a solar bank and turbine on every roof next to a community garden. Imagine a passive heating and cooling system that allows fresh air naturally into the buildings’ corridors and common areas. Imagine terraces with plants, wide streets with bike lanes and a zero-emissions system of public transit, and imagine universal access to the rivers, lakes, parks, and shorefronts that a sustainable lifestyle values and protects. These are changes that can be made now, with each new building and community we construct. To choose otherwise – and make no mistake, it is our choice – is a fatal mistake.
We have reached a precipice, a point from which we can see two options and must decide for ourselves. We have the resources, the technology, and reasonable judgment to envision, plan, design, and build a new humanism that puts people ahead of profit, understands that nature and man will always be intrinsically linked, and pursues new and innovation solutions to complex problems. So far, however, we have chosen to follow a path that leads to expanding, accelerating destruction of the natural environment for capital gains – a pursuit of more for more’s sake that is fundamentally opposed to the reality of a finite planet. We can re-tool it, retrofit it, and slow it down with regulation, enforcement, subsidies, and the like. Yet until we are able to change our the pattern of our collective human habits, to realize the fundamentally integrated functioning of our species and its reliance on natural systems, we will be unable to rule out a catastrophic collapse, and eventually, extinction. If we are to survive, we must say goodbye to René Descartes, reconnecting the mind to the body and the body to the earth, once and for all.
Yet because our species has been given the power of the rational mind and the ability to anticipate the future we may be able to accomplish in the impossible, turn back the clock on our collective doom, and salvage a pattern of existence for our species that is communal, sustainable, and healthy. The key word, however, is may. Our planet is wounded, the victim of an overaggressive carnivore species who has battered its fragile systems, the offenses myriad and scattered like so many bits of destructive shrapnel. Each of these wounds, the isolated environmental abuses we see mounting in size and scope each day, deserve our dedication attention. But as with a slashed artery, attending to these before stopping the bleeding seems to skip past unwise toward downright foolish.
The task is, by nature, too broad, too basic, too general. It will not be accomplished by traditional means, must not be approached as other problems have been, for one simple reason. The methods we have of solving international dilemmas – depression, world war, nuclear standoff, genocide – are incompatible with the environmental emergency we face today. The basis for international law and regulation, the basis from which we derive a system of global capitalization, and the basis for most of our social institutions (perhaps with the interesting exception of spiritual ones) is predicated on a paradigm of exploitation, use-value, and profit. These institutions and practices not only encourage environmental degradation; they cannot survive without it. How can we solve problems from within the very system that mandated their existence?
This view does not mean that the entire system of regulation, distribution, and domination must be torn down in some sort of grand expression of rebellious anarchy, nor does it mean that such measure are entirely unwarranted. Everything that can be done from within must be tried, and with haste. But it must be understood that ultimately these solutions will fail unless they are overwhelmed in the reasonably near future by a shift in mindset that transcends all systems of power and classification, be they monetary, national, racial, gendered, or otherwise. There are ways to make the current system more efficient, but as with retrofitting and existing building or machine, nothing can replace that gains to be made by rethinking the entire process from the ground up. What follows is an examination of some of the most successful attempts at piecemeal reform, what I’ll call retrofitting capitalism, and a few ideas for how to start fresh where and when we get the chance, called building a new humanism.
Retrofitting Capitalism
There are several successful examples of how to make capitalism less detrimental to the environment or how to use market principles to mitigate the destruction. While some are more successful than others, they provide insight into the type of reform necessary in the short term as we struggle to shift toward a sustainable human lifestyle.
The first and perhaps most appealing is the internalizing of externalities, most notably in the form of a carbon tax but extending to other reforms like higher tariffs on imports and more emphasis on transportation expenses passed on to the consumer. Because capitalism essentially fails to compute the worth of natural resources, the price point of the goods they are used for rarely reflects their actual human value. Not only does this encourage exploitation of resources at a grand scale, it promotes processes that create waste, what businessman Ray Anderson calls “throughput” – that portion of resources which is used but creates no value. Internalizing the cost of this throughput would mean higher production costs and higher prices at the purchase point – a boon to the consumer and producer alike. But as profits decrease capitalism can become our ally; firms will find ways to become more efficient and waste less or they will perish, victims of perfect competition. As the European Union’s carbon taxes and trading programs extend in scope and size, businesses are become increasingly aware of their CO2 emissions, as they would be any other increase in total costs. While the system has been only mildly successful at achieving significant reductions in total emissions (more credits have been allocated than necessary) , the ability to implement and enforce a such a system has been effectively proven. Excellent results are certainly possible within this approach, but they will be dependent still on the ability of the market to police itself through government regulation and enforcement. While providing the possibility for immediate reforms the ultimate effectiveness of the a cap and trade system is inherently limited because it seeks only to curtail current practices and makes little effort to create new ones. We must, wherever possible, strive to create change that is holistic and interdisciplinary, making new roads instead of retooling old ones.
Building a New Humanism
When we are presented with opportunities redefine the way we live in the world as a set of sustainable relationships with our environments and each other, we must understand how large and valuable the opportunities for wholesale change in lifestyle and process can be. We are given few chances to start fresh and must capitalize on them if we want a noticeable redemption of the natural environment.
The physical construction of new buildings, communities, and cities is perhaps the most obvious arena to enact these kinds of wholesale change, and yet it may also be the most effective and important way to begin a larger movement. As demographics continue to shift toward urban living arrangements and populations continue to grow, the way we structure our built spaces will have enormous repercussions for our physical and social patterns of behavior, our mental and spiritual relationship with the natural environment, and the size and type of impression our species leaves on the planet with each passing generation. If we can structure our living spaces to reflect a worldview and lifestyle that is sustainable, healthy, and integrated with our natural surroundings, the results can be enormous. The concept, though it may sound flighty and optimistic, is far from abstract.
The technology exists to create buildings that not only do less harm to the environment, but none at all. In fact, we have found the techniques to build homes and offices that actually create energy surpluses that can be fed back into the main grid. Greenhouse and hydroponic technology allows the cultivation of produce at latitudes and seasons previously unconscionable. A wide of array of environmentally friendly products and services are now available for construction and development projects, their costs decreasing every day. In simple terms, the opportunity for a sustainable future is on the table in front of us, we must use every tool we can find to make it a reality.
New buildings alone will not be enough – of that much we can be certain. By structuring built environments in ways that promote community, activity, and connection with natural elements, however, we can hope to move beyond physical change to social change. Imagine an inner city neighborhood in Calcutta or Hong Kong or New York. Imagine the same city with buildings that allow light to filter into the street, a park every two blocks, a solar bank and turbine on every roof next to a community garden. Imagine a passive heating and cooling system that allows fresh air naturally into the buildings’ corridors and common areas. Imagine terraces with plants, wide streets with bike lanes and a zero-emissions system of public transit, and imagine universal access to the rivers, lakes, parks, and shorefronts that a sustainable lifestyle values and protects. These are changes that can be made now, with each new building and community we construct. To choose otherwise – and make no mistake, it is our choice – is a fatal mistake.
We have reached a precipice, a point from which we can see two options and must decide for ourselves. We have the resources, the technology, and reasonable judgment to envision, plan, design, and build a new humanism that puts people ahead of profit, understands that nature and man will always be intrinsically linked, and pursues new and innovation solutions to complex problems. So far, however, we have chosen to follow a path that leads to expanding, accelerating destruction of the natural environment for capital gains – a pursuit of more for more’s sake that is fundamentally opposed to the reality of a finite planet. We can re-tool it, retrofit it, and slow it down with regulation, enforcement, subsidies, and the like. Yet until we are able to change our the pattern of our collective human habits, to realize the fundamentally integrated functioning of our species and its reliance on natural systems, we will be unable to rule out a catastrophic collapse, and eventually, extinction. If we are to survive, we must say goodbye to René Descartes, reconnecting the mind to the body and the body to the earth, once and for all.
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