Why some people can't Cool It...

It does seem that the discussion of the Copenhagen Consensus and Bjorn Lomborg's positions canlead to some pretty heated reactions. I came across an interesting post discussing such reactions and arguing that it all boils down to the concept of "opportunity costs". It does  look as though the world is going hysteric over global warming when it would be quite crucial to keep cool and make perhaps vital decisions rationally, especially since our resources as so scarce.

Sadly, despite a very "user friendly" / pedagogical way of presenting his points Lomborg is not always well understood. I believe that is because quite a lot of his developments run counter generally accepted ideas and even "common sense" in a way. It's a bit like the resistance to change one faces when trying to help a disorganized and overloaded executive to start prioritizing actions because it takes some nerve and a healthy dose of indifference to accept the idea that there are quite a few things out there on which you will not focus if you are to achieve anything meaningful on those subjects you've decided to tackle first with your limited resources.

Maybe more than an issue with the understanding of the concept of "opportunity cost" discussed in the post, I feel there are phenomena that provide explanations on that count:

1. a reluctance of many people to use money and utility curves to make decisions about "noble causes" as though that would put dirt on those noble causes (perhaps owing to a tradition in many cultures to consider money as "bad" or "dirty")



2. the degree of anxiety created by the sort of media coverage we're getting about global warming and I must say Cool It came as a refreshing perspective as far as I am concerned



3. reluctance to accept the consequences that cannot be avoided and which stem from our past (current?) consumption behaviors... something which is creating a collective schizophrenia of sorts with part of ourselves concerned with success within the existing economic and social context and part of ourselves leaning in the direction of a radical change of behavior in favor of more ecology



4. lack of skill in prioritizing and planning at a collective level especially where the protection of the commons is concerned, more particularly since we were conditioned into believing the theory that competition and the free markets would solve all of our problems without government intervention



5. poor collective sense of proportion and assessment of quantitative facts, especially as regards the quality of projections of likely consequences from warming



6. desire to keep things as they were or are (something that is very characteristic of our modern civilization with its unprecedented recording capabilities), when the world is a place in constant evolution



7. excessive confidence in the effectiveness of public action with ambitious goals, fueled by the lack of assessment of past initiatives led by governments only with long term time horizons (economic development of less-developed countries, agricultural programs in Africa, funding of projects by the World Bank, free trade agreements invariably leading to a violation of the position of developing nations...) Overall we have confidence in a failed model of world governance and perhaps the first challenge to tackle is to reform that so as to be at least confident in the vehicle we are going to use to tackle whichever problems we can rationally consider to be the real top priorities

On the other hand there are also a few intelligent replies like this one that are a real contribution to the discussion from my perspective and which IMHO should not prevent us from using valuable contributions from the Copenhagen Consensus (I certainly consider their analytical and cooperative approach to be a very positive contribution that should bring us closer to a more factual discussion on this important matter).

A contrarian's view

If we are serious about dealing with durable (human) development and the type of world we will leave to future generations (not only in the economically developed world), it is worth listening to well documented views from contrarians like Bjorn Lomborg, whose book Cool It I strongly recommend. Worth considering on this Blog Action Day I think. His presentation at TED Talks can be viewed at the end of this post.

What I like about what he develops is that:

1. he makes the case for immediate action on stuff that matters today and has consequences tomorrow, possibly preparing people and nations to better deal with threats that we cannot possibly fathom



2. his approach involves considering the issues of the human condition in an integral manner, not looking at matters in isolation



3. he considers the limited nature of current resources and outlines a path for a rational use of those resources to achieve the goal of a wealthier and more balanced world



4. taking an integral approach forces us to confront the contradictions of our current ways with barely conceivable imbalances between endeavours of different types and merits



5. considering costs and benefits and focusing on currently achievable steps while keeping an end goal in mind is precisely what will break the loosing game of the prisonner's dilema as outlined in a recent article of The Economist

D-1 for blog action day

Laziness: an enabler of common sense?

A friend sent me a link to an interesting post about the risk of collapse of the Web 2.0. The article argues that users out there will become tired of playing around with platforms like Friendster, MySpace or Facebook as the "natural" human attribute of laziness becomes dominant as a driver of online beavior and that this will actually lead to a burst of the Web 2.0 bubble.
The point is valid in the sense that as the power of "new" fades, the motivation of individual users to spend time doing work for free will drop. However, there are still quite a few things happening out there which may be done without the people doing them getting paid and which bring at least indirect benefits to those people, such as for example public image or the opportunity to show how good they are at specific tasks or in given industries. In other words, in the vast mass of participants to phenomena like Facebook, there is a fraction of people who actually derive business value out of their participation to the platforms that are so characteristic of what has been called Web 2.0, like for example Wikipedia or targeted blogs like Culture Buzz.
The question then becomes: how does one actually measure the indirect benefits they get from participating to communities like LinkedIn or Facebook? By which means one can assess the relevance and value of platforms allowing users to host online applications is another question, that I think is particularly relevant in view of a comment made by my friend David on a recent post about Facebook.
I will also add that although I have no illusions as to the dark sides of the human psyche, I don't believe laziness to be inevitable or undesirable. Usually we humans face problems when we abandon ourselves to the extremes like complete passivity as resulting from extreme laziness or frantic activity as caused by workaholism... Bottom line: in order to identify value drivers for the web 2.0 space better skills in psychology may be needed.

Blog action day: 15-OCT-2007

The following video is an open invitation to participate to a huge global conversation about the environment on 15-OCT-2007. If you have a blog, post relevant material in your area of focus. If you don't visit more or less prominent blogs and use the "Comments" features to participate. Wherever you are, save a quarter of an hour to take part and show you care about the world that this generation will leave to the next one... if there is to be a next one, because life will go on even without mankind.

Nimbuzz's interesting replies

As Sofie from Nimbuzz promised, the company posted a couple of interesting replies to my post about their solution, which I am still testing and finding quite addictive. I'll probably write a few thoughts triggered by their reply, one of which is that this is exactly the sort of product that can (at last) justify paying for a mobile IP service, regardless the underlying technology. So, yes Nimbuzz may be the anti-Skype for incumbent telcos, especially those who have embraced WiFi as part of their ISP offering and IP service as part of the cellular service. In a way, they are giving more flesh to the concept of a personal integrated communications center, something I felt Jajah was also serving pretty well when they hit the market over a year ago.

Web conference hacked: what's next?

The amount of criticism about the way Le Web 3 conference was high-jacked by politicians is stunning. A distinction needs to be made between issues and individuals. I have certainly made quite a few mistakes in this life and will not cast a stone at any one individual; Loic Le Meur has been criticized as a person and in terms of his competence for running a conference like this one. I am not sure that's the point. Actually, I do think we need to distinguish between individuals (with their limitations and personal challenges) and issues.
Perhaps what happened is an opportunity for the community of bloggers to play the game of democracy, "the right to make mistakes and the obligation to correct them" as Shimon Peres said. After all, don't we all carry part of the responsibility for letting such an event in the hands of one, when our true aspiration is one of a peer-to-peer distributed world in which individuals can freely participate? In the economy when markets work it is because no single participant can skew the process. So, acknowledging the following facts:

1. there must be a reason why 1000 people from 37 countries gathered in Paris these two days



2. humans need to meet in person aside from having a presence on the web



3. the community of people involved in collaborative, distributed, social processes is interested in
   • finding out new applications and services,
   
   
   
   • understanding how existing applications affect real life
   
   
   
   • finding their role in the world
   
   
   
   • ...



4. "the world is pregnant  with a new age" and this community stands to play a role to transform old ways



5. as the influence of the community of free agents / free participants grows, established players will try to seize the dynamics of the process to their own benefit (see how Elkabach from Europe 1 jumped on the scene to take control of the interview of one of the French politicians on stage - luckily the facilitator that was translation stopped him and took questions from the audience)

perhaps the community of bloggers ought to put together a dynamic self-organizing global forum:

• built around the essential principles of the Internet (peer-to-peer, distributed, never relying on any one node, inclusive, self-organizing, with minimal central infrastructure used to help route packets, free as in free enterprise, sometimes free as in free beer, open...)



• organized in streams (and perhaps politics should have a stream of its own with rules for politicians to be there on equal terms with participants), with topics emerging dynamically instead of being built as an agenda of items structured as "Is XYZ dead?" (where XYZ is some familiar topic of the traditional world: media, politics, television, bananas...)



• focused on objectives (one of which could be a "better world" initiative if the objective emerges from the community of bloggers) to be updated on a regular basis



• bridging the gap between technologies and applications in this space



• providing opportunities for people to meet and co-create



• ...

Shimon Peres offers vision to bloggers at Le Web 3

Shimon Peres paid us a visit today at Le Web 3.
It was great to listen as the Nobel Prize winner developed his vision
of the future of mankind, declaring that "the world is not a mess. It
is pregnant: a new age is coming, marking the end of the stone age".
The experience of having Mr Peres here was just great and I will simply
give you a few of his most striking declarations here, some of which
are pretty radical:

"... we are moving from traditional memory to intellectual
imagination. The world is created through what people discover and
imagine today, not through the memory of past events. Bloggers and the
Internet community has freed the world from the obligation to remember.
Everything that needs to be known is available, recorded online, so now
we can turn the energy of our minds to the future, to imagination and
creation."

"I think young people will stop reading newspapers and watching
television. They will use the Internet to access information when and
where they want."

"States, countries, borders and governments don't mean that much
anymore. They made sense when wealth was derived from the land [...]
Past history is written in red ink, in blood [...] Borders do not stop
knowledge from flowing, armies cannot conquer knowledge and governments
cannot control economies [...]Today to be successful a young person
does not need to kill and conquer."

"Wealth is not defined by accumulation of capital, but by penetration.
It's not what a company owns that makes its value, but rather the
potential it holds to imagine, create and bring to life future
business."

"The strength of a country cannot be counted in number of square miles it controls, but rather in number of patents it files."

"Modern economy cannot be run without transparency and decency, since a
company's value is its potential to create wealth, the talents of its
people."

"Economy cannot be measured by bookkeepers. It needs people with sharp eyes who can identify potential."

"I met China's politburo recently. I was stunned by their current
philosophy, which is harmony: harmony between humans, harmony between
man and nature, harmony nation to nation [...] It felt like the time I
spent in a Kibboutz when I was young!"

"Democracy is the right to be different, the right to make mistakes and the obligation to correct them."

"I am an optimist. Optimists and pessimists die the same way, but they live very differently."

"Religions are opium for the people. You can sell opium, but you can't
live on it. Even the Ayatollahs need more than enriched uranium to feed
their children."

Extremely inspiring thoughts that actually brought some fresh air in a
conference that contains more than a fair share of gadgets, egos, masks
and sometimes complete bull-shit (although the content is often very
good). When asked what bloggers could do to help solve the problems of
the Middle-East, Shimon Peres paused and said "that's an interesting
question... Well, you should go there take initiatives, start
companies, build schools, open shops and create wealth... Do it on your
own, not under the flag of any government. People will welcome you with
open arms!"

Quite an invitation!

Hell of a week. Balancing life.

It's been a hell of a week and I thank the Universe I am away tomorrow... I've had a lot of stuff to deliver and Excel gave me a rough ride with a big fat formula-rich file that got corrupted to the point of requiring a full reengineering (oops! here's the ugly word again!) Fortunately I just love the client and the challenge they are facing.

Anyway, it's been a lot of very short nights and I found that even though time may be lacking it is of the essence to maintain a balance in my life. So while I was clearly trying to squeeze output out of each instant, I still took the time to go swim and made a point to achieve some progress (don't look for any olympic performance there, but still there is always a limit to beat). I also took time to do something that I find very relaxing too: my weekly session of Taiji Quan.

I think that showing calm determination in balancing life builds a very healty kind of energy and in fact it may even be far more intense and focused energy than sleeping a bit more. Anyway, that's my two dimes of life balance stuff learned (again) this week.

Blogging in Canada

A couple of days ago I started a blog about my trip to Canada. Giving a thought to this blog, I decided to focus it more on business and professional aspects and to create dedicated blogs for other topics: books, cooking, trips, training, personal development... My plan is to invite other people to write in these dedicated blogs. More in a couple of weeks.

Syndrome of the perfect green apple (again)

There's an interesting interview on Guy Kawasaki's blog with the CEO of a business called MyPleasure, which is "dedicated to providing the finest adult toy shopping experience possible" (quoted from their site). What prompts this post is this answer of MyPleasure's CEO:

"We tend to do exceptionally well in the “red states". At first, we were a little surprised by this, but this actually makes a lot of sense. If you are living in a conservative community in the South, for example, and you want something to enhance your relationship, where exactly are you going to go? Even if there is an “adult bookstore” or something of the kind in your state, it is probably quite a drive and most likely in a bad part of town, and you are unlikely to find a sales person who actually knows anything about the products or you would want to talk to. Also, you probably want to avoid running into your neighbor or your minister."

Red states in the US, in case you had not guessed, are states voting for the Republicans (or GOP), the party of the current President. Interestingly the GOP is positionned as the party of morality and traditional values. In view of the info provided by the CEO of MyPleasure, I come to wonder whether the GOP is not in fact the most potent factor of neurosis and psychological disorders in the US simply because it amplifies the disconnect between what people think they must look like or do to be "acceptable" or "honorable" in their local societies and what people actually want for themselves.

From a marketing perspective the insight provided by this case is simple: never assume... ever!

From a social and political perspective, I guess it may be time for all of us to meditate on the syndrome of our societies to seek "perfect green apples". By this I mean that we pay more attention to the way people, products, companies, animals, food... look than to their substance. That may be why...

• job offers contain unrealistic / unnecessary requirements



• candidates lie on their CVs



• marketers lie about their products



• performance indicators are consistently manipulated



• project support offices exist in big corporations



• the art of politics by the people and for the people became a line of business reserved to an elite serving special interests



• the Peter principle remains consistently valid in big corporations



• merit is irrelevant in many parts of our society



• a good product without excellent marketing fails



• vaporware became a discipline for at least one big software company



• people who never paid any attention to nature nor to people all of a sudden portray themselves as champions of durable development and charity initiatives



• the same politicians remain in the spotlight for decades



• ...

Odd HTML code due to Jajah's Firefox extension?

While working on a post for my blog, I noticed strange lines of HTML code when using the online editor provided by TypePad. Here’s an example of such odd lines:

<div id="jajahYDiv" style="visibility: hidden;">0</div>

<div id="jajahXDiv" style="visibility: hidden;">0</div>

I decided to open a ticket with TypePad and after I got their answer I uninstalled the Jajah extension. Guess what? The funny lines of code had disappeared, except for a few of the posts of my blog. I wonder what may have caused this and obviously I now feel somewhat less confident in the Firefox extension for Jajah. A pitty because it was quite convenient.

The details of my uninstall, with screen shots are available at the link below.

Here are three screen shots of posts in which I found HTML lines similar to the ones shown above. Please click on the pictures to get a full-size image.

In fact all of the posts I opened and viewed in HTML rather than WYSIWYG format had such strange lines at the very end of the post. Also, I noticed that the WYSIWYG editor showed some pretty strange behaviour: when writing a new post starting to type at the default location of the cursor I got nothing on the screen other than the cursor moving as though text was being printed; to solve this I had to use the UP arrow and only then would the editor work properly. That behaviour started after I installed the extension and it is not peculiar to TypePad’s editor as I had the same issues on other online platforms.

 

Now, the third screenshot is the test I am using to show that the abnormal lines of code must be coming from Jajah’s extension. Test is simple:

1. remove the extension

2. close all instances of Firefox

3. restart Firefox, go open the same post on TypePad and read the corresponding HTML code

I removed the extension as shown in the following screen shot.

 

 

The odd lines of HTML are no longer in the code of that post.

 

 

 

Smart web marketing: an ounce of practice worth more than tons of theory

As I was reading a piece of news on the site of BBC Newsnight, I noticed a smart marketing trick: the BBC lets you access a specific piece of content under the condition that you as a reader agree to”digg” the article. Suprising and smart method for an established media company.

Digging of course is web-speak; it does not involve any shovels or spades: it merely means that as a reader you somehow “vote” for the article and increase its popularity on a site called Digg that aggregates content from difference sources and allows its users to qualify and comment the articles. Digg is often the source of traffic for a web site as most recommended articles are viewed by Digg’s community and by non-members.

I know there has been quite some coverage lately about the BBC’s strategy for the Information Age. Strategy is necessary and potentially useful but actual implementation of a strategy is really what makes a difference for a company. More often than not implementation is visible through small details in a company’s operations, not fancy top management initiatives.

Oh, and by the way this post was written with BlogJet, a desktop blogging software package I am trying out. It seems a lot easier to use than Ecto, but I have not made up my mind yet. Any ideas?

The time when blogs went mainstream

I took the train for a trip to Paris just a couple of days ago. A few tie-wearing business persons were traveling to the same destination. Three of them spoke loud enough for me to hear their conversation, which was about the great opportunity blogs represent for business... That's when I thought about my early days of blogging; back then few of my contacts knew what a blog was and those who did thought it was an online personal diary for teenagers. And then I thought about top radio channels making their content available as podcasts. And about recent business contacts I got through this blog... How things are changing!

Blogs are great tools, not only for sharing thoughts as I do, but also for business communications. In fact one of my latest customers is in the field of buzz marketing and they do use blogs heavily. I will tell you more about it in the coming weeks.

If you don't get it, regulate it! Just in case...

This seems to be the axiom upon which every act of government is based in countries whose political elites don’t have a clue about the real implications of the Internet. In many European countries today, governments swim in self-congratulatory communications, boasting about their “achievements” in e-government. At the same time citizens empowered by the web are taking by storm all areas of public life. The latest example of disconnect between the people and governing elites seems to come from France (again), much to the despair of yours truly.

The French Minister of Culture, not satisfied with the
fiasco of the legislation on authors’ rights - mark my words, it will turn out to be YANAL = yet-another-not-applicable-law -, is now about to take an
initiative to "regulate" citizen-driven journalism on the web. Renaud Donnedieu de Vabres embarks on a crusade to protect citizens from the perils of partisan coverage of news by amateur journalists (i.e. journalists who have not been coopted and do not have the blessing of the establishment). He hinted at the fact that he wants blog articles to involve at least one professional journalist who has a valid license as a member of the press. I don't know about you, but I am personally sick and tired of those guys who create regulations for stuff they don't understand and fear.

You see, Renaud
Donnedieu de Vabres is worried: according to him, blogs are not reliable sources of
information and they are biased and lead to misinformation of citizens… blah,
blah, blah…. Whereas, of course, the conservative mass media TF1 or Public
French TV or partisan newspapers or private radio channels supporting interest groups or indeed SkyTV and
Fox News are officially and automatically labeled as reliable. Perhaps because of the government’s
certainty about their almost complete allegiance to the "official truth".

The fact is that there is a managed coexistence and strong
codependency between the political world and established media. This results in the emergence of a new form of political regime that I call a mediacracy in which power is no longer in the hands of the people but rather in that of a political elite involved in an incestuous relationship with special-interest sponsored media. Actually, that was true until recently, until the web empowered citizens to share opinions and collectively build intelligence on often complex subjects like the proposed European Constitution last year. In that instance the political-media power did not prevail.

This incestuous
relationship goes far beyond public life and right into the privacy of
households of French politicians many of whom are in relationship with stars of
established media, themselves employed by established capitalists who finance
and support said politicians. And perhaps they do so because politicians are
their very best insurance policy against changes and challenges brought about by the adoption of new applications of infotech like blogs, vlogs, podcasts, WiFi networks and mobile devices. Perhaps established players do not really want power to the people.
Perhaps that is why they favor party-driven processes of pre-selection of
candidates to be presented to the people for crucial elections like the French
presidential election. Perhaps that is why they don’t like the idea of citizens
going around and reporting what they see as they understand it: it does drive
information out of control.

Now the good question is this: why in the world should we
consider the established media with their covert submission to or concealed
manipulation of politicians to be more trustworthy than bloggers and freelance
citizens-journalists who openly state that the content they produce is partisan
and do not try to position themselves as holders of the one and unique truth?
Another interesting question is the impact of such attempts to “regulate” the
free expression of individual opinions on one of the foundations of democracy:
free speech with the understanding that freedom works best when there is also
respect for other opinions so long as they don’t invite discrimination or
hatred or ethnic and religious violence.

It seems that regulation of everything they do not
understand is the illness of outdated elites in government today. And France is a telltale example unfortunately: from a
totally idiotic and non-applicable legislation about ostentatious signs of
religious belief, to the legislation about authors’ rights, to protests against flexible
work contracts, to this new “initiative”, France is crumbling under the weight
of over-regulation and centralization. The imbalance in favor of the Jacobins
centralizers in their two-century old contest with the Girondins who favored
decentralized processes, is now the worst threat to

France

’s
future in a global connected world.

"Beware free speech" campaign launches today

Chernobyl

We have
just commemorated a sad anniversary: 20 years since Chernobyl exploded. I remember like yesterday those days of anxiety when our media were relaying official
information claiming that the radio-active pollution had stopped right at the
frontiers of [NAME_COUNTRY] (replace with whichever name of European country you want). Of course, for those of us who were following the news in several countries, the inconsistencies were blatant and I remember how they amplified my feeling of insecurity. Remember
how all national governments were trying to sound reassuring to "their" citizens?
Common folk, uneducated people, we all knew that there was no reason in the
world why an ecological disaster would stop at the borders set by humans:
pollution needs no passport to "travel". It knows no frontiers. Yet, the official truth was served by
established media organizations. Precisely those who plot with the political establishment to limit the freedom of speech on the web. I wonder why... don't you?

An article of protest at the cover-up published in 1986 has been reissued just yesterday on Agoravox and if you speak French, it is definitely worth reading. It is an account of the painful personal experience of a French scientist who scrambled to have a coherent picture amid conflicting reports and incompatible units of measure of radiations and their effects on human health. Above all it shows how citizens feel when governments are cheating with the complicity of established media organizations. And its call for open confrontation of facts when such emergencies are involved is an invitation which we citizens can now accept thanks to the power of the web.

Strictly OPEN business

I received
feedback from visitors  who asked me why I would not confine this blog to
"strictly business matters". I appreciate honest feedback so first of all a big thank you.

For me, Open Business is about passionate
commitment, about curiosity, about exploration, about discovery and
about action. All these things require one core ingredient: humans. Competent, balanced, motivated, positive, energetic, driven, passive, tired, happy, sad... people. Variety. Talent. Movement. What the authors of Funky Business call "core competents" and I firmly believe there is a place for all in this world. Go out an stake your claim!

This is the world of alex Inc., and "strictly business"
is what I do, no matter if some posts seems "broader" (whatever that means).

Great traveller

One of my former colleagues (who used to be a globetrotter in his days as head of sales of the company we were working for) has started a great trip around the globe that has taken him from Latin America to New Zealand. I trully admire his daring nature and his way of always being in action. Lodewijk shares some of his considerable travel (and adventure) experience on his web site, Silk-on-the-Road. Beautiful pictures of awesomely beautiful places on the planet. A source of inspiration for something completely different.

Coming up on this blog

I have a list of topics on which I would like to write a piece on this blog in the coming days and weeks. So let me give you a preview and invite you to drop me a line or leave a comment on this blog if you think about other subject you would like me to write about. Of course, I cannot commit to accept all proposals as there are clearly matters I feel like writing about and other I would rather skip; in any event your suggestions are welcome and will be studied.
Anyway here's the list of what's coming up on this blog:

• NLP and professional orientation



• how to give people feedback in a respectful manner



• why on-the-job coaching makes sense



• how to develop and use human potential in IT projects



• is NLP a technique of manipulation?



• how to manage confusion of logical levels



• the attributes of "flow activities" and personal happiness

Have a great week.