Business Quests in the Information Age

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.