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Call to arms (sort of) from Umair Haque:
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If we face an imperative, perhaps it's one as timeless and worn as bedrock: not merely to employ our selves to make the most, but to make the most of our tiny selves. Perhaps it's this imperative that is the bedrock of the human world, the only firmament solid enough to support the foundations of meaningful lives. And to this imperative, there are no easy answers — just hard questions. The questions we've been uncomfortably failing to ask for a long, long while.
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umair_haque harvard_business economy eudaimonia recovery

Very nice set of comments on the Steve Jobs quotes recently featured in the Wall Street Journal.
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Herewith, without further ado, a minor eulogy for Steve Jobs the CEO. When you look at the global economy today, here's what might strike you: Apple is an organization almost singularly unlike the massed hordes and would-be contenders to the throne that surround it. It is the one company seemingly tuned to hit the revolutionary apex, not race past the lowest common denominator. So how did Steve — after a legendary decade in the wilderness, exiled from the island of his own creation, watching it turn grey, dull, bland, and colonized, perhaps even lobotomized — rebuild it that way?
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umair_haque steve_jobs apple harvard_business style design innovation

"Revitalizing Cities is the third of three blog series on social innovation culminating in three Think Tanks organized by the Advanced Leadership Initiative at Harvard University. The other two series explored Innovations in Health Care and Innovations in Education."

cities harvard revitalizing harvard_business reference series

5 approaches:
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Attention provides leverage. The more people we can attract and motivate to join us on a challenging quest or initiative, the more impact we are likely to achieve. So, what are effective ways to attract and retain the kind of attention that helps us to address the challenges we face? Here are five steps that build on each other.
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1. Embrace mystery; 2. Focus inquiry; 3. Excite the imagination; 4. Limit availability; 5. Be authentic

harvard_business john_hagel john_seely_brown attention_economy

Love this: Harvard Business Review (management nerd mag) telling people to get enough sleep. Will we finally see the end of "I only sleep [ridiculously few hours] each night" one-upmanship?
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Say you decide to go on a fast, and so you effectively starve yourself for a week. At the end of seven days, how would you be feeling? You'd probably be hungry, perhaps a little weak, and almost certainly somewhat thinner. But basically you'd be fine.

Now let's say you deprive yourself of sleep for a week. Not so good. After several days, you'd be almost completely unable to function. That's why Amnesty International lists sleep deprivation as a form of torture.
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sleep harvard_business tony_schwartz health

Why is Wal-Mart taking on a negative externality that no one is really forcing the company to address or fix? It's scale.
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In a recent article in HBR, Chris Meyer and I argued that we'll see companies taking more and more ownership of externalities they could ignore because of changing sensibilities and better sensors (meaning detection and reporting of impacts by third parties). But we also identified a third driver: the scale of modern business. Whereas in the past, a single grocer could not have much impact on society, in today's highly consolidated market, Wal-Mart touches a significant percentage of the nation's food intake. Once you reach a scale where your decisions have ramifications for millions, it is hard to pretend that the impacts, even as distant ripples, are not your problem.
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harvard_business walmart negative_externality scale health

Part of a series on "The $300 House," this piece is by Seth Godin, addressing the problem of marketing to the world's poor. Don't scoff - Godin's piece is a real eye-opener. If we agree that innovation (and innovative approaches & thinking) is (are) critical in solving poverty, then we have to realize that it's those in poverty who have to be convinced to *adopt* innovation. Godin shows why this is difficult, and offers suggestions for overcoming the problem. Excerpt:
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If you're a tenth-generation subsistence farmer, your point of view, about risk, about life, is different from someone working in an R&D lab in Palo Alto. The Moral Economy of the Peasant makes this argument clearly: Imagine standing in water up to your chin. The only thing you're prepared to focus on is whether or not the water is going to rise four more inches. Your penchant for risk is close to zero. One mistake and the game is over.

As a result, it's extremely difficult to sell innovation to this consumer. The line around the block to get into the Apple store for a gadget is an insane concept in this community. A promise from a marketer is meaningless, because the marketer isn't part of the town, the marketer will move away, the marketer is, of course, a liar.

Let me add one more easily overlooked point: Western-style consumers have been taught from birth the power of the package. We see the new Nano or the new Porsche or the new convertible note on a venture deal and we can easily do the math: [new thing] + [me] = [happier]. We've been taught that an object can make our lives better, that a purchase can make us happier, that the color of the Tiffany's box or the ringing of a phone might/will bring us joy.

That's just not true for someone who hasn't bought a new kind consumer good in a year or two or three or maybe ever. As a result, stores in the developing world tend to be stocked with the classic, the tried and true, because people buy refills of previous purchases, not the new. You can't simply put something new in front of a person

seth_godin harvard_business $300_house poverty innovation marketing tribes

The English language is remarkable: "creation care," a new-to-me descriptive that makes eco-consciousness appealing to the religious. Well, if it works, I'm all for it...
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The Climate and Energy Project is cleverly avoiding the climate debate and thus any discussion at all that triggers arguments about the really bad misinformation out there (the article, for example, points out the shocking statistic that only 48% of people in the Midwest agree that there is actually warming going on — whether you think it's human-caused or not, temperature measurements are clear on this point).

Instead, Nancy Jackson, Chairman of the Climate and Energy Project, has hit on three alternative arguments to going green: personal thrift, the benefit to the community of promoting green jobs, and a religious appeal to "creation care." The program has targeted everything from home weatherization to getting the community to lobby Siemens to build a wind plant in the region. They've also gotten towns to compete with each other to save energy.
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ecology economics harvard_business green_strategies

Umair Haque raises some interesting questions in this piece:
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It's 2010, and we still don't know how to describe the archetypal magnates of the next economy. We don't have a word for it, so we resort to awkward neologisms, like "information entrepreneur" or "green mogul." It's as if we're still not quite sure just what kinds of "capital" tomorrow's tycoons will be "ists" of. What are the kernels of tomorrow's prosperity?
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economics harvard_business umair_haque

Suburban decline (urban rise)?
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To put it simply, the suburbs have lost their sheen: Both young workers and retiring Boomers are actively seeking to live in densely packed, mixed-use communities that don’t require cars—that is, cities or revitalized outskirts in which residences, shops, schools, parks, and other amenities exist close together. “In the 1950s, suburbs were the future,” says University of Michigan architecture and urban-planning professor Robert Fishman, commenting on the striking cultural shift. “The city was then seen as a dingy environment. But today it’s these urban neighborhoods that are exciting and diverse and exploding with growth.”
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And meanwhile, in other (more recent?) articles, critics argue that the city is being suburbanized, presumably by all the boomer ex-suburbanites who transfer their values (and economic clout) to the core.

suburbs cities harvard_business

Retrofitting older cities/ existing communities to green-ness?
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We are studying different business models (and their pilot projects) for creating better urban environments (aka "smart cities" or "eco-cities"). Living PlanIT is the first business model we have examined in depth. On June 28 one of us (Bob) attended an event in Paredes where an important deal between Living PlanIT and Cisco was announced. It's important because the imprimatur of Cisco, a leader in networking technology, means that Living PlanIT can now shift into execution mode and try to demonstrate that its co-founders' vision for creating a sustainable smart city can work.
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urbanism green_technologies green_strategies retrofit harvard_business sustainability

Liked this article by Umair Haque. Excerpt:

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Prosperians believe the economy's central problem isn't a lack of demand, or a lack of supply - but a lack of purpose. Prosperianism's foundation can be summed up in a single sentence: 21st century economies can, should, and must have a higher purpose than product.

Prosperians believe that the real challenge of the 21st century isn't kickstarting "growth" and churning out more "product" - but reconceiving what is growing, how it grows, and why it grows. The prosperian agenda is redefining prosperity, so it's more meaningful, authentic, and durable. It's not about just restarting the same old industrial-age engine of GDP, but building a better one.
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umair_haque harvard_business prosperity economic_development

Here's to spreading a tendency to (as one commenter put it) "unjacking and single-tasking," and letting go of the punishing drive to multi-task. Read the article for pointers on how (and why) to stop multi-tasking and embrace single-tasking instead.
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I think it's because our minds move considerably faster than the outside world. You can hear far more words a minute than someone else can speak. We have so much to do, why waste any time? So, while you're on the phone listening to someone, why not use that extra brain power to book a trip to Florence?

What we neglect to realize is that we're already using that brain power to pick up nuance, think about what we're hearing, access our creativity, and stay connected to what's happening around us. It's not really extra brain power. And diverting it has negative consequences.

So how do we resist the temptation?
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peter_bregman harvard_business multitasking singletasking productivity

Quality, not necessarily quantity:
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Stop measuring your people by the hours they put in, and focus instead on the value they produce. Make that your primary measurement. Then encourage your people to intermittently renew during the day (and on weekends, and over vacations), so that when they're working, they're really working.
That's the path to true productivity.
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productivity harvard_business work

Featured Guest: Gregory Unruh, director and professor of the Lincoln Center for Ethics in Global Management at the Thunderbird School. He is the author of Earth, Inc.: Using Nature's Rules to Build Sustainable Profits."

biosphere gregory_unruh harvard_business sustainability economic_development

Depressing:
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The fact is that so far as leadership is concerned women in nearly every realm are nearly nowhere — hardly any better off than they were a generation ago. The following figures, from the American experience, speak for themselves.

* 3% of Fortune 500 companies are headed by women (2009).
* 6 % of the 100 top tech companies are headed by women (2010).
* 15 % of members of Fortune 500 boards are women (2009).
* 16.8% of members of the U. S. Congress are women (2010).
* 14.5% of 249 mayors of U. S. cities with populations over 100,000 are women (2010).
* 21% of nonprofits with budgets greater than $25 million are headed by women (2010).
* 5% of generals in the U.S. Army are women (2008).
* 8% of admirals in the U. S. Navy are women (2009).
* 7% of tenured engineering faculty in four-year institutions are women (2010).
* 19 % of senior faculty at the Harvard Business School are women (2009-10).
* All ten Princeton University eating-club presidents are men (2010).

This does not, of course, mean that there is no improvement whatsoever. Rather it is to point out how abysmally low the numbers remain, a decade into the 21st century. (In some cases, the figures are worse than before. In 2009 the percentage of women holding statewide elective office was 22.6. Ten years earlier it was 27.6.)
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harvard_business women leadership equality

Great article on greenwashing, with a link to Terrachoice's Seven Sins of Greenwashing (which includes a cool online game).
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The problem of greenwash seems like a mild issue to worry about. But as advertising giant Ogilvy & Mather puts it in a new report, greenwash is actually "an extremely serious matter...it is insidious, eroding consumer trust, contaminating the credibility of all sustainability-related marketing and hence inhibiting progress toward a sustainable economy." In other words, it's very hard for customers to know what choices make a difference when some marketers are muddying the waters for all. When buyers throw up their hands in confusion, we all lose.
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harvard_business andrew_winston greenwashing environment

Umair Haque puts a deserved boot to typical (traditional?) social media, calling instead for meaning, organized around reconceptualized definitions of 1. Character; 2. Control; 3. Creativity; 4. Culture; 5. Clarity; 6. Cohesion; and 7. Choreography.

Closing paragraph:
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Social strategies are about reinventing tomorrow. Their goal is nothing less than changing the DNA of an organization, ecosystem, or industry. Want to get radical? Stop applying 20th century principles ("product," "buzz," "loyalty") to 21st century media. The fundamental change of scale and pace that social tools introduce into human affairs — their great tectonic shift — is the promise of more meaningful work, stuff, and organization. Start with "the meaning is the message" instead.
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harvard_business umair_haque socialmedia

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"A good sketch is better than a long speech..." -- a quote often attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte
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(The opening gambit to Sviokla's article.)
In many ways, this is also about patterns, and pattern recognition (which is what Scruton's article was about, too). The new changes are perhaps more related to how *dynamic* our reality has become. But "...even in a world of information surplus, we can draw upon deep human habits on how to visualize information to make sense of a dynamic reality."

harvard_business john_sviokla data_visualization

When I read this pithy article by Rosabeth Moss Kanter, I found useful parallels between an evolutionary take on economics and innovation, and what she describes as the 15-minute advantage. That is, if you're too far ahead of the curve, you may make an evolutionary (or innovative) leap, but it won't "take" - it will be like a leap from one peak to another, without successful landing. Instead, you need those increments that allow successful leaps.

The Woody Allen backdrop story is such a great lead-in - makes her underlying idea very graspable, too. Moss Kanter lists 8 characteristics of innovation, some of which are straight out of our understanding of successful evolution:
1. Tria-able; 2. Divisible; 3. Reversible; 4. Tangible; 5. Fits prior investments; 6. Familiar; 7. Congruent with future direction; 8. Positive publicity value.

economics innovation competitiveness harvard_business rosabeth_moss_kanter evolution