Robert Paterson's Weblog

Island Time - Adjusting to a slower pace

This post is for Stephanie.

^{And that's how it took 6 hours to run one errand off-island. Yep, six hours. We left Friday Harbor at 1:40 and returned at 7:40.
I now understand why some people here only go off-island once every four months. It's really exhausting. I mean, I like the ferry ride itself. I love being out on the water. Love it. It's the waiting before and after and the overall time it takes that gets me.
They have a name for it here: Island time. And we're on it now.}

My blogging friend Stephanie has moved to the San Juan Islands of the west coast - between Vancouver and Seattle. She comes from the  LA and Chicago. She has been confronted with a huge adjustment in time - she is experiencing "Island Time". Time when the simple things seem to take a long time - especially if you have to take the ferry to go to the mainland.

My face to face friend Cynthia, has left PEI for a weeks trip to Toronto. She is experiencing the reverse - the frantic time of the big city.

"was there always this many people in toronto? peopled out."

I had the same experience as both Stephanie and Cynthia. I believe that Island living does change our perception of time.

When I first arrived on PEI in the mid 1990's, the bridge was not built. Getting on or off the Island was a journey into another world. In the summer, you could never be sure that you would make the trip. It is quite a feeling to be the last on the boat or worse, the first not to get on. "Running for the boat" was an experience that all shared. Even if you were driving from Vancouver, that last few hours, it was pedal to the metal as you did your best to make the crossing on the schedule.

There was no way to be sure of the time that it would take to make the crossing - so this meant that you had to stop believing that you could control the time of your journey.

On the other hand, with distances so short on the Island, you had more time in the day. In a big city, it is commonplace to spend 2-4 hours a day getting around. Getting to work, daycare, shopping, dinner etc are all major consumers of time. So all the rest of the day gets compressed. We sleep less, eat in a more rushed way, go from one task to another. We don't stop to chat. It's heads down.

But on PEI we get back most of this time. Say 3 hours a day. This is a huge amount really when you factor in sleep. So time moves more slowly. We stop to chat in the street, in the shops, wave at people in cars - because we are going slow enough to notice!

In Arabic there is a term - Buhkara. It is defined as Manana without the sense of urgency. Buhkara would be an idea familiar to Islanders. Things in the service area move sloooooow. It is surely part of the total view of time. Things sometimes never happen. Like many traditional societies, Islanders hate to be overtly rude. So when your plumber says that Yes he will come on Tuesday - Yes does not mean Yes. It is easier not to turn up than to say No.

So sometimes time stands still!

I winter with no tourists there is even more time. All the yard work goes. There is parking everywhere. There is no traffic. Few visitors. Time slows to a crawl. Space shrinks too. We retreat to the kitchen, home office and bedroom. Only the dogs get us out and about.

All this is normal for natives but for new folks like me and now for Stephanie, adjusting to Island time is hard. But when you do adjust - then returning to the big city seems like being exposed to madness.

Everyone looks haunted and harried - and they are. They are all in time deficit. They don't have enough time. So much of the social oil is not there. I walked down the street in Toronto the other day and a man stepped out onto the street from his gate. I said "Good Morning" - he looked at me as if I was mad. My son, embarrassed as hell said "Daaaad!!!! This is Toronto!".

There are so many people! I have to switch off all my social radar. I feel the crush and I have lost a lot of my social armor. It's exhausting just to be in contact with so many people.

I also get ill nearly every time I go to the big city. I have lost some of my immune system - like the Incas?

So Stephanie - if you can allow Island time to sink in, you will find that your armor drops, that you notice more, that you align better to the seasons and the world itself. If like me, you learn to love this, then it will be hard to fit into the time stressed big city again.

Unemployment is permanent and structural - Need for a Reivention

Why am I making such a deal about unemployment? Because it is the main driver for people losing their homes now. There is no remediation if a person has no income.

There are are millions of Americans in the pipeline - who have lost their jobs or who will - who will inevitably lose their homes.

But what about the "Recovery" will they not get their jobs back? Have a look at this chart form the Department of Labor and think more about will the jobs come back in time?

The first thing we see is that the wait to find a new job is now very long indeed. It is in fact "off the chart".

Now look at this chart - what I think it shows is that over the last 60 years that has been a collapse in manufacturing jobs that is systemic and long term. What is happening today is the final curtain for the idea that a person with a high school education can support themselves - that is 75% of the population in America!

This chart tells us that we are back to end of the last depression before the  war made such a difference to manufacturing. It shows us that we have been in a long term systemic decline since 1980. It shows us that there is no quick or easy fix.

On a related note the Unemployment Benefit Trust Fund will run out of funds in the early part of 2010 - so those that are relying onunemployment to keep them in their house will lose that too - unless there is the politcal will to boost the fund in a major way.

So what does this mean?

I don't think that there is a simple rebound in the near future. Traditionally, the jobs come back - but we can see here that they cannot. Yes there may be Service Jobs but no one can own a house on that.

I don't see any way around having to Reinvent the Economy. Find out how to return to a high employment and local focus. Easier said than done right? But there are a lot of people who have a vested interest in finding out the answers. Many of them are already reinventing local food etc. My bet is that if we open our eyes - we see see the real "Green Shoots" and they will be where people who will not give up are trying things that are radically new.

YouTube - Where may it go?

Today the Times talks about how our PC is taking us away from TV as a time waster and as a source of entertainment.

....“Internet homes, including broadband and dial-up, watch 9 percent less television over all than the general population. The impact by network differs, with some experiencing 25 percent lower ratings and others substantially unaffected.” (He added that wired homes were generally well-off, a population that watches television less as a matter of course.)

Anecdotally, I can say that our family ends up finding the remote less often. Tally up all the bereft fathers video-chatting with college-age daughters, bored teenagers making videos for other bored teenagers and geeks mashing up existing content to hilarious effect, and there is ferocious, idiosyncratic competition for consumers’ attention.

The threat isn’t new media displacing old media as much as personalization. Media has become something people make, forward, link and program. When we took the 2,000-mile road trip to drop the girls off at their respective campuses, we switched between my iPod and theirs rather than flip fruitlessly through radio channels that had been aggregated and formatted into musical sameness.

Newspapers felt the pain of technological disruption first, when people had dial-up modems capable of transmitting modest, largely text-based data. As fatter pipes developed, music performed a jailbreak, leaving behind a maimed industry. And now, with the number of ever-faster connections spreading and the advent of the Flash player, television seems positioned as roadkill, with great big movie files soon to fall after that.

The question remaining is how these industries will choose to react. Television, it seems, may have learned some of the hard lessons endured by the music industry and taken an attitude of cautious engagement with downloaders rather than randomly slapping them with lawsuits.

I still caught Wednesday’s episode of “Lost,” downloading it to my iPod to view on my commute and sending $1.99 to ABC and Steve Jobs to split. Through the magic of that time-and-platform shift (and my willingness to pay for free content), I remained a part of the “Lost” tribe, although not the kind that shows up on Nielsen.

Selling programming that way is a smaller business for the networks, but not a bad one. Maybe this time, Grandma saw the brick coming

This weekend I discovered that nearly all of Black Adder is on YouTube. Guess what I was doing for most of Sunday?

This American Life has buckled to protest and has now offered each program as a Podcast on iTunes. I think that it is time for Public TV to go down this road. I want to watch Bill Moyers on Net Neutrality later this week but may miss it for scheduling reasons. I would pay to download it on iTunes. I would like to watch all his programs. I would pay to download a lot of PBS content on iTunes. The Centre for Social Media did  a lovely job for iTunes with this video on the topic of Many to Many. Surely this is how it could be done.

If you then "wrapped" the program with a social website where fans could talk about the show or the topic even better. Imagine The Vidcast Site for PBS and for each station where the show could be downloaded for a small fee and where fans could sign up (with all heir details) to extend the discussion. You would generate fees. You would keep the material safe. You would create community and you would know all bout those that liked the show. You would be really ahead of the game.

Come on guys - the lesson is clear. It's do or die here.

Lost - The Start of Discovery

My friend Joanie Brady sends me pictures now and then. This is her latest.

We live in such a complex world now that many leaders have to start out with a question. Such as "What are we going to do in public radio now that technology has disrupted our established business model?" which is where we were a year ago.

No one knew what to do. The wonderful part of the work was that none of the leaders jumped up and said "I know and follow me". They all acknowledged that they did not know and had the patience to go into the deep forest and discover.

This I think is the core of how to work in complex situations. Start with Not Knowing and Trusting that the answers will Emerge if we all talk enough.

Leadership in a Human Organization

What is leadership in a human organization?

As I deepen my conversation with Toke and Chris the idea of the warrior/midwife seems to grip me harder.

Warrior

Midwife

I think that this is the power of the film - The Mission - in that it shows the blend of the warrior and the midwife as a composite for leadership that enables people to become all that they can be.

I have to admit that at the moment I feel more like Mendoza the penitent as he drags his life behind him in a huge net waiting to be released or not by those that he has hurt the most.

Mendoza dragging his penance

The moment of redemption

Storm ahead

I think that we are on this ship right now. If we choose to steer into the storm we will likely sink.

Imagine if the plot to blow up a lot of planes in mid Atlantic had worked? What would have happened? Will it happen anyway? Is such a tragedy now inevitable? is ever tighter security the only response?

Our lives depend on easy air travel - is this over now?

What is going to happen to our society as the threat from terror that we have no defence against builds?

Will our tactical reliance on more control end our liberal society? We saw what happened in India after the bombing in Mumbai - blogging itself was shut down.

Will a response be to control the web?  All the fuss about My Space is a symptom and a trend. Will giving the pipes more power help?

What about our military efforts on the ground?

Imagine that your son or daughter is in the army. Is what we are doing in Iraq or Afghanistan making a positive difference? Every week we hear that things are getting worse.

My question to the commanders is this - tell us how what you are doing is making the situation for all concerned better. My bet is that they cannot, In fact if they were straight they would tell us that in a year's time things in Iraq and Afghanistan will be worse. So our sons and daughters are dying for a mission that cannot work just as they did prior to Vimy in 1917 when Generals simply did what didn't work harder.

What about the heart of our risk - our own Muslim Communities?

Are we doing things that we can have confidence in that are reducing the risk that young Canadian, British and American Muslims are being persuaded to join the Jihad?  Recent reports from the UK suggest that things are getting worse.

All I see is simplistic posturing and the demand for more control, when it is clear that systemic problems cannot be limited by more control and that more control leads in fact to a worsening for all concerned.

I think that we are stuck like WWI Generals responding to new and systemic problems with simple answers. If what you are doing is not working simply try harder.

Like WWI generals, if we keep reacting and trying to control more, it means that we play into their hands. Terror will have won. An American general complained to General; Giap after the Vietnam war that the Americans won every battle. Yes Mon general replied Giap - but we won the war! We are not thinking deeply enough.

I am not just complaining. I have been thinking a lot - at least about how to think about the problem

In WWI everyone was also stuck. No one knew how to think their way through the effect of  the new technology. All Generals could do was to try harder. The result was ever greater casualties for no return.

But there was one group who could not afford the cost who stepped aside and thought of how to think their way through. They were successful and the process that they used to find a solution is a universal one that I think can apply to us today.

That is what I think we need today - to dig deep intellectually and discover a flexible response to a dynamic situation.

Download vimy_lo_3pd.pdf

Light blogging - NAFTA?

Sorry but I have joined the light blogging club for a while.

Excuses - teaching online where I blog many times a day and also that I am writing a lot for a couple of clients. Lastly I am preparing to get a TN Visa to the US. NEVER have I been through such an ordeal!

What a joke NAFTA is. A set of rules to keep Canadians out.

Hopefully I will return in a couple of weeks.

CIBC - Bonus?

Back in the olden times, when I was a SVP at CIBC, we had the big Reichman hit. All bonuses were cut. There is a growing clamor to do the same for the investment bankers at CIBC. Snip from the Globe

Canadian Imperial Bank of Commerce, reeling from a third-quarter Enron-related loss of $1.91-billion, will likely be forced by investor outrage to cut back the $733-million in incentive bonuses it has so far accrued but not paid out, says an analyst who has publicly criticized the bank for not doing so already.

"We think it's going to be hard for the bank to justify paying out bonuses at that level in the face of such a massive loss," Robert Wessel of National Bank Financial said in an interview Tuesday after issuing a report on the matter. In the report, he estimates that CIBC's investment bank, which took the Enron hit, will lose $2-billion for fiscal 2005 as a whole.

A "material reversal" of the bonus accrual —which works out to $980-million annualized —could provide CIBC shareholders with "significant capital benefits (namely, earlier return of dividend increases or share buybacks)," Mr. Wessel said in the report.

If they don't there will be hell to pay. Time to stop the fantasy of being held hostage by the investment bankers guys.

If we look back at CIBC's problem it is that this idea of driving the entire bank by incentives that drives the deal above the bank which is what we saw drive the Enron deal. The bigger the deal, the less the bank's interests and the less the interests of the shareholders and in the end the depositors are taken into account,

What used to govern the risk behaviour of the old style investment banks was that we used to risk our own money. Now we risk monopoly money. Time to see that playing at investment banking means you play with your own money or not at all.

My plan?

My plan was to go to Montreal to pick up James and bring him home here for labour day weekend. We leave at dawn tomorrow. That was my plan.

Tonight the husband of an old friend who lives in Montreal called. Our friend is dying in Montreal. Just now, she has tipped into the final chapter. Plans change. We still pick up James but we go now for another reason- everything is perfect.

How did this happen? How did one plan lead to another? Why was it this weekend for her and for us? What gave us this opportunity to say good bye?

Jevon MacDonald - Special Man

My dear business partner, Jevon, is leaving PEI tomorrow with his new bride Laurel to make a home in Toronto while Laurel attends Medical school at U of T.

I feel like a father whose son is leaving home. I am so proud of him and wish him well and yet ..... while we live in a virtual world ...... I will miss being able to see as much of him as I could while we were both here on PEI.

Safe journey and best wishes
Rob