Robert Paterson's Weblog

Creating Value in a world of infinite content - Charles Handelman

I was looking for a photo of the divine Olga Borodino and found this

Intrigued I looked further and found Charles Handelman's brilliant site where he takes a lifetime of listening and a museum sized collection to make meaning of the best of opera and those that sing in it.

His site is a delight - beautifully laid out with detailed liner notes and a very well executed podcasting process.

By the way - the image is related to singers who use the Chest Voice - that include Olga

I have some related ideas about how to create value in a world of infinite content - Here , Here and Here

The Revolution in Organizational Design

Over the last 3 years I have been struggling as I work with small organizations that have few resources such as Public Radio/TV, NGO's, ultra small businesses to see how they could become powerful. How could they get all the resources they need knowing that they do not have access to lots of money? How could they expand without lots of money. How could they have influence without lots of money?

How could they do all of this and still have a life and have fun? What a concept!

We knew that some kind of "Wirearchy" would be the answer - some aspect of using networks well. We knew that social media might be the agent for change. But what was it/ How could it be described so that anyone who wanted to could act?

By trial and error - by really examining what was working and not - we have been able to come up with what I think is a theory that is very easy to understand. It is easy because, like Galileo's work - it is based on observation. We discovered it by looking at real things - so you can too.

We have been able to act upon it and to articulate it. I would like to share our findings with you here.

1. The Problem of the Current Orthodoxy - The Wizard behind the curtain. Why our current way of organizing is a feudal/medieval approach that cannot cope by design with complexity. Why "They" won't be able to see it.

2. Why culture is the new competitive barrier - Why most, like the medieval church just cannot get it and why therefore those that do will run rings around them - their own mindset prevents them from changing. Why you can use their blockage to your benefit

3. What is the new model?   Our Ptolemaic Revolution - Its all about Energy vs Kinetic or Mechanical Power. Why is actually a "Solar System" - How you use energy to attract resources and social media to hold the system together - shifting from a mechanical or kinetic view of power to energy as an attractor - why the 1% rule works - why Wikpedia is like a solar system. How this works in practice

4. Deepening the understanding of the power of the Donut to attract resources - Why the key to the kingdom is the interaction of the centre to the inner ring - why most of the work goes away - why work can become fun again. How the Tipping Point fits into this idea - why the 1% rule works in more detail

5. 2 illustrations of the difference - choreography versus community - simple videos showing performance versus participation

6. Where value is in a world of infinite content - Why all value is based on what is truly scarce - In a world where things are abundant what is scarce is "Meaning" - The underlying shift in value from things to meaning - What this means in practice -  why Google is so successful and most media companies not - where do we find meaning and hence value

7. How this applies to Food - The Core process of all civilizations - how we can eat better, more safely and restore the environment - how farmers can make a living again - how we give meaning back to food

8. How when this model plays out we can all go home again - the end of thee work life balance issue - how we give meaning to a whole life and end the division between work and everything else

Grace

One the aspects of politics that I really hate is how it is so easy to hurt people to make your point.

Right now on PEI I see two very brave people.

Cynthia Dunsford who had the courage to call a colleague on a very tough issue that was going to make life hell for her and for him. What would you have done? She is clearly a brave person who has taken a stand when most would have wavered. I probably would have wavered.

Rory Beck for not ducking or wavering but for responding with real grace. What would you have done?  I take my hat off to Rory. What an act of courage to behave now as he is. I am sure that I would not have his grit.

The outcome for the PEI Civil service is that it is strengthened. Those who are tempted can see the risks. Those that may feel vulnerable know that they are protected. The system is strengthened.

So what is the call for a full inquiry about? Imagine that you were one of the principals. Could you bear this private moment being made public? In the future, would you come forward? Why do you and I need to know the details? There is nothing good that can come from this.

So why? Because this is how politics is played here. It's a game that hurts people. So I ask Ms Crane to explain herself.

What good do you expect to come from such an inquiry? Why do I and the public need to know the details of what happened? How will the system be improved? What would be the risks? Why should the principals who have settled their issues between them have to be judged by a third party?

I had expected better.

Gmail Phish?

I got this today - asked me for all my account details

Relationship - Connection - Walking the same path

Tom asked in a comment what I meant by relationship.

Here is a picture of Robin and I walking along the beach at St Andrews a few years ago. Robin is wearing a hat because at the time she had no hair. She was in the midst of a gruesome series of chemo.

I bring this up because of the work that Robin does. She is a hospice volunteer.

My point about relationship is this. Most of the people that she works with have cancer and have had or are enduring chemo. She can quietly tell them that she knows what this is all about. Not just the hell of the treatment but the ongoing question of what will it be like to die a hard and early death.

When she makes this connection - everything changes.

We think today that making a good presentation is about artifice - being skilled at Power Point. We think today that offering good medical care is about technical skill (true for surgery). We think that being a good teacher is all about the technical qualification. We think that making good programs is all about again the technical skill.

But while these skills are important - maybe not power point - it is the connection that is the key to the kingdom.

When the hearts are joined, great things can happen.

I think that what we can so easily miss is that we are also energetic beings. We have become so focused on the kinetic side of life - the tangible surface - that we miss that reality, that it is how we feel that drives our existence.

The scarcest item in the world today is trust. By making everything kinetic, we have reduced everything to a meaningless commodity.

Those who understand that bringing meaning and trust back to what they do, will prosper.

The War - Ken Burns - 4,889 People - Everyone a son, a brother, a husband, a friend - a citizen of St Louis

This Sunday, The War premieres. On Saturday, KETC shows a one hour program that remembers the 4,889 dead from St Louis. Each one a catastrophe for the family involved. I saw the preview hosted by WOSU in Columbus last week and as the days have gone by, have this to say about what I think you will discover for yourself as you watch the series.

Burns will take you to a place that I think has never been done before on screen. First of all he attaches you closely to a few individuals. You get to know them as close friends. They will become important to you. Then he shows war as maybe you have never seen it before. This is not some distanced footage and generals and historians talking. He shows war as a dangerous, messy, bloody, cruel business that is all about killing, being killed and hurt.  He shows the progression of physical and emotional exhaustion that builds over time that shut down the better parts of us. This is not Hollywood. This is not the History Channel.

For maybe the first time, we see war on a screen in context. The context is that we now care. I began to worry - what would happen to the people that I had become attached to? Then I started to think - how would I have behaved. The footage keeps coming back to intimate shots of both the carnage and the growing numbness that has to occur for men to cope. But at home - there is just the dull ache of constant fear. Will you son come home? What is happening to him.

This is a masterpeice. A materpiece because, Burns, as a great artist, has made that connection from the people on the screen to us the people watching - his brilliance is in making this connection live. We care.

So I return to what KETC and many other stations have been doing in the run up to the show. They have been making the connection between their community and the war - setting yet a deeper context between the viewer and the show and more important for the station between the viewer and the viewer with the station as the mediator.

This is the great lesson that we have been learning and part of the gift that Burns gave us. We too are learning to expand our roles as mere broadcasters and to become meaning makers. We begin to serve - really serve - our home towns. Here is Kate Shaw of KETC telling us what this has meant for her

Until it went into production, the list of names was a 2-inch stack of papers that Dale carried with her wherever she went. I remember seeing this stack for the first time at one of our meetings and I was kind of stunned by the significance of it. I went through the names then and found some of the friends and family members mentioned by people I had interviewed. It made all of the talk of death very, very real. I am so glad that we are paying tribute to these folks who are still so vividly remembered so many years later…I will be watching Saturday night for the same reason, with my heart going out to all of the people who lost someone in WWII.

The War is on nearly every night this week. Next Sunday PBS will show 5 episodes in a row. Please tune in - it is the best TV that has ever been produced.

Blogged with Flock

Tags: TheWar, KETC, PBS, WOSU, St Louis, Columbus,

The New Business Model is in Sight

The Times took down the pay wall today - all pretense by anyone that you can get adequately paid for content is now over.

So what will people pay you for? I have done my best to answer that question here on Fast Forward.

This is no longer speculation - I think that my clients and I are 80% of the way there

Labelling - Can you Trust "Organic"

While working as an independent organic food inspector, Mischa Popoff says he felt like "a police officer without a billy club or handcuffs." When he found four jugs of herbicide -- each containing four litres of prohibited spray -- inside one organic farmer's garage, Popoff ordered crop sampling be done at a lab. But that never happened because, he was told by the certifying body that hired him, "it's too expensive to run tests," Popoff recalls. When he asked a pig producer who also grows certified organic produce to prove that he wasn't putting liquid hog manure on those fields, which is often forbidden under organic guidelines, the farmer couldn't, and the matter ended there.

Popoff, who inspected more than 500 farms in North America over five years before he left the industry in 2003, says that he's suspected 16 instances of negligence and fraud by farmers who were nevertheless certified organic; he is sure of about at least five of those cases. "There's never one rat. There's always more in the wall," says Popoff, who was designated an advance process auditor by the Independent Organic Inspectors Association, and is now a certification consultant. "I don't want to say 50 per cent of farmers are cheating. But I also don't want to say five out of 500 is okay. I can't live with that."

This article in Macleans gets behind the issue of regulation as a process. It makes it clear to me that regulating is really a game that is gamed. We are naive to accept regulation in any field.

Regulation also favors the industrial over the small as it tends to drive so much cost. Health regulation for food actually drives out small and healthy producers. Here is Chef Michael Smith on this:

For chef Smith, who advocates for community-supported agriculture initiatives such as buying weekly field boxes from local farmers, deficiencies in the organic certification process today come as no surprise. "I've been hearing this for years," Smith says. "I can't tell you how many farmers I know who say, 'Why bother [getting certified]? It's a contradictory morass of regulations that gets in the way of me actually doing anything.' "

In a year and a half, however, organic farmers will have no choice if they want to sell outside their province. Smith says that while he is concerned about dubious claims, he supports organic production. Even Popoff recommends buying organic; the only problem, he says, will be "finding food that really is organic."

What does work is where Trust is made personal and we know who we are dealing with. With modern technology, it is possible, as we see with eBay, to have large systems based on personal trust.

We can do this - we can set up a system where those who are in it - like eBay have an interest in building Trust. It is cheap and it favours the good

The Face of Evil - Cat Jekyll and Hyde

She looks sweet - but - we live with a serial killer. Nearly every night she returns with some poor rodent. Some are simply left to run around in the house like the one last night that ran over Robin's head at 3.30am. I won't go into details but you can imagine her response.

Some are almost entirely consumed with just maybe a furry face or a gall bladder left on the carpet. Some, like the night before last, look as if Pussee (her name) is learning biology and has displayed the inside of the body for us to review.

During the day, she hangs around and sleeps - only interrupted by official meal times. She sometimes prances along with me and the dogs for part of the walk. My favorite times are when Jay feels she is too close and shows her all his teeth - I keep praying!

Well enough is enough. We have taken down the cat ladder that enabled her to get to our bedroom window and meow for attention. I long for the snow when her hunting ceases and we get a break from disposing of all the dead bodies.

The dogs and I are fed up.

Regulation may be part of the probem - Food Safety

There is a huge fuss in England right now. Finally the regulator has announced, after yet another trial, that some popular additives in soft drinks and food, are a significant cause of hyperactivity in children. The Prime Minister is outraged - the supermarkets will take steps etc.

Research for the Food Standards Agency (FSA) and published in The Lancet has established the “deleterious effects” of taking a mixture of artifical extras that are added to drinks, sweets and processed foods. It has led the FSA to issue the advice to parents who believe their children to be hyperactive that they should cut out foods containing the E numbers analysed in the study.

But the FSA has been accused of missing an opportunity to protect children and all consumers by failing to impose a deadline on manufacturers to remove additives such as Sunshine Yellow and Tartrazine from their products.

But this is not news. Many have known about these effects for 30 years. Why the delay?  Regulators are only human and they operate in a system. They people they meet the most are the "Industry". It's like the Stockholm syndrome:

Stockholm syndrome is a psychological response sometimes seen in an abducted hostage, in which the hostage shows signs of loyalty to the hostage-taker, regardless of the danger (or at least risk) in which the hostage has been placed.

So if you are a food regulator - you mainly hear the ideas of the food industry. They become your colleagues and even friends. In effect the industry regulates itself - BUT WE THINK that regulation is independent and looks after our interests. The bottom line is that we have placed our trust in a system that is run by the industry and for the industry's interests.

That is why for instance, in the meat & poultry industries, the focus is on refrigeration, expensive plant issues and high cooking temperatures at home. All this puts a burden on the small producer that they cannot meet. It hides the key health issue which is that it is how the animal lives and is killed that is where the risk really lies.

All hamburger is suspect and it seems that every week there is a new problem. We are told correctly to cook hamburger well. Why? Because the centralized and  industrial process used to kill and to process meat makes contamination inevitable.

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Fairbank Farms, a U.S. ground beef producer, said on Wednesday it is voluntarily recalling beef patties sold to Shaw's Supermarkets in New England because of concerns about bacterial contamination.

So small butchers and small milk plants have been put out of business. Animals are killed in massive operations. Small and local is impossible. For instance there is pressure at the Farmer's Market here on PEI to put in refrigeration for eggs. If the Market loses, we on PEI will lose our only access to real free range eggs. There will only be supermarket eggs available and all the small producers will have to give up or go blackmarket.

Did you know that a healthy egg can live for weeks. Once it is refrigerated it dies. What is a healthy egg? It is one produced by a healthy chicken and a healthy chicken is one that has a real chicken life. It is the poor battery hens that by virtue of their living conditions routinely have salmonella in the eggs.

The Local Food movement is being stymied by a regulatory system that makes it impossible to run a small processing operation. Our health is at risk because we unknowingly support regulation that supports a food system that cannot be trusted and that creates risk. We are blind to the reality that our regulatory system has been inadvertently high jacked by the industries they purport to regulate.

So what do we do?

Here is where I think the Food Trust has an answer. It is possible to set up a system today where you can find out who grew your food and how. It is time to give up commodity and to seek reality. The technology now allows this to happen at scale.

We have to demand provenance. We have to know who grew what and how and how the food was processed. So how do we do this? We can't just use contract law. All contract law in any system is there to be gamed. Look at poor Mattel who can't even keep their toy suppliers in line.

We can trust in the age old system of honor and reputation - when both mean something. I can trust a farmer whose name I know and whose name is important to him or her. I cannot trust a system that is gamed.

We buy as much of our food directly on PEI. Here are some places where you can do this. So if I shop at the farmer's market, I can look Raymond Loo or the Ling family in the eye and know that they are doing their best.  If you buy a Food Trust product  you can know that Alan and the gang have done their best to connect me to their small group of named farmers. Here is where FT products can be found.

So what about the larger market then? Are they condemned to be at risk? I don't think so. There is a very modern version of the Farmers Market that could be set up. I can see a kind of eBay system emerging where Trust Ratings are not made by some regulator but by consumers on people that have a name.

Oh it can't be done? Really - who might be the least trusted business people out there? I think that second hand car dealers might be in the ranking. Well having to maintain a trust rating on eBay Motors has transformed the business. Here it is worth the suppliers while to be straight. eBay is a scale business.

What about taking this approach?