Robert Paterson's Weblog

Business & the Natural Step - My Fall Course at UPEI

Here is the link to my next course at UPEI this fall. The Course material opens as follows:

The Natural Step – Reconciling the Economy and the Planet

“The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account”
“Flow”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Introduction – Seeing our problems through a different lens
This course is about hope. It is about how each of us can take steps to shift the mindset that supports our view of the human economy so that business can become an agent of environmental regeneration and renewal.

You will learn about a set of principles called “The Natural Step”. Originally developed in Sweden, The Natural Step is now a global movement. Its value is that The Natural Step is inclusive. It does not preach nor does it tell you what to do. It asks you to look more deeply at how you interact with the planet leaving you to decide how to take your own steps to make your own life and the life systems of the planet better.

While simple, the Natural Step requires you to use a different lens or perspective which may be hard at first. It is like seeing the two women in this picture for the first time. You may struggle for a while to see the other woman, but once you see her you always will.

Why is having a new perspective important?

Few of us deny that we are in the midst of a growing environmental crisis. The 1990’s have been the warmest decade in recorded history. The wild fishery is under threat. Western agriculture is in economic and environmental turmoil. Supplies of fresh water are reaching their limits. Ice caps are melting. But just as our situation is becoming so obvious, we cannot agree on a solution.

The apparent success of our mindset about resources and business, has reinforced our assumptions that humanity has “Progressed” beyond the confines of the laws and processes of nature. Our “Progress” model has triumphantly overwhelmed cultures that maintained a connection to nature and has proved them “Wrong”. So when we sit down at Kyoto to discuss the environment, the debate is framed as a choice is between jobs or the planet. The protagonists each see the other as the “enemy”. The result is that we are trapped in conflict. Each side blames the other  and we muddle on, hoping that somehow “technology” will come up with the answer.

The Natural Step offers you a new lens to see yourself and the planet. By shifting your perspective, it will take your focus from the leaves of the trees, where disagreement is inevitable, to the roots where we can all find a common cause. Not only will it help you find this new common ground but The Natural Step provides you with a related set of diagnostic tools to help you make better decisions.

Our course will expose you not only to the theory but also to a number of case studies that will show how it has been applied.

Hugh McLeod and Tom Mahon - Teaching at UPEI

This summer I have just finished a small online class on the Market as a Conversation. We used a beautiful Conversation tool called the Sandbox designed and built by my partner Jevon Macdonald.

For our last paper we assumed that each of us was Tom Mahon and looked ahead to 2008 and told the story. Thank you Hugh for getting this powerful idea started - you certainly got the attention of my gang. here is how I set the paper up:-

Here is the scenario for your last paper - 1,000 words please. We are going to explore the world of the small and the personal in the hope that in this case study, you will find some insight that will help you do the same.

Your task is to imagine that you are Tom Mahon of English Cut - the Tailoring Business supported by Hugh Mcleod of Gaping Void and Hughtrain fame. It is 2008 what happened? How did your new approach begin? What was the influence of Hugh. What happened that was differenr from the traditional way of doing this? What is is about the Long Tail that fits? Why did you not grow beyond a certain size? As you became more successful (How) what did others like you do - in other words what was the larger impact of others who made bespoke products. What were the challenges? What were the lessons for you and for others?

Here are some resources:-

* The Long Tail (The Thesis) - Chris Anderson (His blog) shows how much of the new will be the small as helped by the distribution power of the web
* Small is big - Seth Godin The Guru of small
* The Dunbar Number - Why effective organizations are limited in size to a max of 150 and to smaller groups for creative work

I have kept the resource list short but please go deep - there is a ton in all these links. The Dunbar numbers are a new idea for you that we can explore a bit during the week

After a bit of a shock - after all they have spent 4 years being taught what marketing is (Ha ha) - my students got it immediately. My lesson here - if we want to make progress get to the kids. Once they see this they will never go back. If we can help enough to see it - the world will change.

Blogs and Education

"...... I look at my 13 year old sister who can design and make webpages. When I was her age - I was still in awe of the internet. I have bought some things online - but I'm sure my sister's generation will be much more eager to do so. I also noticed that my sister would rather chat on MSN to her boyfriend than talk on the phone. I asked her why one day and she said it was more fun on MSN.

Teenagers these days eh? haha"

This is a post in my class today from one of my class who may be 21.

Other than its funny to see the gap between a 13 year ols and her older sister - what else does this say to me?

It says that the interactive online world which is a mystery to most people is THE PREFERRED METHOD OF COMMUNICATION for most teens today.

This means that if you want to reach them you will have to use this channel
1. Advertising/Retailing
2. Education
3. Work
4. Health
5. Entertainment

So if you find all of this seems like a fad - worry

The Customer Revolution - IBM to sell its PC Operation

IBM announced yesterday that it had put its PC division on the block. One way of seeing this is simply a matter of the cycle of innovation where the PC is on the back end and has become a commodity. This is true but there is another factor working here as well. This is another event in the end of the traditional business model and the advent of a new one.

No major PC firm can compete with the Dell model of business. One response has been to get bigger - Compaq and HP are trying this. Another response is to exit, IBM. No one has responded by matching the Dell model of working back from the direct wishes of the customer. Why? I think that the answer is that if you have a culture embedded in you, change is all but impossible. The new model is powerful in two ways. The first is that it works. The second is that those who are best at working the old way cannot change to catch you.

You don't believe me? Look at Wal*Mart. Wal*Mart uses the new model. Everything works back from the store not out from Bentonville. The response from its major competitors - bankruptcy or merger. Do you believe that the Sears Kmart deal will threaten Wal*Mart? What will threaten Wal* Mart will be its size and success. As it becomes even more dominant it will create ever more opposition.

But its model of buying for you and giving you the best deal remains the key to its success.

The top down model not only does not buy for you - it works against you. The traditional model creates value by extracting it from us. The new model creates value by giving too us. This is a revolution of Copernican scale.

Imagine a bank that instead of pushing products at you all the time, instead constantly worked to find cheaper and more flexible products for you. Imagine a university that instead of raising fees every year and increasing class size and reducing student space did the opposite? Imagine a chain restaurant that instead of treating you like a piece of their production system, focused entirely on giving you and your date the most wonderful eating and social experience?

The traditional top down model is maxed out as a system. It cannot compete with the value creating model once a value creator has set up shop in the sector. I am convinced that, over the next 10 years, competitors will emerge in every sector of the economy and even in education and health care and sweep away the top down model.

If you want to know more about this idea please go to the continuation or to this link

The New Customer Revolution - How I think that it really works

The mass consumption, centralized machine model is dying. Why? Because it shrinks choice and voice. Its relationship with employees and with customers is primarily adversarial. Just as Ford changed everything 100 years ago for all business - so a new model is emerging now that will overwhelm the Ford model.

eBay, Amazon, Starbucks, Southwest, Wal*Mart and Dell are all redefining their sectors or have invented an entirely new way of doing business. I will be teaching a course at UPEI on this revolution starting in January about this. If you are interested, the continuation will show you the outline.

Business and the Natural Step - My Online Course for the Fall 2004

Here is a synopsis of the course that I will be offering this fall. The outline is here

The Natural Step – Reconciling the Economy and the Planet

“The most promising faith for the future might be based on the realization that the entire universe is a system related by common laws and that it makes no sense to impose our dreams and desires on nature without taking them into account” “Flow”, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi

Introduction – Seeing our problems through a different lens
This course is about hope. It is about how each of us can take steps to shift the mindset that supports our view of the human economy so that business can become an agent of environmental regeneration and renewal.

You will learn about a set of principles called “The Natural Step” Originally developed in Sweden, The Natural Step is now a global movement. Its value is that The Natural Step is inclusive. It does not preach nor does it tell you what to do. It asks you to look more deeply at how you interact with the planet leaving you to decide how to take your own steps to make your own life and the life systems of the planet better.

While simple, the Natural Step requires you to use a different lens or perspective which may be hard at first. It is like seeing the two women in this picture for the first time. You may struggle for a while to see the other woman, but once you see her you always will.

Why is having a new perspective important?

Few of us deny that we are in the midst of a growing environmental crisis. The 1990’s have been the warmest decade in recorded history. The wild fishery is under threat. Western agriculture is in economic and environmental turmoil. Supplies of fresh water are reaching their limits. Ice caps are melting. But just as our situation is becoming so obvious, we cannot agree on a solution.

The apparent success of our mindset about resources and business, has reinforced our assumptions that humanity has “Progressed” beyond the confines of the laws and processes of nature. Our “Progress” model has triumphantly overwhelmed cultures that maintained a connection to nature and has proved them “Wrong”. So when we sit down at Kyoto to discuss the environment, the debate is framed as a choice is between jobs or the planet. The protagonists each see the other as the “enemy”. The result is that we are trapped in conflict. Each side blames the other and we muddle on, hoping that somehow “technology” will come up with the answer.

The Natural Step offers you a new lens to see yourself and the planet. By shifting your perspective, it will take your focus from the leaves of the trees, where disagreement is inevitable, to the roots where we can all find a common cause. Not only will it help you find this new common ground but The Natural Step provides you with a related set of diagnostic tools to help you make better decisions.

Our course will expose you not only to the theory but also to a number of case studies that will show how it has been applied.

My Course - Server Down on Sunday

If you are taking my course and had problems logging on - sorry. The server was down today. In future I will post here if we have any further problems

Welcome Students for Understanding the Real New Economy

Welcome to the course. The course will be a weblog hosted course that will have its own site

Each of you will have a username and a password that I will email to you so that you can log on. The page that you see will be the "front page" where all our posts will be aggregated like the front page of a newspaper.

You will each have your own unique weblog that will link into this main page. You will be able to post original posts and you will be able to comment on any of the other students posts.

The site will go live on Monday June 21 so that you can find your way around. The class starts formally on July 7

You can see the course outline in an earlier post on this site

Please email me with your active email address and I will send the log on package to you

My Summer Course Online at UPEI

This July I will be offering a course on how we might start to undertand the real new economy - not the buzz words but the underlying systems that are taking us to a more natural metaphor.

I believe that the "New Economy" is not merely a new set of technology bolted onto the old but will be eventually be based on an entirely new doctrine - a new set of rules about the role of business, power and organization.

We will see that a new set of rules is eroding the power of centralization, corporatization, dehumanization and gigantism which are the last gasps of the old business model. We will see how the new rules, based on the network, the small the human and the dispersed, are going to provide the returns that a business requires and the power to transform society and the planet.

The course will contain a set of new rules and assumptions that will show us how we can have an economy that will enhance the natural world rather than over exploit it. We will see how we can end the perceived conflict between jobs or the planet. We will see how we can have both.

The Course is full but if you would like to see how this course might work please have a look at the extension.

Normally I offer my online courses via WebCT but this summer I will be experimenting with a blog based tool that will be custom built for me by my pals at Good Basic

Health - Our Immune system - A better perspective

In my course, we have been talking about the immune system. Here are my thoughts about how a focus on the immune system might help us break free of the costs and the failure of the medical model.

You raise the issue of the immune system. I think that in your lifetime, you will see that we increase our focus to this.

I have always found a useful metaphor for disease to be a herd of zebras being stalked by lions. The lions, bacteria, are always there. Their job is to keep the herd health up by culling the weak and the infirm. In areas where the high end predator is no more, herds grow too fast and in the end crash because they have taken up too much grazing. So long as an individual is healthy and fit, the lions will choose the infirm. so it is I believe with bacteria.

Bacteria are not our enemy not more than lions or wolves are enemies of zebras or deer. In fact they are an important system health enhancer.

You keep the lions or disease off your back by having a robust immune system. if you want to be healthy do everything that you can to improve your immune system. So what in practical terms can we do?

1. When you have a child - breast feed. The best way to inject your immune system into your baby who is largely unprotected. Formula has several other drawbacks. Touch is also a key to infant development. Breast feeding demands skin contact and a closer connection. I see so many people bottle feed almost at arms length and of course fully clothes. This is no small matter - touch is the critical mammal pathway to development. In some horrible experiments - Harlow - baby monkeys were offered a bottle in a wire doll or no food in a fuzzy doll and the babies chose the fuzzy doll before food every time.

This leads in to the key to development - attachment. As a parent the most important thing you can do to help your child be healthy in life - a robust immune system - is to also help them have a strong sense of self which paradoxically can only come from paying the child a lot of attention in the first 6 months of life. humans are born 6 months premature! Our brain size is so large relatively that we have to be born before our heads are too big for the mother's birth canal. Critical then for our development is to recognize the babies need to stay in a womb type of environment. In all traditional environments, mothers keep their babies attached in some type of pouch. Contact is all physical and the baby is never alone. women still work but they have the baby with them.

I am going on about babies because of the importance of the first 3 years in the development of our immune system and also our world view that will shape the rest of our lives and determine how we make our way from then. There is a ton of info if you are interested on my site Our Kids their Future

2. Reject external rewards as the guide to your happiness. Let me explain this more. Starting at school an maybe at home, we have all been taught that if we do well by another person's idea, your mum or your teacher, you will get a reward. We are therefore trained to gear our life to play the game of get the reward by pleasing another rather than by developing ourselves to please our selves. When we devote our lives to please mum, teacher, the boss , our friends, we lose who we are and we jump around all the time - this is highly stressful which is a major driver of the weakening of our immune system. There is a growing body of evidence that women who seek to please at their own cost are candidates for breast cancer. We get confused here with selfishness. I am not talking about being selfish. I am talking about being centered. There are marks in this course. I make it clear how to get them. It is up to you to meet the thresholds. This course is not for me, though I get my own thrill and my own learning from it. It is for each one of you as an individual. You can test yourself against your self. If you take care of your self so many of your worries go away and if you have taken care of yourself, you can help others. At the core of this is the idea of love. It is impossible to love others until you learn love yourself with all the frailties that each of us have. Which brings me to my last point about what we can do to have a robust immune system

3. The key to adult health and happiness is the nature of our relationships. To have health we must have a voice - we must know that we matter to some key people. The tragedy of the corporate Ford world is that it has taken our voice away. What we say means nothing. With no voice, we start to die spiritually. Our immune system goes into a tailspin and hence we have developed the chronic diseases of our time - obesity or substituting food for human comfort, back ache and chronic fatigue for lack off control, depression and even some types of cancer. The Ford system does not allow real relationships.

What do I mean by this? Look at survivor and all the so called reality shows. What real tribe would vote a person off the Island? In a real tribe, a tightly knit group of people bound to each other in social and work terms, You never leave a person behind. In the marines, you never leave a man behind. Why because your own survival and identity in a real tribe is bound up in the mutual love that each member has for the others. you may laugh at the idea of love in the Corps. Research is clear. In war men do not die for their country, nor for their unit - they die for their friends. Imagine a work force that felt this way about each other - Southwest maybe? An you see what a joy it must be to go to work when you feel that strongly about each other.

This for me is where the search for a new model will lead us I hope. To a way of being and working where we have a purpose that is noble and a fellowship of colleagues where we can truly be ourselves. Imagine what such an organization could do? Imagine how you would feel? Imagine what this would mean to your health?