Robert Paterson's Weblog

Are you a Robot or a Human? - "Fit"

My regular readers have had to endure months of my banging on about my "diet". I think I have not described what I am trying to do broadly enough for while what I eat is having a massive impact on me, I think that the larger context is more helpful.

What can we learn from our past that can help us make a better people - healthier, happer and more fulfilled? 

I ask this question becuase it is clear that more of us now are none of these things.

My bet is that the more we fit who we really are the more we will indeed be healthier, happier and more fulfilled.

So my question to myself and so to you is - How far have I drifted away from a good fit with my innate Human Nature? After months of thinking about ths, I have come up with this simple model.

The best Fit with the food that we are evolved to eat. The best Fit with the social conditions that we are evolved to do best in. And the best Fit with the needs of our body and its place in the natural world.

The ideal would be a total Fit based on our evolution. So what to aim for? What do we know abut what this best fit should be? 

We have a pretty good feel for this.

We are not "Instant" People. You and I are simply a Face applied to millions years of primate evolution and of course to 4 1/2 billion years of evolution. So let's look at 

1. Food
2. Social
3. World

Food

There is an important shift in this progression. Did you notice it? It is about 2 million years ago when we lost our ape like massive chewing jaw and we lost much of our gut and so became more gracile. Some thing caused us to lose the ability to chew for hours and to digest plants. Whatever it was also gave us a jump in height as well. We also lost most of our body hair. Our brains also doubled in size. 

What could have done that?  Only more and easily accessed protein. Wranghm suggests that we probably tamed fire. This enabled us to eat more meat. That it turn made for larger brains. That in turn made for better hunting and so on. As we hunted more, we lost our hair.

The main ingredient for this breakthrough from primate to human must have been that we could get and also consume a lot more protein. Meat is the centre piece of such a breakthrough. 

Cooking is the vector to this massive increase in the consumption of meat. Try this. Try and eat a 10 ounce steak 2 inches thick raw. You will be exhausted before you get half way through. Before cooking all we could eat was the easy stuff - eyeballs, the liver etc. We would have had to leave 90% of the carcass. What society would have invested in the risks and effort of hunting if this was the only reward?

Fire and hunting for meat also shaped our body and our social structure. With fire, we could lose most of our hair.

As a result, man in Africa had developed a brilliant hunting strategy. We can run in the sun. We are not fast, but like wolves in winter, we can run down anything. In the middle of the day, the largest animal can be reduced to a wreck.

This kind of hunting also changed our social setting. All primates, except for Bonobos DO NOT SHARE food. Wolves do. This suggests that we evoled like wolves into highly social and cooperative groups. We must have had very similar social conditions to a wolf pack. No wonder that Dogs became our closest ally! We evolved to share a similar culture. A Culture that evolved from how we got our food.

So here is the choice we have for what we eat. On the left is the "Official" line for the healthy diet for a Diabetic!!!!! On the right is what we are designed to eat.

Oh but you may say, we can evolve to eat anything?

No we cannot and don't. If you are a Swede, your skin colour is not going to evolve unless you breed into another race. If you are a whale, you are NEVER going to get your gills back. It would be more than great if they could but they can't.

Grains are a modern food. Highly processed foods are not even food at all.

Social

Of course everything is connected. There really are not any categories. It's just that I don't know how to discuss this without making neat categories. So bear with me.

How we got and ate our food made us human. We became highly cooperative. In sharing food around the fire we probably developed language. (Putnam)

Our ideal social structures have know boundaries and an optimal culture. 

The ideal culture is tribal - that is that all in the group are bound up in the real issues of survival. Like a submarine crew (Tom!) There is a hierarchy but all share the same living conditions and all live or die togther. As Tom, my submariner friend will attest - this is a social world that is very high performance and where you feel great - no matter whether you are on the top or the bottom rung of the ladder.

Submarine crews are also small. Few would exceed the Maximum Dunbar number of 144. So all know all. Life is lived in public on a sub. You live with your ship mates. The same is true for firemen. This is why the issue of women in firehalls or on subs is so tricky. The real issue is not skill it is intimacy. Tribal life is intimate. You do not leave part of you ashore or at home. All of you is in the tribe.

In the ideal social setting there is no distinction therefore between work and home. They are the same. Those of us that Freelance have this life again.

Those of us that Freelance also are Hunter Gathgerers again too. We rely on the tribe and our knowledge of the hunting grounds to give us food. We make love to our partner ansd we raise children with them. We do not pretend to be robots.

How much trust do you have in your social world? Do you have a group of more than 8 who really care for you and you for them? If you don't, you will not be well. You not designed to be alone in the world.

World

You are also not designed to be removed from your body or the natural world around you.

Our ancestors did not take exercise. They were "active"! Active in the world. Every day involved carrying a two year old and firewood. Our running down an animal and carrying it back to the camp. 

Being active does not mean these obvious things either.

I find it ironic that even the chair is very modern. 500 years ago in Europe only Kings sat in chairs. The rest of us sat on benches or stools. We mostly stood or squatted. Our bodies were moving all the time.

We also inhabited the natural world and our bodies made all sorts of exquisite adjustments to light. How do you sleep? Not well. Maybe too much light at the end of your day.

Simply being a part of the natural world is good for us. 

So all these 3 aspects of our lives are part of the best fit that we can have.

This man is in his 60's. He is a chief. Compare yourself with him. Not just the abs! Can you feel his energy?

This is what we are designed to look like and to be like. If we live this life, we can expect to be fit, active, healthy happy and fulfilled.

So here is your homework. Think about each of these sections. How close are you to the Robot or to the Garden Of Eden?

If you are far away, what might you be able to do to get you closer to the best Fit?

Food is a good place to start. You have the most control here.

Again it is not as simple as buy the right food. Making food was itself a collective gift - eating it together the centre of human society. Food is not just energy but the social glue.

And Guys, the more you help in the kitchen, the more you listen and pay attention at the table, the more you will be rewarded in other ooms in the house. And parents, the more that happens at the family table, the more your kids learn to be humans and not monsters.

 

 

 

Capitalism 2.0 - Is this what it might be?

Much of our discourse about the New Enterprise seems to use the premise that our traditional business organizations will be transformed.  I am beginning to doubt that. But I think that there is a new Enterprise but that it will look more like that I propose in this post.

All the news about employment remains bad. Will the jobs ever come back? I don't think so. Business as we know it makes less and less and in reality offers fewer roles and jobs that have any meaning or that can pay todays bills. Business  as we know it has no capacity to offer most people what they need.

I think that the real new economy is going to emerge out of desperation and out of this failure.

Here are some trends that we should watch out for. They are all  linked into the great Trinity of real needs - Food - Shelter and Surplus

Hyper Local Food - If you have no money, food becomes very important. The Food Bank model takes us no where - it relies on charity - offers shit food and does not add any impetus to the lack of work or role. People are doing better than this by making the growing of food the centre piece. Here is an example. We see already in the worst hit cities like Detroit, that people are starting to grow their own food amidst the ruins of the city. And its not just that food is grown but that real community is created. People who grow food together and then share it return to the society of our hunter gatherer past. They become Tribes. With this Trust comes the potential to do more.

Cheap Land and Real Estate - As many areas become blighted, the land and the space becomes very cheap. Offering the opportunity to get the second part of the  trinity. In the old model, people would have to pay others to make shelter or working space. But if enough Trust is created by say starting with co growing and sharing food, then "Barn Building" is possible. The "Tribes can help the members have shelter or work space. The capital that is required is less financial capital but social capital.

Surplus - But we still all need money or some way of exchanging value outside the Tribe. This is where the social web comes in. There can be a surplus of food that can be sold locally. Inner Detroit is a food desert. There are only corner stores. This is true for many urban areas. The food operation can scale and can also network with others offering in the end large scale. 1,000 mini farms in a large city can produce a very large amount of food collectively. Enough to feed most people. A real surplus is possible. Those who start to grow food to feed themselves will make a good living feeding other. With this surplus and with their social capital all sorts of new ventures then becomes possible. For the capital costs of business in this context are very low. Anything will soon be able to be made locally with very little capital. This trend is most visible in the media now. Did you know that True Grit was edited by the Coen brothers on Final Cut Pro,? The technology is here right now that can empower a small hyper local group to go even into manufacturing. Here I see the idea like Fab Labs coming into prominence. For about $25,000 a community can equip itself to make almost anything. As with a network of tiny farms, a network of tiny shops can build on a large scale. This was how in fact Germany kept its war production growing throughout WWII. To avoid bombing, all aircraft production was dispersed into small shops and the parts were assembled at the bases!

Again as with food - the social web connects all of this. Producers to Buyers - Suppliers to producers - Producers to Producers. In a network  the nodes are small, but the network and so the output and the opportunity can be vast. In the old, we all depend on the MAN. In the network we are all the man. No one is going to move your urban farm to Iowa or your Fab Lab to China.

Food is the starting point I think. We all need it and if we go down this road we re-invent society. Food offers us the core of what we need and growing it and sharing it creates a real tribe. For a food model like this brings us all back together where as the old model splits us all up.

So with this wealth model come also wealth distribution. A new better form of capitalism. Capitalism 2.0?

 

"Lessons" - "Deeper Conversations" with Johnnie Moore - Part of 4

What's wrong with this skier? 

He is trying to ski by thinking. He is thinking so hard that he cannot "hear" the hill or his body. He is thinking so much that he might miss a fallen skier or a tree - for he is thinking so hard that he cannot see. His fear also causes him to miss the key risk and control factor. Fearing falling or going too fast, he leans back instead of down the hill.

He is thinking so much that he cannot have a conversation with his own body or with the world that surrounds him. 

He is thinking so much that he gets exhausted very quickly because he is fighting himself, the hill and the universe. And just thinking so hard uses up so much energy. 

He is not having a "Deep Conversation". He is relying on his rational mind to guide him in a novel and complex situation. This is what most of us do at work and in our personal lives. 

The most important conversation that we need to have is within ourselves. This is the core lesson of having Deeper Conversation. That to have a deeper conversation with others and with the univers, we must be able to have such a conversation inside us. This is the topic of this our last of 4 parts of my 4 part series that synthesizes a longer series of talks I have had with the brilliant Johnnie Moore. (Part 1 - Part 2 - Part 3)

It's the classic psych drama. We have got so used to giving our rational mind primacy that we allow it to fill our consciousness with its chatter and worries. Mothers worry about what the book says about their kids. Managers seek control. You wake up in the middle of the night consumed by a fear and if you can surpress it, find another one right behind it. At school this part of our mind is the only part that counts.

Yes the new skier has to "know" the theory of skiing - well maybe not... Adults have a huge problem learning to ski - I did at 40 - but kids know no theory. Their rational mind has not yet taken over. No one told them the theory of walking or language, they just got on with it and did what FELT right.

Kids use their full range of channels. They listen to their body and they feel their way into novelty. They learn to walk and to talk and to stand upright. They learn so much before they go to school!

But we adults, who know better because we have been to school, wait to be told by a higher authority. In this universe, all the other parts of our mind are closed down and the Ego is given precedence.

So how do we get the rest of our mind back. How do we tune into all the channels in our body so that we can feel the hill or our way though a novel and a complex situation? For as all adult ski learners know, we have had this ability whacked out of us at school and at work.

Johnnie reminded me that it's all about habits. We have lost the habits that help us access this power to use our whole mind, so it helps to set up new habits to bring the whole mind back and to put the Ego into his place - a minor character!

Sit as often as you can in a circle. This brings the field into its best quality. Access the Field.

Before you get down to business check in as to how you all are. This might be how you feel - what you are feeling about the task at hand in your body. This type of sharing brings up the common humanity of you all. The leader may be feeling anxious in her stomach about the result. Hearing this, we can all relax more. Any good consultant has such a go around at the beginning of a meeting so that the Field can be awaked. I know to many this may sound very new age - but my question to you is do you want to ski like me or like my son?

Surely no one wants to ski like me? That is what is at stake here. Real results - getting all the wisdom from all the minds into play and in getting more cohesion in the team are what is at stake here.

Beware of "Action" as a demanded result.

You know what has happened here don't you? Trying too hard leads to a failure and then to bad feelings and then a habit of trying too hard and so on. The point of good sex is not the erection but the communication and the shared love. Bringing your rational mind into the bedroom is a disaster. So it is in meetings.

The key result is to have the team both together and open. Then the "Whole Mind of the Team is brought into play. THEN you can start to see your way through the paradoxes that make up any complex situation.

For the issues that confront organizations and us as individuals today are not simple, or even complicated. They are Complex. So by definition are not able to be solved by the rational mind. Your response will be to reinvent your business or you.

Let me give you 2 examples - one a corporate one that Johhnie and I worked on with NPR and 300 stations and the other a new problem that confronts me and all of us in middle age.

This was the complex problem that we used to have a Deeper Conversation inside NPR where all the senior management, the board and over 200 staff participated along with the leadership of 300 stations. At the outset NO ONE could know the answer. That is the definition of a Complex problem - the answer cannot be predicted rationally it can only emerge as a result of lots of trial and error. What we did was to set up many many meetings where the groups "Played" with this problem - we in effect set up a process of iteration that could enable answers over time to emerge.

The challenge was this - We assumed, now rightly, that in 2009, the web would be ubiquitous. NPR and the Stations were then in 2005 at a high point with their listeners on terrestrial radio but at ground zero with the web. How were they going to grow the web side and not lose the listeners? How was NPR to do this and not lose the stations? What were the stations going to do? For one thing was clear, and that was by 2009, the world would be very different. 

To set up the larger field where all could participate - we used "Play". I have found that if you think of complex problems that might involve you losing your current power in role, the job of protecting your status quo is paramount. This is why when we ask the Usual Suspects to think of the future of their field, say health, they act to preserve the status quo. They cannot go beyond this. A rational role based discusion about novelty has to fail. For our ego will force us to lean back and try and protect what we know and our current power.

So we made this exploration into a game. I won't go into the details but to say that to wrestle with complex problems demands that you give up your role. Back to kids again - they learn all the vital lessons of life via play.

The results come through emergence which comes from trial and error. In complex situations you CANNOT know the answer up front. It is impossible. Remembering this is very helpful. No senior NPOR person presumed to know. All were equals in ignorance. This opened up the field. At the end of each session, each group had to put on a play - they had to express what they thought the future would be - and you know they were right - they found it.

Does this work? Each of the many independent sessions came to this conclusion - that the power of choice of what to listen too had to shift to the listener. Now we all know this right? No we only know this as lip service. You have to have wrestled with this and seen the alternatives and felt that this is true to accept it. We all "Know" that we have to lean DOWN the hill to get control - BUT this is not what we do as learners for though we know it to be true - we CAN"T do it - it is too scary and too counter our old reality. 

Does this work? Well what media organization is best equipped for dealing with he online world right now? I would say NPR. So what was the result of our work with NPR? It was not the plan that came out of the process. It was that 300 people in NPR had wrestled with the problem and had felt their way into the future, so that when a new leader arrived with the mandate and the attitude to go for it, there was a mass aha! Not the normal resistance that you get when a big change is dropped in the organization from on high.

Meetings that start with a demand for action and results - are often code for a desire to lean up the hill. Let's stay in the rut where I can control what is going on because I feel safe there. When you demand results or action - what do you mean? Most of the time it means a focus on the minutiae - like the skier focusing on thinking his way into the turn - forcing himself to turn rather that letting the hill and his body do it all for him.  When we work on the surface we force the whole team into this posture. It is our fear that keeps us from skiing. It is the fear that stops many still in radio and the media from allowing the gravity of the Hill of the New Web to help them get a new control.

The ongoing result that all teams need in complex times is to be so comfortable with each other that they play intuitively like a basketball team on fire. Look at this player - he is not thinking - he KNOWS where the pass will go. We have to really know each other. We have to bring our Whole Mind into play. 

If you work on the key result being a well functioning team, THEY will do the heavy work. The real ACTION is to get the team using all their whole mind as individuals and as a team. Like a good skier, there is no time to "Think" on the court. You have to be able to sense what is going on.

So let's extend this a bit and look at an issue that affects us all - our health. My task - to find a question that engages anyone. From a personal point of view.

Here is one for me and for you that I hope illustrates this principle. I am looking at the health costs for PEI. An important question but very abstract and with many people with hard views. So how to use a question to break the logjam? This is my starting question that only invites each of us as people into the realm of the question. I start as Johnnie suggest with a question that gets us to react by feeling it out. 

See the red line. That is how men on PEI age and deteriorate. The average age of death is 75. But by 65 the average man is in such bad health as to be helpless and dependent. From this stage more than half his lifetime cost to the health system will be spent. These are real data points.

Now see the black line. This is my goal for my own life. Aging as we know it is not natural. The black line is the natural aging process. In nature aging hits a threshold and then the deterioration stops - if you make 85 and are fit and not demented you will likely stay the same until you die - and that might be 95 - 100 - or 105. You will die - but you wont deteriorate more. There is a ton of evidence and work behind this - just trust on this right now there are books and books to be written and I can only point this out to you in this post. 

The research suggests that I and you can push this point of stability back to 55 or 60 - my current age. I can be at choice. I can choose to change nothing and I will get ill and degrade. Or I can choose to change my life and have a good chance that I will die healthy and a contributor. Now I can choose either one  - newspapers chose degradation - but it is a choice.

But choosing life is not enough. Knowing where to go is not enough. Like NPR I have to find out how to live differently. I will have to learn how to change the habits of a lifetime. This is hard.

How hard? This involves my giving up modern food. All processed food as a start. All grains and all dairy too. It means that I have instead to eat what people did in our hunter gatherer period. I also have to do many other things to get a better fit with my deep biology. Sleep more. Be outside more. Walk more. Have a mission in life that is bigger than me and so on - I will be posting tons on this later.

So here is the point. I know this. You can know it too. You know that when you ski you must lean down the hill. But knowing and doing are 2 different things. Changing the habits of a lifetime is very very very hard. Doing something that NONE of your peers are doing is as hard. This is the landscape of real change - being out of step with the mainstream - not knowing what to do - being pulled back all the time by your old habits.

Like Beowulf and Grendel - you have to have the energy to kill the old inner you.

But if you have asked the right question, we can wrestle with it. You can feel enough to kill off the old you who will fight to keep you stuck.

Thought is not enough. You must have emotional power that comes from how you feel about a situation. Here is my feeling test about my health that is raised by the Question I posed. 

• Do I want to become feeble at 65? What will this mean to my family? No I don't want that - I would feel as if I betrayed them because I know what I know now - that had the choice and chose pizza over them
• Can I afford to be feeble? I worry about my savings and if I will have enough - can I afford to be feeble? I don't have the money and I doubt the state will have it either - I will be fucked if I stay as I am.
• How do I feel now? How do I look? How capable am I now? Would I like to feel, look and be better soon? Of course I want to look and feel beter - I have noticed how weak and inflexible I am and wish I was fitter.
• I know I am weak of will and that changing all these things will be hard - so what feedback and what support can I tap into to help me? I know I cannot do this on my own? In the few times I have made other major changes, it was the support I had that made all the difference - I know that I am weak!
• Are there good tips that I can use to help me? I need reinforcement to get over the early hump - I know that other people's experience will help me

I have a rational argument but my feeling argument has more power over my behaviour - The Rational is the Volts - the Feeling is the Amps. It's the Feedback that encourages us and shows us the path:

• I have lost 15 pounds and most importantly my 6 months pregnant belly is nearly flat - this is very reinforcing
• I am never hungry - and the signal that I get when I am full kicks in immediately - that helps me not overeat.
• When I fall off the wagon and have bread and cheese I feel like shit - not guilty I l feel bloated and sick
• I look forward to my walks with the dogs - I want to do it more than they do now - it helps me think and do better work too
• My wife is completely onside and my friends who have not seen me in some time comment on how well I am - important people are encouraging me

So I could not have a plan from the question but the question gets at the heart of the matter FOR ME.

We all have to feel our way into change. The mind is not enough. The body has to power us into the new. We have to be able to hear what our body says. We have to be like kids again and play our way into the future.

So what is the biggest lesson of all?

We come back to Johnnie's key lesson. We have to calm the mind so that we can hear the rest of the conversation in our body. Our mind can show the way but the getting there is all bout the rest of us. This goes for teams too. If we can create enough personal trust we can access the Whole Mind of the group. THEN we can win any game set for us. 

Your work and mine is to put him in his place - shut him up - so that we can hear the full you and me.

The Sleeper must awake

 

 

 

 

Raj on the Value of Nothing - Brilliance in 3 Minutes

 HT Charles Frith

This is the pathway to our future - we go this way or we go nowhere - and you only have to invest 3 minutes to hear the ultimate in coherence - a masterpiece of compression and story telling - I am aghast at how thoughtful he is.

Boingo - The Power of Strong Ties

What would it be like if your business had a sales, marketing and support force that was 1.3 million strong that you did not have to pay for? What if you could source this leverage with a tiny central force? Sounds impossible? Do you have any idea of how this could work?

Now that everyone is using Social Media – what I am seeing mainly are people who using the new tool in the old way – trying to shout above the noise – “Look at ME!” “Aren’t I cool!” “Aren’t we good!”. I am seeing a Dilbert approach – “Let’s have a Facebook site” “Let’s get on Twitter”.

Most do what most do when a new technology arrives – they apply it in the old way and so get nothing in response.

So what then is the power and leverage that you can harness by using social media well?

Boingo are on their way to finding out how to do this. Oh yes and I am one of the people that are part of this and oh yes I am not being paid and nor do I in any way work for them. I am living the theory.

So how might this work and so how might you do this too?

Boingo have a class of people that are deeply committed to the enterprise that Baochi calls her “Super fans”. They and why they are connected to Boingo and each other is the core of the leverage potential. We will meet 4 of them in this post who agreed enthusiastically to be interviewed by me. As you will see, these Super Fans are attracted first of all to Boingo by the obvious:

• The service – easy one stop access to Wifi in Airports and Hotels – is now no longer a nice to have for travellers but an essential
• The support for the service is outstanding – got a problem – you get instant personal help

But a great product is not enough. Nor is good service. What is the differentiator for Boingo is the human nature of the relationship that Boingo has with its customers. Most organizations do not allow their people to be human. Service people are often ciphers working from a script. Boingo have set up an environment where their key point of contact is a real person who is allowed to be herself.

She has a name and a face and we are all in awe and a bit in love with her. We all feel her presence watching over us. It is way more than getting her help when we can’t sign on. She watches out for us. Have a problem – A quick tweet. In minutes she is there. She is like the guy who runs the old corner store who holds your keys when you go away, keeps an eye on your kids in the street, helps you find a new roommate.

As Nuno Montegro, a customer in Portugal says – It is not what she says but how she says things that is the difference.

Nuno is like me, a customer who actively refers others to the service.

Most of Social media is all about Weak Ties – They are very useful but Weak Ties don’t get people to do much – or risk much – or commit much – that is why they are Weak – they are easy.

If you want to do something – Civil Rights in the US – you need Strong Ties. (Nice new piece by Malcolm Gladwell that explores Weak and Strong Ties in depth)

The key to attracting Strong Ties is being human. It is NOT PIMPING your product. It is instead to show that you really do care about ME. It is instead to show that you can indeed be trusted.

How do you show this? Nuno makes the point that every service and product fails at times. The key is to offer the best possible response to the inevitability of a problem. The best possible response is to know from experience that if there is a problem, you can reach a real person quickly and that they will go the distance to help you get it fixed. “I felt as if I was the only customer in the entire world when she was helping me” Bruno told me. I had the same experience.

Attracting Strong Ties is all about “Giving”.

Aaron Strout is the CMO at social media agency, Powered Inc. and is also Super Fan. “Boingo is proactive and they don’t expect a direct return – they are not selling all day – so if they want an inch, I go the mile back. It’s Karmic! I know if I have a problem that they will look after me. If people are good and do good, then good comes back. Not necessarily directly but good gets attracted back. We talk about a wide range of things that affect me not just the product – which is great too – have to have that – they listen.”

What Aaron is talking about here is a very old model for an economy that was the centre of all tribal economies – the Gift Economy. In the Gift Economy, the Big Guy is not the man who has the most stuff but the person who gives the most.

This is the power in networks – this is how Open Source Works too.

Cliff Bremmer is a programmer who works for a company called Carley Corporation that bids on government contracts to develop instructional CD base/computer based training for the US military.  ”In my spare time I help companies understand and navigate the social media spectrum in a professional yet interactive way.  The company I’m currently helping is the one my father works for called the Jamaica Pegasus Hotel“.

The Gift?

Not only is he a fan but in interacting with Boingo he has learned a lot about how to use SM media well. “If there is anything I’m proud of lately it’s that I helped the Pegasus Hotel promote their brand with the help and support of @Boingo and other companies to become one of the most popular brands in Jamaica.” Boingo is  not only helping him with his travel and Wifi but is talking with him and helping him help his dad in his business with advice and Tweet Up prizes such as free access and bag tags. The Gift in action!

He can see the flaws of how most use SM – “They are stuck in self promotion versus communication. I can see through it all – it’s all about them.”

In the Gift Economy that drives Trust and so Strong Ties, the starting point is YOU. In the non network economy the starting point is ME. No small difference!

Shelby Rogers is a flight attendant, a serving soldier (in the active reserve) and the wife of a serving soldier. Travel is her life. When she is not working, she travels. Access to Wifi has made her travel better – “I now know more than the Gate Agent does about my flights!” and it has taken away much of the loneliness that travel brings with it. Who has not been alone eating room service and watching TV in our room? “I can stay in touch with my husband on Skype and every city seems to have a friend in it.”

For Shelby, Boingo is a service that truly meets her needs. But it is how Boingo is connected to her that has transformed a pleased customer into a Super fan.

How often has your service provider taken you out to dinner? “We have even had dinner recently. I am now a walking billboard for Boingo with winking bag tags!”

So what does this mean? What are the lesson for both Boingo and for you?

• Baochi is no accident – the Boingo senior leadership have created the role and given it the space to enable someone who is naturally humane to be herself inside it. This new way of using Strong Ties to be the centre of a network is all about culture. In most cases senior leadership is too scared to let go. But if you do let go and create this safe place then the power of the network effect can be yours
• A really powerful network has to have an inner core bound by Strong Ties. This is where the leverage is. One staff person like Baochi can without too much trouble have close ties with 34 people. That gives her an outer network of 1.3 million. If she can handle the Dunbar limit of 144 that creates an opportunity of 400 million! You can see that with the right person, you can have a vast reach – provided you realize that your goal is not to have thousands of relationships but a few Strong Ones
• The secret is the math of social leverage. Many of you know about the “Dunbar Number”. Some of you know about “Magic numbers – the hierarchy of trust in human groups. If you don’t here is a quick primer.

So what now?

I think that the next stage would be this:

• At the moment all the Super Fans have a strong relationship with Baochi – I think that the best next step might be to find a way to connect them to each other
• At the  moment most of the dialogue is still about the obvious and excellent service that Boingo provides – I think that some of the work that the Super Fans could do might be to deepen the conversation – Shelby touched on this in her interview with me – What is it that being easily connected while travelling does? In her case it helped her deal with isolation and loneliness – it helped her do her job better – it kept her in touch with her husband – these are deep issues that I think connect all of us who travel a lot

As I think about networks, I think about the laws of physics. All systems have order and attractors. Some force is needed to keep systems coherent.

Think of the Sun in our own local system. It has mass that provides a gravity that holds all the planets and asteroids and stuff in a pattern. It has energy that creates life in the system. I think that any healthy human social system has to have gravity and light.

At the very centre is the “Right Space” a Trusted Space created by the leadership. In this Space, the Right Person – Right being a person who as part of her natural persona truly cares about others. Connected to her is the fuel and the mass that makes up the Sun – the Super Fans. The closer they are to the centre and the closer they are to each other – the more mass and the more energy. The more mass and energy, the larger and more healthy the network of Weak Ties that form up around the Sun.

What gets in the way is our fear about losing control.

At Disney the surface of the Brand Icon never changes but inside the mask is a person who changes all the time and so is never allowed to speak.

But in the new world we have to take off the costume and let the person inside have conversations with the public – HARD to do.

via fastforwardblog.com

Posted via email from Rob's posterous

Traditional Marriage? The Tribal Alternative - A more resilient model!

Many people are pounding away about the "Traditional Marriage". Their assumption is that such a marriage is part of human nature and all other forms must be unnatural. But is this true really?

For many, "Traditional Marriage" is One Man and One Woman and their job is to have children.

But inferred by this view of Traditional is that such an arrangement is somehow ordained by nature - it is the "normal" and historic way that humans have raised kids and been in relationship with each other.

But our history as a species does not support this view at all. 

For millions of years we lived in small groups that were larger and more socially complex that the traditional view. 

Here the optimal arrangement for women was to ensure the protection and the feeding of their children by having as many of the males as possible in the group attached to them and the kids. No one could have had an exclusive arrangement with another for in the hunter gatherer tribal society of "NO PROPERTY" no person belonged to another individual.

This was a very pragmatic arrangement. For, if a woman was linked only to one man, she and her children would be very vulnerable. What if he died? Who would feed and look after them? If she had a new man, would he support her children? 

It was pragmatic socially as well as functionally. A small social unit like this could not survive sexual jealousy. 

It was an arrangement that shaped our biology.  Bonobos and humans are the only species where the female is sexually available all the time. They are the only two species where the vagina is designed for face to face mating. Ovulation is hidden. We are designed for social sex not mating sex.

Sex far from splitting the group asunder makes it closer. The design for social sex and not reproductive sex - suggest that sex for humans is a form of "grooming" . Apes with fur groom the fur of the other to improve the cohesion of the group. We, the naked ape, find sex the more powerful way to develop intimacy.

The group was the most important thing - everything was designed to make the group healthy and effective. Sex must have played a large role in this.

This arrangement supported our core economic and survival function - how we got food. Among the apes, only the Bonobo and the human shares food. Human hunters would share all the food with ALL the tribe. There was no smaller group such as a "Traditional" family that had its own food. There was no mom and dad and the kids, there was only the larger group where ALL was shared.

This arrangement extended to child feeding and raising.

All the mothers and in fact all the females looked after and fed ALL the babies. While there was obviously the birth mother who was close - all the women were close. All those who were sexually active also had synchronized cycles. Meaning that there was a lot of milk available all the time. So if a mother died, the baby would be not at risk. All the females from as young as 5 or 6 participated in the raising of all the infants. 

Defense was a group activity. All the males participated in the defense of all the children.

Our bodies, our minds and our nature has been shaped by millions of years of living like this.

The Traditional marriage - that itself only is common in certain societies has been around for at most 10,000 years. It is a blip and it is a social product of a new way of feeding our selves. It's a product of agriculture and the great social invention of agriculture, a state.

With agriculture property is invented and who land and the herds were passed down through generations became THE question. 

Property is the central idea in the agricultural world. So men owned property and ensured its ownership through time by owning their women. This was the new deal as told in the story of the Fall and the exit from Eden.

The growth of the state is also part of this system. As the state took more and more of the surplus, it could bind people to the state by offering more of the "services" found in the Tribe. Protection, Employment, Money itself, health care, education, pensions. Only in modern times could there be a nuclear family and even more extraordinary a single parent. These groups are too small to survive in a world that is not so organized.

So has this experiment worked well? After all it is a product of our different environment.

The evidence suggests not recently. Not since the end of the larger more tribal extended family. 

In a moment of my own unhappiness years ago, I asked Dan Keating what was the track record of dysfunction in families today. He thought it was over 90%! No effective "natural" social arrangement can have this poor an outcome. 

What is it about the nuclear family that drives so much dysfunction?

Let's look at some of the common issues.

There is not enough social diversity to raise a healthy minded child. With only one or 2 parents, it is rare to offer a child a really broad and healthy spectrum of experience and security. Worse it is easy to offer them a very controlled or as bad a very lax and unsafe experience. Most of our challenges in later life arise from this too narrow and too weak platform. We were not designed to imprint on such a small group.

The family is no longer an economic unit where all play a role so we lose our sense of meaning. Children have in fact become a drain on the resources of a family. Our natural place where all provide value and hence where all can find meaning has been lost. Instead children are groomed to make their way as separate beings in the larger economy or left to their own devices. In both cases there is a disconnect at the core of the family.

Property is still the basis of marriage and so drives power issues. We think we own each other. We think that the true roles of the other is to make us happy. It has become all about me. Happiness and self fulfillment have replaced the larger goal of continuing the tribe. This is a very fragile basis for a long and fulfilling relationship.

Long term monogamy is as natural as celibacy! It drives urges that are all too human and makes it certain that we are wracked by guilt and by anguish and failure. For in reality being unfaithful is routine but is seen as being the unforgivable sin. But the traditional marriage - being based on property - makes it inevitable that we fail. With this failure comes a terrible cost in "broken homes" and people.

The traditional marriage is not suited to our nature. So what then?

Frankly I don't know. I am as much a product of my upbringing as you. But I do see some signs.

Tribal Marriage was not a free for all - at its heart was the practical way to survive in a world that was dangerous. 

The unspoken partner of the Traditional Marriage is the state. It is the state that underwrites a lot of the risk in life. Only in a state could there be a unit as small as Mum dad and the kids. In all places where the state is weak at least the large extended family prevails where all the family look after all the family.

The state and the large institutions that offer us shelter, food, energy and security enable us to limp along in the traditional marriage.

But there are signs that the economic collapse, with our food system depending on cheap oil and climate change that the state may not be there as strongly as we expect.

In the US now, financial pressures are picking away at the foundations of the safety net. The same is going on in Europe too. Your pension? Health care? Schools. Jobs even. 

How will we get by as jobs stay scarce - pensions disappear - food and security become hard to get - as energy becomes very expensive? 

We surely have a tried and true social answer. It is at least the extended family. It is at best the Tribe. The tribe being in my mind a unit that is profoundly economic. It exists to provide over generations what all the members need for a good life.

For this to work, we have to return to the ideals of our hunter gatherer ancestors. To raise great kids we ALL have to provide for them. To look after each other as adults and as older people, we ALL have to look after each other. Exclusive bonds make this impossible. How might this work? 

I don't know. But I do know this. That such an arrangement is truly natural and that we will feel our way naturally into finding the answers. I think that events will push us here. Families now split up like mine will coalesce. 

Several house holds will regroup into a larger whole. Some of the people will not be blood but dear friends. Some how in this mix, the old ways will emerge I think. Not as an act of deliberation or even intent - they just will happen for of course this is all innate.

Many now are wondering what the best response to Peak Oil will be. I am just seeing for the first time that one of the responses will have to be at least the re-establishment of the extended family. And even the Tribe.

For as many of us think more about Peak Oil and the requirement for Local Resiliency, we need to think about the social arrangements in which we will live to cope with a much tougher world and a place where the institutions that we take for granted no longer work. 

Many are also wondering about how best to find a "better business model" based on community. Surely the tribe might play a key role here?

We can even predict the social size of these groupings for they too are hard wired into us. My bet is that the ideal size of the group will be found in the social groupings that Dunbar explores and that are found here. 

Many of the ideas in this post have been taken from a remarkable new book that is part of a larger body of work on the shift from Hunter Gatherer life to Agriculture.

If you wish to know more a book called Sex at Dawn - The prehistoric origins of modern sexuality is a must read. Here is a teaser video.

In closing, I see another old story here. Back in the 14th century - one of the worst in human experience where it all seemed to go wrong - people started to look again at the old forgotten texts of the classic world. From this new study of an older world came the Renaissance. The grafting onto the world of the time of the lost wisdom of the Roman and Greek world. What is being done today is the same. People are looking back at our Hunter Gatherer Past that had been dismissed as savage and are finding wisdom that we can use today.

Surely family as a social construct is the most important aspect of their millions of years of hard acquired wisdom?

So finally the traditional marriage is as true to our nature as the idea that the world was made in a week 6,000 years ago.

If we can accept the reasons and the value of our successful ancestors, we might ourselves find more fulfillment and a bastion for the storms to come.

The Dropout Economy - part of our future - Are You Ready?

Rather than warehouse their children in factory schools invented to instill obedience in the future mill workers of America, bourgeois rebels will educate their kids in virtual schools tailored to different learning styles. Whereas only 1.5 million children were homeschooled in 2007, we can expect the number to explode in future years as distance education blows past the traditional variety in cost and quality. The cultural battle lines of our time, with red America pitted against blue, will be scrambled as Buddhist vegan militia members and evangelical anarchist squatters trade tips on how to build self-sufficient vertical farms from scrap-heap materials. To avoid the tax man, dozens if not hundreds of strongly encrypted digital currencies and barter schemes will crop up, leaving an underresourced IRS to play whack-a-mole with savvy libertarian "hacktivists."

Work and life will be remixed, as old-style jobs, with long commutes and long hours spent staring at blinking computer screens, vanish thanks to ever increasing productivity levels. New jobs that we can scarcely imagine will take their place, only they'll tend to be home-based, thus restoring life to bedroom suburbs that today are ghost towns from 9 to 5. Private homes will increasingly give way to cohousing communities, in which singles and nuclear families will build makeshift kinship networks in shared kitchens and common areas and on neighborhood-watch duty. Gated communities will grow larger and more elaborate, effectively seceding from their municipalities and pursuing their own visions of the good life. Whether this future sounds like a nightmare or a dream come true, it's coming.

This transformation will be not so much political as antipolitical. The decision to turn away from broken and brittle institutions, like conventional schools and conventional jobs, will represent a turn toward what military theorist John Robb calls "resilient communities," which aspire to self-sufficiency and independence. The left will return to its roots as the champion of mutual aid, cooperative living and what you might call "broadband socialism," in which local governments take on the task of building high-tech infrastructure owned by the entire community. Assuming today's libertarian revival endures, it's easy to imagine the right defending the prerogatives of state and local governments and also of private citizens — including the weird ones. This new individualism on the left and the right will begin in the spirit of cynicism and distrust that we see now, the sense that we as a society are incapable of solving pressing problems. It will evolve into a new confidence that citizens working in common can change their lives and in doing so can change the world around them.

We see this individualism in the rise of "freeganism" and in the small but growing handful of "cage-free families" who've abandoned their suburban idylls for life on the open road. We also see it in the rising number of high school seniors who take a gap year before college. While the higher-education industry continues to agitate for college for all, many young adults are stubbornly resistant, perhaps because they recognize that for a lot of them, college is an overpriced status marker and little else. In the wake of the downturn, household formation has slowed down. More than one-third of workers under 35 live with their parents.

The hope is that these young people will eventually leave the house when the economy perks up, and doubtless many will. Others, however, will choose to root themselves in their neighborhoods and use social media to create relationships that sustain them as they craft alternatives to the rat race. Somewhere in the suburbs there is an unemployed 23-year-old who is plotting a cultural insurrection, one that will resonate with existing demographic, cultural and economic trends so powerfully that it will knock American society off its axis.

Salam is a policy adviser at the nonpartisan think tank e21, a blogger for the National Review and a columnist for Forbes.com

via time.com

As many fuss about the organization of the future - have they thought of this?

On May 6 in Charlottetown, some of us start a nationwide 3 year inquiry into what our work future will be like. When there are so few young - how will work be done? How will our world be? For never in the history of any species will there be so few young. A situation made worse by how badly our society prepares children today.

Watch this space for more in the next few days.

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

The Job - Time for the lies to be exposed & for it to die

We all worry about getting or losing a job. When we meet people, they ask us what we do and we give them a job description. When we apply for jobs, we get all fussed about the “skills” we need. When we have a job, we have to be managed and so have bosses. Politicians all talk about getting more jobs. School is all about getting jobs.

But the “Job” as we know it is a 19th century idea. In America very few people as a percentage of the population had job before 1905.

Here is a core idea, especially as we all fuss about skills etc. The whole purpose of a Job is to DESKILL people. What do I mean?

This picture is the key. Before Henry Ford, making a car was an artisanal activity. Really skilled people created each car. With the production line, tools and algorithms were used to enable the owner to use unskilled people. Yes each person could get good at assembly but that is like saying that, because I am good at putting Ikea furniture together, I am a cabinet maker. The men who made the Stanley Steamer could make anything. They had the metal working and engineering skills to be artisans.

This process of DESKILLING has taken place in all parts of ur lives.

Today we can all offer our friends and family an excellent meal. Many of us are Foodies. But in reality, most people today cannot cook. They can assemble but not cook. They have no deeper skills.

Yes it takes a certain amount of skill to do this. Chances are if the tractor breaks, it has to go to the shop. But think of the skill behind this!

The plowing is only a fraction of the skill. Farmers in the day knew what was really going on. Today agribusiness is no different from a production line. It’s all external process and algorithms. It’s Ikea.

It’s the same with white collar work. Sales people are all scripted. All core processes are scripted. There is no room to think or create outside the very narrow range allowed in the Chicken Box each of us live in. We are all working at Highland Park.

So all the skill aspects of the “job” are in effect about knowing how to follow Ikea instructions. They are “assembly” and obedience skills.

What is not wanted are people who really are engineers, or farmers or cooks. The assembly line has no room for thinking outside the proscribed process.

This is why when so many people lose their jobs, they are lost. They are lost because they have no real skills. Anyone can put an Ikea desk together which is why your job can be outsourced or replaced with a machine. Your only chance is to find another “assembly” line that still needs what you can do.

Today that will never happen.

This too is why the Manager is a dying breed too. Managers are in reality factory assembly line foremen who job it is to meet the quota and the rules of the process. Theirs is not the job to think of new ways of doing things. Their job is to keep it all moving and the sheep from straying. But with fewer sheep, who needs the manager?

Again the biggest farce of all are all the managerial skills that are in demand. All those managers that are truly innovative get asked to leave. What is demanded is to be able to keep control.

The skill that managers need to rise, is not to have results, but to be expert politicians. Anyone who has been an outstanding manager who has constantly delivered results knows that this means little compared with others who climb over them.

This system was OK when it really was Highland Park. Then all of this was in the open and accepted as such. People also got paid well. Now all of this is obscured behind a touchy feely facade. On the surface we are all one big happy family. We need your ideas. Innovation is what it is all about. We are all going to cooperate. We are all leaders. This will be bottom up.

And worst of all, it doesn’t work anymore. Highland Park revolutionized how things were done in the world. This process worked very well for a long time. But it doesn’t work for any one now, not even the owners.

Later in the series I will talk about leaving the idea of the job behind. Of what true skills mean and how they protect us. Of how to look for work instead of a job.

Bu in my next piece I will talk about the central business process for the traditional organization. The process that any executive has to master. The key to success for you if you wish to climb what is left of the greasy pole. The main barrier against all forms of cooperation and why 2.0 will fail in most organizations. The Budget!

via fastforwardblog.com

Posted via web from Rob's posterous

Human Organization - Trust and Dr Jonathan Shay

Here is a Washington Post Interview with Dr Shay - He not only makes sense for the military but I think for all organizations.

Modern Soldiers From Ancient Texts
Physician Advising Army on Personnel Policy Takes Lessons From Homer

By Thomas E. Ricks Washington Post Staff Writer Friday, September 17, 2004; Page A25    

What do the works of the Greek poet Homer have to do with the nitty-gritty details of personnel policy in today's U.S. Army?

Plenty, says Jonathan Shay. In fact, so much that the former assistant professor at Harvard Medical School, who has written two well-received books examining Homer as a chronicler of military men in "The Iliad" and "The Odyssey," signed on this month as an adviser to the Army's personnel chief. Shay's task is far from literary. Rather, it is to help boost "cohesion" -- that is, the essential psychological glue that holds soldiers together -- in Army units.

It is a long way from ancient Troy to today's Pentagon. But Shay sees a direct line.

In his first book, "Achilles in Vietnam: Combat Trauma and the Undoing of Character," he used Homer's account of combat in the Trojan War to examine the Vietnam War, and especially how poor leadership increased the trauma of many U.S. soldiers in that conflict. Shay's sequel, "Odysseus in America: Combat Trauma and the Trials of Homecoming," reinterpreted Odysseus's troubled voyage back to Ithaca as a way of understanding the long and painful journey home of many combat veterans.

Through his work as counselor of Vietnam veterans, Shay has become a passionate advocate of the three things that he has concluded reduce the trauma of war on soldiers: keeping members of units together, giving them good leadership, and putting them through intense and realistic training.

"Cohesion, leadership and training -- each of these is a protective factor against psychological injury," he said. And together, "the synergism is enormous."

So, he said, he sees his one-year stint at the Pentagon as a work of "preventive psychiatry."

Signing on with the Army at age 62 may seem to be an odd career move for someone who is a veteran not of the armed forces but of three different Ivy League universities. Indeed, everything about Shay's background paints him as an unlikely candidate to advise the military: a beard-adorned, yoga-practicing resident of Newton, Mass., who describes himself as a "lifelong liberal Democrat, and proud of it."

But, he explains, 17 years of counseling Vietnam veterans at what is now the Department of Veterans Affairs transformed him from being a detached academic into a zealot for cohesion in U.S. military units.

"I am a physician with a fire in the belly for prevention of psychological injury in military service," Shay wrote in a summary of his work. "As such I am the missionary for the injured veterans whom I serve in the VA. They don't want other young kids to be wrecked the way they were wrecked." Indeed, to not abandon his patients, he is staying with the VA part time during his Pentagon tour.

His goal of cohesion is easily explained but harder to achieve, he said.

" 'Cohesion' is really about mutual trust," he said. "If you don't have mutual trust, you tend to burn up all your physical and emotional resources." For example, a soldier in the front lines who distrusts his comrades' ability to protect him from the enemy will not be able to sleep well. "If your gaze is directed inward -- 'Can I trust these guys?' -- then your cognitive resources are directed inward, when they should be directed outward, toward the enemy," Shay said.

The notion extends beyond small units such as squads and platoons. When subordinate commanders trust and understand their superiors, entire large divisions and corps become more militarily effective, he argued.

"Trust lubricates the friction of warfare," he said. "If every move in the chain of command has to be formally laid out, you are going to move slowly, and the enemy is going to move faster than you."

Another oddity of his move to the Pentagon is that it comes essentially after he and his allies in personnel policy have won much of the argument, especially on unit stabilization. After decades of transferring people every couple of years, the Army earlier this year reversed course and is trying to keep soldiers attached to the same unit for much of their careers.

Shay cautiously applauds the Army's recent shift, saying it goes in the right direction. But, Shay said he is not sure how far the service has moved or how permanent the changes will be.

"Changing the culture of a large institution is a very protracted process," Shay cautioned.

He said he sees some worrisome signs in the U.S. military in Iraq. The abuse of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, he said, directly resulted from the failure of leadership at the small unit level.

"What you need is a crusty, old sergeant who says at the right moment, 'We're soldiers; we don't do that [expletive],' " Shay said.

An Army report released in March found widespread problems with unit cohesion in Iraq. Its authors recommended that the Army do a better job of getting mental health resources to the troops.

Shay appears to disagree with that view.

"Honestly, I don't think the most important thing to do is to provide mental health professionals," he said. Rather, he returned to his three core issues: "The most important thing to do is to provide cohesion, leadership and training."

Overall, he said he is less worried about the mental health of regular, active-duty soldiers serving in Iraq than he is about the part-time troops in the National Guard and Reserves, and even more the thousands of private security personnel working on contract there.

Unlike service personnel, he noted, contractors have no formal network of support to help them when they return home, even if they are hired as bodyguards or placed in other combat-type roles.

"The amount of potential dynamite we are sowing in our own society by sending people into that situation, that way -- it just terrifies me," Shay said.

What do his friends and neighbors back in the liberal suburbs of Boston think of him helping the top brass make the Army more militarily effective?

"They know that I'm not just trying to turn people into more effective killers," Shay said. "The point of fighting in a just cause is to win, not to kill. The highest form of military skill is to win without killing."

What is more, he said, it also has to do with the morality of our own society. "If we're sending people to fight in our name," Shay said, "we damn well better be sure to win swiftly, and not kill any more of the enemy than is necessary."

   

    © 2004 The Washington Post Company

Banks - The Limits of the Efficiency Model - Class Action Suit by Star Teller

A star teller with many years of experience and in the lead role at main branch is the initiator of a class action suit against CIBC for unpaid overtime.

What is really going on? Is it really a matter of pay or is there a deeper issue? I think that it is a sign that CIBC and the banks are reaching the limits of running banks like a machine and that it is now time to think about how by looking at the model of a truly "Human Work Place" they could heal this wound and also get the performance that they desire

TORONTO (CP) - In what's being called a potentially precedent-setting case in Canada, a bank teller has taken on one of the country's biggest financial institutions with a class-action lawsuit that alleges CIBC fails to pay overtime to its customer service staff.

Dara Fresco said Tuesday that she's owed some $50,000 for the two-and-a-half to 15 hours a week of additional work she says she's been required to perform as a teller and personal banker since 1998.

The 34-year-old Toronto woman, who has worked at more than a dozen CIBC branches, points out that's a lot more than her current annual salary of $30,715.

I've been working for the bank for almost 10 years and I figured enough is enough already. I wanted to get paid for the overtime," Fresco said at a news conference Tuesday, just hours after the lawsuit was filed in Ontario Superior Court.

The $600-million class-action suit is expected to cover an estimated 10,000 current and former non-management, non-unionized CIBC employees across Canada, many of whom are women.

"What is unfair is that my colleagues and I are rarely being paid for the overtime that we are working, and that's just not right," Fresco alleged.

"I decided to seek out legal advice to see, mainly, if this was allowed and to find out what my options were ... because it isn't fair to work and not be paid for your time."

I don't think that this issue is really about pay. I worked for CIBC for many years and for the last 5 was SVP for HR. This issue is about managerial culture and the relationship between the staff and the bank's  senior leadership

In the decades that I was at Wood Gundy and then at CIBC, we knew that sales were key but we knew that the key to sales was relationship. But in the last 10 years only one thing now counts - sales. Everyone now has a set of targets, ever expanding, that they have to make. CIBC retail has become a machine. The client is there to be farmed. The business, the clients and the staff have all become commodities.

As CIBC has become a machine, the people who feel the most alienated are paradoxically the stars. Every milestone passed leads to another hurdle. Life just becomes a treadmill.  Key staff feel like Sisyphus, who as a curse was forced by the Greek Gods to roll a boulder up a hill - every day. Their reward for achievement - another boulder. The claim is that they get paid for success - but the amounts are paltry compared to investment bankers.

They feel unappreciated. They feel that they are treated like things. They feel that no one cares about the clients either. They are not people anymore they are leads or they have yield. It's all about the numbers.

I come to my point - in medical malpractice - the key to being sued is not the malpractice but the nature of the relationship.

Many malpractice suits are brought not because of mal-practice nor even because of complaints about the quality of medical care but as an expression of anger about some aspect of patient-doctor relationships and communications.

The theory presented is that under the stress of anxiety and physical illness, some patients regress to childhood needs; physicians are not generally trained to fill such needs. Thus, these patients, angry because of this, express their anger in malpractice suits. This theory has been taught to physicians and medical students as part of a physician continuing medical education (CME) seminar on Loss Prevention/Risk Management through demonstration of active-listening techniques to seminar participants.

Physicians who understand and can respond appropriately to the emotional needs of their patients are less likely to be sued. This may also translate into a more fulfilled practice of medicine by those physicians who are most aware of the importance of a positive relationship. (My emphasis)

My advice to my old place CIBC is to look beyond the obvious and look to your culture.

There is more performance and less friction available in a more human model. I will write more about this in the next few days. I will be using examples from a very tough organization - the US Marine Corps!