Journeys on the Lint Head Highway

Come on, its not that hard

2011-10-12T12:46:00.000-07:00

It’s been a while since I have written here, several years in fact. Since 2008, we have been in a recession, I have gotten older, and the world keeps turning and the apples keep blooming in the spring.

Meanwhile, in Washington, hope has turned to gloom. Many people that I respect believe we have entered a paradigm shift that will bring down the current form of economic development and how we define growth. On top of it all, the weather keeps doing weird shit. Believe me, if you work outside all summer on the farm, you understand how hot and dry it was and why the apples came off the trees, two-three weeks early.

We know what we have to do about the climate. The science is there, despite what the Republicans say. We just lack the will, just yet, to get it done. We have bumped into the "limits to growth" just like Meadow's said we would. We are beginning to see innovation as a repercussion to banging into these limits (just like Hart and Gilding and many others said we would). Civil unrest, as the masses realize just how rich the rich are and how poor the rest of us are becoming, is just beginning. The behavior of the markets, consumers and enterprises all reflect a total lack of faith in the future, or we would not be so hard pressed to make the good long term decisions. I think that most have decided that the future will be worse than the past, so the general consensus is to get it while you can. This fundamental lack of faith in the future is the under lament driving our behaviors. It’s kind of sad really, because we really do have a great foundation and a great planet, and we know what to do. We just lack the will, just yet.

The answer to the economic issue is just not that hard to see. As a country, we have lost all of our production and manufacturing jobs. There are some things that are just basic to any modern society. We need to be self reliant for energy, transportation, food, water, and manufacturing of items critical for a resilient country. In the textile industry alone, since 1995, over 700000 jobs have been lost. Add to that steel production, auto production, food production, energy production, and you can hear Perrot’s great sucking sound. That's right; it sucks for most of us. I am not anti globalization but I am pro self sufficiency and resilience. So, if government would lead and set a goal of 75% internal sufficiency for food production, 75% internal sufficiency for energy production, 75% sufficiency for critical component production for critical systems, we could have more balance… and create the jobs we need. Would costs be higher? Yes, I think they would, but not over the long haul, only for the short term. Over the long haul they would be steadier over time and more truly represent the real costs of living in a place. What are the real costs of these peaks and valleys we keep creating in the economy? I think they cost a lot, but the losers have not yet started killing the ones that made money during the bad times. This may come.

So, all you powerful people in Washington and Wall Street take note. It just ain't that hard to make things right, just yet. It does take leadership and guts with a vision for the future that includes a brighter picture for what is possible and a longer view of things.

Sam

election time

2008-09-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

Well, the stage is set and the game of politics is on. Make no bones about it, I am voting for Obama and Biden. There are several major reasons for this:

1. The power of incumbency is too great for the republicans to create real change. There will be too many residues from Bush that they cannot get rid of and these rats must be flushed out of Washington.
2. McCain is 72. My Dad died at 72. I do not believe that there is any person at 72 that has enough vigor for this job. Especially not a man that has had melanoma. He is a good man, just not the man for the job.
3. It is the youth of this country that must bear the brunt of dealing with the major issues of our time, clean energy, the allocation of the commons, social justice, etc., globally. We need someone that can represent both generations.
4. Pallen is an abomination. This is a family that thinks it is OK to bring 5 children into the world. If every family on the planet had 5 children, we would all be over run. She says that this choice is a family choice and yet she want to legislate such choice for others. Nutcase. George Bush has shown us what an anti-intellectual, god fearing, fundimentalist can do. Do we want more?
5. Obama is smart. He is well educated. He is vigorous. He represents his generation. He has Joe Biden.
6. I do not think most people want less government. I think they want a government that works. We have seen what happens when the private sectors is given the power to make socially correct decisions. Fanny Mae and Mac are great examples. We will not hear the republicans fight this govt. takeover because its the only way to stop this private sector, poorly run trillion dollar business from crashing our economy. The airlines are next and maybe GM. People will expect the govt to step in and fix it because the market has no soul and no social outlook...by definition.

This can go on and on. Obama will make mistakes. He will not make severe ones because in his own way he is conservative and he will have great advisors. What he does have going for him is can link more that 5 words together, he reads, he understands the issues of health care and environment, and he understands the importance of local economies. He understands that we are in a rapidly expanding global circumstance, and that we must dialogue with everyone, friends and enemies.

I have had enough republicans, its time to give the other party a chance. How much worse could they screw it up?

Generic America

2007-08-13T05:18:00.000-07:00

After 22 years of growing up and education, my wife and I deposited our daughter at graduate school last week to become a doctor of audio logy. It was a big experience and one that most parents hope for. I am very proud of her and the challenge she is undertaking.

This also gave me the opportunity to drive from Elon, North Carolina, to Mobile, Alabama. It is a drive of almost 700 miles and for the most part, the roads are in great shape. Here are some observations from the trip:

America is now almost exactly the same. Whether you in NJ or in Al, all the cities along a major highway have the same stores, the same restaurants, and the same banks and hotels. We are now generic America.

One thing we always do on trips, is to look for, (and it is becoming harder), to find the “local” spots, i.e., the places that are regional and local to a place.

Many local folks eat at the chains. They are full of people. Why is this when the local places are so good?

The Gulf Coast looks like a tough place to be. Dauphine Island off Mobile has about every other house for sale. The locals say it is due to high insurance costs. Insurance premiums are now almost $10k per year. $10k can buy a lot of exclusive vacation time in a very exotic locale. I suspect that the Gulf coast is what the entire coastal area of the US will look like after global warming has impacted fully.

Did you know that asphalt is made from oil? It is the bottoms of the crude oil fraction that is polymerized and laid down with gravel. So, not only are we dependant on oil as fuel but also oil as roads. This story just keeps getting deeper all the time.

I had some really good friends that watered my orchard while I was away and the temperatures rose above 100F for a week. Bless them for doing that.

People from the South are just gracious and nice. They go out of their way to be hospitable.

The Boiling Pot in Mobile has the best friend shrimp I have ever eaten. It is not a chain.

100 degrees for days on end will sap your strength and energy.

The average speed on I-85 is 74 miles per hour from Elon to Montgomery. If it was not for a couple of spots of construction, I suspect it would be close to 80 mph.

It was less stressful, riding in the car for 12 hours and driving, that it would have been flying to Mobile. We would have had to change planes twice and the difference would have only been 4 hours less, net-net.

That's all for now.

Sam

Las Vegas is not a good place

2007-05-06T18:58:00.000-07:00

I recently went to Las Vegas with some very good friends. It was my second trip there, the first time I did more than spend one night. I was shocked at the number of children there. Why would anyone bring a child to such a place? The food was mostly bad and very expensive (there were exceptions). We went to visit the new Indian sponsored glass bridge on the west rim of the Grand Canyon, only to find it was almost $200 bucks a person to see it, and this was after a 4 hour drive, the last 22 miles over the worst dirt road I have ever been on in a normal car. Everywhere you go, the focus of the place and the people is to part you from your money. I am ashamed of a country that sees this as the future of entertainment.

It is a shitty place.

Ending and beginning

2007-01-28T19:36:00.000-08:00

After over 30 years of getting up every morning and going to work in the family business, one day this week I will go into Burlington Chemical, and the place will be owned by someone else. We signed all the papers Friday to sell the company because we were unable to overcome the challenges of managing a community based company in a globalized market. It has been a sad 10 years, riding the bike backwards, leveraging the assets of the firm, trying to find the key that unlocked the value that we knew, just knew had to be there. Unfortuately, we failed. Not due to lack of effort, imagination, or even in the beginning cash flow, it was a lack of understanding of one of the fundimentals of market economics and indeed of life itself. Sometimes, somthing must die for others to live. Our company lived within a community that had been the lifeblood of a region, that being the textile community. It was a community that was not without problems, poor labor relations, a history of environmental and social exploitations, cotton dust, toxic chemicals, but it was a community that had survived and improved itself over hundreds of years, and now it, along with our company, it has moved on to someone or somewhere else.

I suspect that somewhere over in China, there is a person that sees the opportunties in the growing textile industry there, and I hope that the chinese textile community can support this person and perhaps his family through several generations, granting the boon of success and teaching from the failures and nurturng these families through the business of life. My Dad went to church each day he set his foot in Burlington Chemical. The place he built and the spirit and the opportunity that grew there was felt by most that labored for our customers.

He died a couple of years ago, knowing that unless something radical happened, the two generations of our family that worked to build that firm, would be the last to find success there. The world had changed. We could not change fast enough to find our new community. Oh, we are in good company, Interstate 85 is littered with the ghost of plants and the textile museums telling the stories of the good old days, in fact, one of the most successful textile mills in Concord has been torn down and a biotech research center has been developed. From the splicing of cotton yarn to the splicing of genes, same old process, one just being done at 10 to the minus 9th and one being done of the back of macro industial technology.

Just as I know that I and every person I know will die, the old ways are also dying. I do not have a good value judgement for that. Is it good? Is it bad? Does it matter? Damned if I know, but I do know that lots of good folks and some part of my heart and reality are gone. They teach us now that change is good and that change and the ablity to change is the only true competitive atvantage. I suspect that with technology cycles in acceleration and trade cycles mimicing technology, that the race will keep getting faster and faster and success will be based on being able to change. This leaves all of us with one simple reality, and that is the relationships we have with other people and with the planet are our only constants.

I do not know how to feel about the business going to someone else. I can only hope that the company will florish and that under a new leadership and with new financing, the firm will find a new value proposition that works. It will not be ours. We will not create the heroic turnaround story we were all working so hard for. This will be someone else's story and someone else's success or failure. For me, there must be a new reality, a new reason to get up and get going in the morning. There will never be another time and another slice of life that is what was. All that is left is memories, ghosts, and good stories.

Knee replacement surgery- The straight scoop on the first 6 weeks

2006-12-13T13:38:00.000-08:00

I am a 51 year old guy who had a bad knee due to an auto accident when I was 18 years old. The knee finally was so deficient that replacement was the only option. This is the story of my surgery and recovery through the first 6 weeks.

Prior to the surgery, one must arrange for a couple units of blood to be given, just in case you need it. I did not need it. Most everyone also attends a series of training classes to tell you what to expect from the surgery and the various things that will go on after the surgery. I found these educational classes very good and really dropped the pre-surgery anxiety levels.

The day of the surgery, we arrived at the hospital on time and waited around to be called. The anesthesiologist showed up in the pre-op area about 10 minutes before the surgery and inquired if there was anything he needed to know. I did not find this comforting. He then proceeded to prep my IV’s, gave me a shot of something to relax me and then insert a spinal block to be activated after the surgery for pain control.

We were transported to the operating room and I went to sleep.

When I woke up in recovery, I was in a great deal of pain because the spinal block did not work. They tried to insert another, and it did not work. Then they gave me some big shot of pain killers and my heart rate dropped very low and off I went to ICU.

In ICU they put in the morphine “drug buddy” and the pain was controlled very well. This ends day one.

From day two until day four when they send you home, you are in pain or you are out of it from the drugs. There is a lot of pain and the pain control is not very good. Sometime during day three, they take out your catheter and the morphine drug buddy, and change you over to oral Oxy-cotton and Percoset. This takes the edge off the pain, but you still have sizeable discomfort. You get PT in the hospital and this hurts a lot and you must keep your leg as straight as you can to gain extension.

Then, after day four, you take your discomfort and go home. It is good to be home and you have about 10 days to two weeks worth of Percoset and oxy-cotton prescribed. When this runs out, you get a milder pain reducing drug. During that time you have physical therapy at home daily and sometime after 14 days post op, you change over to outpatient PT.

During week three and week 4 things begin to improve, but the pain is not really reduced significantly until after 4 weeks. During this time, it is important to do your PT with as much vigor as possible to gain strength in the quads and the knee. It is only after you get this strength that the pain of walking and moving about decreases. It is really quite remarkable the progress that you make in PT as the bone pain from the surgery diminishes and the stretching and tearing of scar tissues begins. This scar tissue pain is not nearly as bad as the bone pain and is easily controlled with Hydrocodone and/or Tylenol.

Week 5 and 6 are much better as you get off the narcotics and your head, bowels and physical abilities begin to return.

Final comments-

This surgery is brutal. The recovery period is 6 weeks. You will be out of commission for 4-6 weeks and may not be able to work. PT is the most gratifying part of this process. Your body is greatly traumatized by this surgery. You are weak, depressed and homebound for a long time. This was new to me and I did not suffer it gladly. Day-time TV sucks pretty badly and unfortunately for 4 of the 6 weeks the drugs made me unable to write or read very productively. I was tired most of the time and did not begin to feel better, really, until week 5.

This is surgery that changes people’s lives. I can tell that my new knee will be better than my old worn out one. However, this is major surgery and should not be taken or entered into lightly.

Doctor’s and hospitals are making millions of dollars from this surgery and performing many of these procedures every week. The attention to post-op pain control was not what it should have been for me. My patient care was not as good as I had experienced in the past, and this may be mostly due to the inability to adequately control the post-op pain. The latter stages of pain from PT, are not so bad because you can see progress every day. The first two weeks post-op are pretty bad and you will need some good care during this period.

If I were to do this again, hindsight being 20/20, I would demand a premeeting with the anesthesiologist, not on the day of the surgery, and I would make clear my demands for as much pain control as is necessary. There is still too much triage by experienced nurses on the floor not allowing for adequate pain control. If my post-op pain had been in better control and I had not had the additional trauma caused by inadequate care, my experience with this would have been better. All’s well that ends well is OK, but find a hospital and a surgeon that understands the care needed and get some feedback from someone that has been through the procedure at that facility. I had a great surgeon and a mediocre hospital, which provided for a less than satisfactory surgical experience.

Linking production and consumption

2006-10-31T10:37:00.000-08:00

I attended the Sustainable North Carolina conference yesterday, where workshops and awards were presented. There was a much larger attendance than I expected and it was a very diverse group of folks. From lobbyist and lawyers, that were getting to know their adversaries, to the Birkenstock crowd that were pushing green products and services, it was evident that sustainable is of interest to a wide cross section.

What was not discussed yesterday, and what I find is hardly ever discussed in US conferences, are the links between consumption and production. I my opinion, this is the topic that must become the core topic of these conferences, because it is at the root of the matter of sustainable. .. And also a key issue for enterprise.

I keep coming back to the ethics of globalization of markets in the light of a complete lack of global social and environmental policy. Why are we so tolerant of inefficiency in government and policy and so intolerant of it inside of enterprise? We become excited at lower prices at the gas pump and at Wal Mart, but are apathetic when our government performs terribly after Katrina. The whole Katrina incident is indicative of how poorly the the government performs. I will also say that our military is also a key indicator. Give me an almost unlimited budget and the latest technology and I too can succeed militarily against an enemy 25 years behind me in battle tech. So could any other country in the world. One thing for sure the Bush government can do, is to through money at a problem...But this does not mean it is money well spent, it is just spent

I think the real issues are boundary issues. Can we agree on the objectives for our planetary ecosphere and then develop a life style to live within the boundaries? Does this have to be a life style of an austere monk? I don't think so.

I would hope that the next government will address two issues: The first is to achieve energy independence for the US. This will create millions of jobs and drive clean tech investment. The second is to socialize the medical system. If any incoming government will address and then achieve these two objectives, the country will be more stable, her people more productive, and we can spend some of this obscene military budget on domestic issues and make the US the most desired place to live in the world...And do it by creating opportunity within the boundaries of what is sustainable and important.

Change got to come soon.

2006-10-20T13:12:00.000-07:00

Personal Mastery and Mental Models in Action-

At 51, I know that I am an accumulation of my education, genetic make up, experiences and environment. These attributes are what creates my personality or the skills I use to get by in life. Peter Senge calls this “personal mastery” and I like this metaphor. Senge also stresses the need for a person to always push, through continuous learning, the boundaries of one’s “personal mastery” so that it is ever expanding. As a life long learner and a person of much curiosity, I enjoy learning and experiencing new things. I have always thought that one of my strengths has been the application of my “personal mastery” to Society-Business challenges and developing inventive ways to approach these problems and make money.

For a person to see these challenges and find solutions, one must feel and understand how an individual’s “personal mastery” provides value into the world at large, i.e., where one sits and fits in the world. We all create what Senge calls “mental models”, which I can further define as the reality framework we all use to rationalize our place and value in society. Without mental models, we could all be really smart learners, but for what. Without personal mastery, we could all understand our place in the world, but be unable to change it or improve on it.

I think both of these attributes are important for individuals and organizations. These attributes are two of the 5 disciplines described in Senge’s famous book, The 5th Discipline. In this book, Senge discusses teams and organizational learning, etc., but I want to focus today these first two attributes, personal mastery and mental models, and how the interrelation of these two seem to be the yin and yang of personal happiness… at least for me. I have been much troubled lately about how technologically advanced we are in the US, but how we lag much of the rest of the world in relating our skills to the broader world. The song writer, John Prine, talks about people being forced to “live in their heads” and I think this means that as we internalized our personal mastery and lose mental models of how to build great things and provide value to society with our skills, we stand to lose balance.

When one of these disciplines weakens or is disrupted, this balance of learning for a purpose, or learning to maintain your mental model, is disrupted. If one is unable to continue to learn, one is certainly stuck in one place, for the world is always changing and requiring you to survive. What happens however when you do have the ability to learn and have a positive mental model for your place and value in the world, and then your external world of your mental model is disrupted?

I have seen several examples of this in my life. The first was when I was struck by a car in my 18th year and my physical world changed forever. One minute you are a fine specimen of a young man, and the next you have a damaged, gimpy leg for the rest of your life. This requires change in “personal mastery” to regain your mental model of where you are going to fit and find joy in life. Obviously, you cannot continue on to your college wrestling career and you must find a different route, through creation of a new mental model to create success and joy. At 18 years of age I was able to do this, thanks to my parents, Elon College, and due to the fact that at 18, we are all fairly pliable and the friction preventing change from your past is not so great. (With only 18 years, one is not so set in their ways)

The second example that I saw was my grandfather Rose, who only had a 3rd grade education and was a craftsman dyer. When there was a technological shift in the dyeing industry that made his craft obsolete, he did not have the education, (personal mastery), to change. He could not adapt. He lost his mental model for value creation because there was no further demand for his skills, and he did not have the self confidence nor the desire to learn a new way of doing. He died of alcohol in his early 50s, a person with little confidence, and too much money to buy alcohol.

The third example was my Pop, who had the education to change but grew so accustomed and set in his ways that as he aged and his health declined, and as the pace of change in business increased, he was unable to find a mental model that fit his aging abilities. He died quite an unhappy person at 72, with feelings of uselessness, feeling that he had a total lack of control over anything, and a very poor self image, and this occurred for a person who could have written a book about the American dream.

At 51, I find myself in a similar situation. My poor old leg requires a knee replacement, I am 30-40 pounds overweight, we have been unable to turn our business around, and I am staring straight into the abyss of my mortality through the death of my father and now the cancer in my Mother. I am seeking to find a mental model for the final quarter of my life. I grapple daily with thinking about how things have changed and how little control all of us have over anything. What is the point of life in America after your have lost your youth? I had hoped to use my personal focus on sustainability and my farm, as a post to which to anchor my mental model. However, the older you get, the less physical work you can really do, and I have become disillusioned with lack of anyone or any organization to seek sustainability. I am afraid that much of what we see advertised as sustainable change is really just another face of marketing and does not represent a rebirth or evolution of capital markets or social behavior.

The wisdom that comes from age is of little use in a technological age where businesses want flexibility, technological savvy within a 5 year business life-cycle. I find that all of these trends are opposed to what I feel is the direction that I need to go, which is to slow down, think, and act: to produce positive change in local environmental and social issues, to be a model of how to live a simple happy life.

I am unable to bring about change with my leg without entering the rat race of the medical system. I will have the surgery and pursue the PT and this is the best I can do. This replacement makes me even more dependent on medicine and doctors for the rest of my life.

There are no longer any changes that I can make in the business that are significant to it. I have shot my wad. My creative juices can no longer flow. We will hold on and continue to attempt to find a niche in which we can prosper, but I no longer have the zeal or believe in the operation of a business as a noble pursuit. I used to think that there was no nobler calling, than to be an ethical businessman. I used to believe that business was the best amplifier for ethical change because it influenced the breadth and depth of society. I think this has been removed from domestic enterprise by globalization.

Global business is a fickle mistress. Hard work, astute ethical management of a business is no longer the key to success in this global economy. Success will be measured on how fast you can get into a business with new ideas or services, build its cash production, and how fast you can liquidate it. There are no longer the profit margins in mature businesses to fund evolution and revolution at the same time. So either you clip your coupons until the coupons cannot be paid and the business dies, or you sell it to free up capital to start the next great thing. You cannot do both in the same business, unless there is great separation between business units. It certainly cannot happen in an SME with limited organizational and economic resources.

So the conundrum is how rapidly can expertise be grown, and how astute can management be in realizing when to liquidate. This also means that much of what they are teaching in MBA schools for excellence in operational management and contribution for an individual should be viewed in 5 year blocks.

The question for me is where to find a place where I can make a contribution for a new business?

No short cuts

2006-10-11T13:40:00.000-07:00

For people that know our situation, it is no secret that our family business has been destroyed by the globalization of the textile industry. I have attempted to move beyond trying to sort out the "good" or the "bad" of globalization, because it is impossible for me to have enough data and scope to do so. I cannot measure the positive or the negatives created by globalization on any level other than personal.

On a local and personal level, these changes have been hugely negative, but I would guess that for the company and its employees that are supplying textile chemicals to the local markets in Vietnam or China, it is positive. What I do know is that I am not better off economically due to globalization, I am not happier, and our community, State, and Country are worse off today that we were 20 years ago. When our company began its restructuring forced by destruction of textiles, way back in the mid 1990's, our analysis showed that a successful future could be achieved if we followed the following course:

1. We needed deemphasize the incumbent textile related business segments, cease investments in this area and pour capital into diversification that was focused on service industries.
2. We needed to develop a service-technology-manufacturing platform, similar to what we had in textiles, for other markets including lubricants and service sectors, such as I+I cleaning.
3. That we could use our platforms of "sustainability", cleaner production, and new plants and equipment to gain entry to those markets, introducing a new vision for customers in these markets.

However, this process has proven much more difficult that I ever imagined. We were not able to say "NO" quick enough to existing good customers within the textile market and free up the invested capital. A bird in the hand is hard to release and harder to catch again. It seems counter productive to the bank, shareholders and employees to quit doing what you do well, when it is producing good cash flows, with only projections of decline, as the reason for change. Therefore, the restructuring of the textile business has been very slow, but a model for success in the global textile market might be emerging for us using a local business model in the far east.

The other disconnect from our perceived business strategy is the lack of vision and standards promoting sustainable market segments. Without uniform global regulatory and market standards of what is green or sustainable, or what is not, the only important policy decisions become local ones. In other words, the only regulatory expectations that impact our business are local or regional to the customers, but production is now global. This places inordinate costs on the local purveyor of goods and services, which the producer, located somewhere else on the planet, does not have to bear. To have a truly global market, somewhere these disconnects must be resolved. To have global markets with only regional and local policy and regulations, is inane and artificial, ie, price no longer reflects the costs and ultimate value of a good or service to the customer.

I am becoming to believe more and more that the resolution of the chaos and disrutpiton must be to redesign commerce to meet local values and demands. What do I mean by this?

One of the rationalizations for globalization of markets is lower costs to the customer. But does a lower selling price truly represent value? Is the textile worker who loses his job to China for a reduction in the price of jeans from $25 to $18, better off? What about his neighborhood, his town, his state, and his nation? Who bears the brunt of replenishing the local and state tax coffers when the mills are shut down? Are the costs of retraining, the cost of medical services, the results of stress, the loss of philanthropy, etc., used in the calculations of the cost of policy change? If all the factors that impacted the selling price were modeled, including fiscal, physical, environmental and social costs and limits within a particular economy, eg, national, would the $18 jeans still be a value? If indeed there are regional and global environmental and physical limits to growth, can we produce and enforce policy that evolve a global, national or local sustainability? I am not sure that it is possible to produce global policy that is enforceable. How can regional policy and global economics be balanced to produce a sustainable global market-base economy, based on regional relative valuations?

Having traveled a fair amount in world, and listening to people argue about conflicts between local, state, or national governments, there is no hope that I see for a congruent policy-market evolution.

It seems to me that as a nation or community, we have to decide where we can induce policy and manage it to allow for diversity in society and environments, while meeting the needs and relative regional values.

To continue on with my example... if the textile traditions of our region could be preserved, along with stability in local economies (not having to retrain and retire over 400,000 people) and to do this means that we must pay $30 buck for jeans rather than $18, then is this a good investment? The value of this increase in the cost of jeans and the value of local production would have to be contrasted to getting the lowest possible price.

The answer to this question in the organic or local foods movement is profound. People will pay much more for locally produced food and even more if it is organic. We pay more for bottled water than for gasoline. Why is it so hard to define the value of place, of culture, of tradition for future generations when defining local vs global production?

I know that when our firm employed 200 people, we were a proud, successful organization. Today at 37 people, we continue to seek a path towards regaining success, but I do not feel successful. I feel betrayed by our government and by the consumer who did not value our industries products enough to keep us around. Economists say that value is based on scarcity. When regional cultures, diversity in products, and foods are all generic and everyone is buying commodities at the lowest price globally, are we better off? When diversity in cultures become scarce, will we value it more and once it is gone, can we get it back? Is the warmth and weather the only reason to live in NC or does it have something to do with the culture of the people and place. When there is nothing unique about our place, why would anyone desire to be here? How do we put a value on that and how do we vote with our dollars? I think it comes down to preservation and valuing our local economies.

This question gnaws my soul.

Wanting 4 decimal places in a two decimal place world

2006-04-12T10:41:00.001-07:00

Wrestling with the tiger: wanting 4 decimal places in a 2 decimal place world.
I have spent a large amount of time over the last year working on a Technical Advisory Committee within an NGO , striving to help develop a database of "green" ingredients for cleaning product formulators to use. The basic value of such a database for companies like ours, would be as a clearing house of products "pre-approved" by the USEPA's DfE accreditation group. The premise is that if formulators use Cleangredients in their formulations, they can more easily claim that their final products are designed for the environment, within the EPA's definition.This concept sat well with me, as it promotes continuous improvement, eco-efficiency, sustainability, less toxic chemicals in the environment and is a market-based strategy to bring about change, rather than policy driven regulations. These market-based concepts have driven our firm’s efforts for last 15 years or so. Unfortunately, this effort towards producing market based change, has not developed as I had hoped.

Four decimal places in a two decimal place world.

It seems that to qualify, any ingredient to be used in formulation of a green cleaning product, must have a fully existing set of eco-toxicity data. By a full set of data, this means recent laboratory reports of fish, daphnia, algae toxicity, biodegradability, human toxicity, etc. General literature surveys of past work, data summaries by other governmental environmental agencies, reference data for parent compounds, are not suitable sources of data.

Substances that qualify as "green" must have current lab reports even if, they have been in commerce for years and are sited as safe by other nations such as the EU and Japan. Ecological foot print, material mass economics, continuous improvement of processes, pollution prevention potential, etc., are all being ignored… in order to use this process to allow the collection more data.

What became apparent is that for DfE to cover their risk of endorsement, is four decimal places of hard science, when the existing two decimal places of evidence would produce the changes they desire according to their stated mission.

This must sound like sour grapes. Another chemical company trying to skirt responsibility for insuring the chemistry they sell is safe. This is not the case, although I can certainly say that I am soured on this process. We have been redesigning processes and chemistry to be greener since the 1980's, and are starting from a product line that has already been through numerous iterations of "greening". Rocket science is not needed here, just good solid data based on recent studies and historical performance.

This is one of the challenges that company’s face in being out front in the area of sustainable enterprise. The environmental regulator continues to insist on more data, when they have enough to act in a responsible way that could help increase the rate of change through market mechanisms. I guess the US is still waiting for more hard science before acting on global warming, and I guess they will continue to wait for some poor firm to decide its worth the money to run these tests before allowing these chemistries to become "green"...or not?The market will react by dumbing down to the technologies that have the data sets. These data sets do exist for a limited number of commodity surfactants. They are not state of the art, but they are sold in large volumes, so the data exists. Because the data are so costly to produce, and cleaning is not an exact science, products will be produced under this program that is "good enough". Not eco-efficient, but they will be "green" meaning that the data exists and it meets the "standards".

This happened before with "green" products in the 1970's and we got poorly performing green products from companies that have long since gone out of business. The bottom line here is that the potential exists for non-green products to have a better ecological footprint through eco-efficiency than the fully tested, mediocre performers.When a regulator, rather than the marketplace, decides to set a technology or performance standard, look out for mediocrity. Government can produce policy to move market performance but in my opinion government cannot set market standards. The market performs based on consumer behavior. Our government cannot "yet" dictate that. Deciding what product or technology will lead in any market remains the province of the consumer.

In this case the product can be as green as a gourd, and no one buy it. I think it is humorous that this is not well understood at the government level.So, where this is all moving is to further complicate, via regulation, our US markets. This provides an advantage for competitors who do not reside in this country or who just lie about what they are doing and can avoid scrutiny. Meanwhile, we the small businesses that produce a huge share of the innovation, must suffer a huge disincentive, rather than obtain a big dividend from sustainable behavior.

I always remind myself that the best video tape technology was beta-max and no body bought one. The market alone decides what the standards will be.

Bottom of Form

Ego

2006-01-25T11:46:00.000-08:00

I have begun noticing that in almost every endeavor, people that perform a certain task or skill in a very professional or excellent manner, are the first to tell you or demonstrate how good they are. The worst are sportsmen, especially football players, who cannot accept graciously and professionally the recognition from their fans, but have to thump their own chests like a gorilla as if to say, "look how great I am".

This is terrible form, in my view.

I also had the opportunity to go and see Bella Fleck and the Flecktones the other night. That concert was not about the music but was about those guys showing how well and fast they could play their instruments. I have listened to Bella and his various transformations during his career and he is a wonderful musician, he has nothing else to prove to demonstrate his skill on the banjo.

The Zen of the game and the music is lost to the individual performance and the performer.

There is something sick about this and I do not think we should support it. It is arrogant, it demeans the sport or the music/play/enterprise which should get most of the adoration...Along with the star which has been lucky enough to have or develop the skill that has allowed him to participate.

A little humility and humbleness could go along way toward uniting people rather than isolating and raising the stars up on a self proclaimed pedestal.

Something good is happening

2005-10-28T11:05:00.000-07:00

I am preparing to make a presentation in November, at the Organic Trade Association’s training session for their new standards for processing “organic” textiles. I have never been to Lubbock, so I am looking forward to it. I was on the technical advisory committee that helped draw up the new standards several years ago, but I had not reexamined the standards since that time. When they asked me to make this presentation, I had to get familiar with standard again on a very basic level.

I am not an expert on organic textiles, but I am reasonably proficient in the commercial wet processing of textiles (dyeing and finishing). I published on the process and implementation of “greening” textile dyeing and finishing several years ago. (Ausley-Moore, JCLP 12 (2004) 585-601)

When I begin to compare the new OTA standards to existing 3rd party accreditations, especially the Oeko-Tex 100 standard (www,oekotex.com), I was amazed to discover that there was in reality, very little difference between the “Organic” labeling requirements and Oeko-Tex standard. Why is this amazing? It is important because Oeko-Tex is a standard that is used by mainstream, non organic producers of textile materials, in other words, regular textile producers. Not green-o’s, tree huggers, or niche market companies, but multi-billion dollar global textile firms all over the world. This means that the textile industry, through market forces, has adapted and found competitive advantage through the “greening”, and the third party accreditation that provides transparency and standards to the process. There are now thousands of textile products and mills accredited worldwide, especially in the Far East, as the Oeko-Tex accreditation has become a de facto quality and credibility measurement.

10-20 years ago, this could have never occurred. The textile Industry responded in the past only to local policy for the country where it was located. There was little agreement internationally and some of the health and environmental policies were little more than semi-transparent trade barriers. The Globalization of markets has allowed such standards as Oeko-Tex to flourish and grow even in the developing regions of the world, where they are much more stringent than any local requirements. Most important for me is that the quality of ecological and toxicological requirements in Oeko-Tex are such that they meet 90%+ of the new standards for “organic” textiles. Truly the world’s consumers are beginning to understand the costs of risk in toxicological matters and placed value on the Oeko-Tex brand.

This means that a substantial percentage of the world’s textile production is much safer and greener than even a decade ago, and it was market forces and competitive pressures that stimulated the evolution to greener production…not simply regulatory pressures.

This convinces me that the course our firm is taking, and indeed the course of businesses striving to be sustainable, is the correct for our shareholders. It also means that our assumption that cleaner and greener means more efficiency and profits is being proven in the marketplace. This personal observation is very broad in scope. I am sure that I will discover through my presentation, other gaps between the OTA standards and Oeko-Tex, but the existence of Oeko-Tex is going to make a whole lot of textile apparel folks, who want to sell “organic” textiles, auditing efforts a whole lot easier. For they can now ask if the product and mill are Oeko-Tex certified, and if so, there is only 10% or so determinates that must be audited, for Oeko-Tex has done 90% of the job.

I must say that it does my heart good to see how far this industry has come in the last 30 years by embracing a more sustainable value proposition, rather than delving into the scientific minutiae to find differences that delay the reduction of toxic substances in the environment. It seems becoming sustainable is a good business proposition.

The End of Something

2005-09-20T11:57:00.000-07:00

Today, I was called back in the dye manufacturing area of our facility to look at some old lab equipment, papers, etc. These things were all that was left in the dye factory from 50 years of being in the colorants business. I remember the stories behind each section of that factory. When it was built. Why it was built. How we financed it. How big of a risk it was. The meetings and late nights spent in the design for each section and how important it seemed at the time. I remember how proud we all were of each section as it went up. More so than my Dad's empty office, the sadness of seeing this facility sit quietly makes me yearn for those days to return.

Now it is empty, a shell of a building where Mr. Gilliam worked until he died at 83. Where Mr. Boone repackaged dye for 25 years. Where "RED Man" got his name and where my brother in law decided to try and cool a blend of malachite green with dry ice while blending it and blew green crystals everywhere. Where Thomas Watkins jumped off the tow motor because of a black snake... and the tow motor just kept on going until it fell out of the building. I remember the back corner, among the sodium sulfate, where you could sneak a nap right after lunch, and the shipping desk where I witnessed many an ass chewing by my Pop, as he would jump up and down about some shipping problem or another. There was also the corner, where for many years, a Friday afternoon poker game ran long into the night. This was place where many a summer intern or new employee learned never to draw to a inside straight. So many memories, so many people, so many customers that are all gone. Most of each are just plain dead.

The skeleton's of the blenders remain, their empty shells stained by tons of dye as they passed through standardization. They look like large inverted "Y's" their discharge nozzles all askew. The dust collection system is being removed, the blenders will be sold, and Schumpeter's cycle of "creative destruction" will be completed.

There are two sides of this story for me. There is the rational businessman side. This side is happy to see this cash monster close down and the empty facility made ready for (hopefully) a new task. The personal family side of me sees the end of something that was good for so many people for 50 years. It was the thing my Dad spent his life building. Seeing it being emptied is just as heart wrenching as watching them lower his casket into the ground. A business is not a thing, it is people that make it go, the customers, the suppliers, the employees. When a business dies, some part of all those people, who had a hand in making it successful, dies along with it. We should all never forget that.

Letter to the Editor of the Burlington Daily Times-News

2005-09-12T07:49:00.000-07:00

Dear Editor:

I find myself spending quite a bit of time these days, thinking about how comfortable we all are with the lack of effective government and our increasing dependency on the global supply chain that supply our foodstuffs, fuel, dry goods, and services. Hurricane Katrina has presented, at costs expected to exceed $250 billion dollars, the American people with a vivid demonstration of how fragile our government and this supply chain are. This hurricane has produced a mirror for our society and how we will act when these supply chains don’t work. The uncivil and even uncivilized behavior of the citizens of New Orleans, with their looting, killing, and robbing, indicate what we could expect to see throughout the USA when disruptions occur.

I do not remember seeing the communities that were impacted by the tsunami, loot, rob, and kill each other in the wake of that tragedy. Why would Americans act this way?

I have an opinion, and it is based on my observation that America no longer believes in a positive future. This is the only reason that I can see that we cast our votes with our consumer dollars for the cheapest products and services even though it negatively impacts our community, the environment, and the well being of our social structure. We have allowed ourselves to believe that the only thing that matters is the lowest possible price. We have been “Wal-Mart’ed”, meaning that we want the lowest price today with no consideration for the future of our local communities, our children, our local farmers, our local manufacturing, etc.

We are no longer self sufficient. We do not conserve energy, protect our environment, support local farmers, industries, or service providers, because we see no value in doing so. We are allowing, through our consumption, a burgeoning fiscal deficit, a dependence on foreign governments for food, fuel, and the cash to finance our debt. These actions, in my opinion, are destroying our community.

If there had been a community in New Orleans, would there have been the looting and killing over tennis shoes and flat screen TVs? I think it is harder to loot and kill the neighbor that you know and respect; the neighbor that you depend on for food, energy and services. If it is our belief that goods and services come from foreign companies, and we do not see global markets within the context of a global community, then we have removed one of the barriers that keep our civilization intact.

I think we had better begin to work on building economic, social and ecological bridges within our community to encourage understanding from all of our local citizens that we are dependent on each other. A little conservation of resources, a community that considers security through local commerce, interdependence instead of the lowest price everyday, and a little of the golden rule, might keep us from looting and killing each other when the next disruption of global supply chains occurs. I think it is time that we begin to think of economic policies that put our security and communities first. This means beginning to elect leaders that care for something more than the lowest price.

Sam Moore

Restatement of the challenges for sustainable abundance

2005-08-31T10:39:00.000-07:00

"The purpose of all these suggestions is to end industrialism as we know it. Industrialism is over, in fact; the question remains how we organize the economy that follows. Either it falls in on us, and crushes civilization, or we reconstruct it and unleash the imagination of a more sustainable future into our daily acts of commerce."..."It also means doing something now. It means trying things that may fail. It means shaking up city hall. It means electing people who actually want to make things work, who can imagine a better world. It means writing to companies and telling them what you think. It means never forgetting that the cash register is the daily voting booth in democratic capitalism. We don't have to buy products that destroy or from companies that harm or are unresponsive. If we want businesses to express a full range of social and environmental values in their daily commercial activities, then we, too, will have to express a full range of values and respond to the presence or absence of principle by how we act in the marketplace. It may mean being obstreperous or conciliatory, and knowing when to be which. To go back to our nature can also mean becoming 'sour, astringent, crabbed, unfertilized, unpruned, tough, resilient, and every spring shockingly beautiful in bloom.' It may mean a meticulous reinventorying of our lives, and our country. It will mean, in the words of Vaclav Havel, trying harder to “understand than to explain. The way forward is not in the mere construction of universal systemic solutions to be applied to reality from the outside; it is also in seeking to get to the heart of reality from the inside, through personal experience.” It is time to clean out the closet, both conceptually and materially, and to reexamine our priorities and beliefs. We can't wait until the guardians wake up, but that doesn't mean we shouldn't try to wake them up. We cannot wait for business to set a new course. We have to educate our businesses, and, wherever appropriate, let them educate us." (Hawken, 1993. pp212-213)

Entrepreneurship at Case Western Reserve University

2005-08-22T06:27:00.000-07:00

I have just spent the better part of a week attending a seminar at Case Western Reserve on Entrepreneurship, taught by Dr. Scott Shane. This is a seminar sponsored by the Kauffman foundation.

The materials and presentation were first rate. Over 40 articles and materials were reviewed over the five day period, so it was quite an intensive program.

It is clear from the seminar discussions that the academic field of entrepreneurship is a cross functional area where the empirical techniques used for evaluations draw heavily from economics, finance and the social sciences. The current academic efforts appear to be focused on analysis of the opportunity and decision-making process of the entrepreneur, with less focus on the character or personality of the individual entrepreneur.

It appears that many of my ideas on the influence of global information networks, and the hypothesis that an emphasis on sustainable enterprise can increase the opportunity for entrepreneurship, are on target. An emphasis on the triple bottom line increases the complexity and social pressures of markets. This increases the complexity of the opportunities, and therefore creates market spaces where the entrepreneur can create value through control of complexity. This will increase efficiency for customers and provide value for the entrepreneur. This is in complete alignment with Schumpeterian thought on destruction and disruption creating new opportunities in capitalistic markets.

As far as defining entrepreneurship, I came away with the idea that entrepreneurship can occur anywhere within the innovation, capitalization, or firm founding aspects of the business process. I do believe however that entrepreneurship only occurs when someone risks something to push a new idea into the marketplace, be it an idea that benefits an internal market or the external market.

This leads to examination on the question of how leadership enters into the question of entrepreneurship. Does taking risks and evaluating risk leadership? Are there entrepreneurs that are not leaders? Are there leaders that are not entrepreneurs?

Greater knowledge leads to more questions.

Trials and tribulations of a small business

2005-06-24T06:45:00.000-07:00

Running a socially conscience, small business in America is not easy during a period of change and reorganization. There are certainly management and people challenges, and this is a normal part of any organization. However, in America, it is the regulatory and bureaucratic crap or our own construction is driving small business costs up. This absurd regulatory environment is providing incentives for small firms to drop out, to develop grey markets, markets that are outside of taxation and recorded GNP. Markets that look like the corrupt world of the drug trade.

America is on its way down the path leading towards a black market economy full of corruption, with lawyers, accountants, banks, and insurance companies sucking down all the profits from firms trying to do the right thing, while the SMEs and their employees are left holding the bag. Its a sad state of affairs when two guys in a pick up truck full of lawn mowing equipment, can make more money being paid cash, tax free, than working with a legit firm, with benefits, that are subject to all the rules and regulations.

We as a society do not have enough regulators or adequate systems to enforce all of the existing policy. (our jails are full of criminals now) If law abiding firms are broken by globalization regulation, and convert to micro firms that are so small and so numerous that they become like the fleas on the rats that caused the black plague, then we sink into the quagmire economies of Brazil, India, and the far East, where corruption rules. All across the nation, many of our MBA students are studying in Brazil, China, and the developing economies of the world, trying to find out how grey economics work. They know that it is impossible to exist on $2/day and are trying to figure out where the money is going. They are finding billions in unrecorded transactions, transactions which if recorded, could aid in development for many regions. These transactions are the grey economy, too small individually to matter and to large collectively to ignore any longer.

When the opportunities for legit small business in America are gone, we can thank our government( this means us), for allowing the tax, accounting, banking, legal, and medical establishment of our country for our demise. Hiding, lying, stealing are all OK, as long as you don't get caught. Get small enough and grey enough, and hide and lie enough, and you can be as bad as the law allows.

Eulogy for Pop

2005-04-04T06:56:00.000-07:00

This is the Eulogy for my father, L. Bascom Moore, delievered at his funeral on April 3rd, 2005 at Davis Street Methodist Church.

Perhaps it is as Tom Brokaw said in his book. One of the greatest generations of America is passing. This was a generation of men who grew up during the great depression, and many fought in WW2 and Korea. They raised their businesses and families during some of the best times in American history and are leaving us to a world that is much changed. The one clear difference between that generation and ours can be summed up in two words: no whining.
Dad, by all accounts has lived the American dream. He married a beautiful woman, had 4 good kids, grew a successful business from nothing, and sacrificed a good part of his life for his family’s well being and for his company. I know that I owe a lot of what I am to his and mother’s generosity. It is a debt I can never repay.

My mother never left his side through almost 50 years of the ups and downs of his life, which were many. Pop was never a healthy man and never an easy one. We all watched her keep his ship afloat. He adored her. She was his soul mate and loved him dearly as did his children.

The triumphs in his life were many: his marriage, the birth of his children, the growth of Burlington Chemical, his grandchildren, a good game of golf and catching a bigger fish than Mother (which did not often happen).

His name was L. Bascom Moore. His first name was just the letter “L”. We always heard that the L stood for “little” Bascom because Grandpa was such a big man. He did not favor this explination. He did like it when my fraternity brothers named him Lord Bascom.

Pop was a man that loved a good joke, and enjoyed his own jokes better than anyone else’s. Pop always saw himself as 6 feet tall in a fight. He told me when I turned 16 that I might be bigger than him now, but I would never be tougher. He was right.

He was however a man pursued by demons that only he understood. Many times I felt these demons sucking the joy out of his life, but he was unable to let any of us share these burdens. Because of this, Pop did not have the joy in his life that everyone wished for him. His last few years were full of irrational challenges: the decline of his beloved Burlington Chemical and the insidious decay of his health. His long sad decline has something to teach all of us: All of us must die but not all can really live.

If Pop was here with us today, he would tell each of you to: live life to the fullest, travel, have fun, work hard, have a cold beer, and play a good round of golf. He would thank Mike Scott and all the people of Burlington Chemical for the quality of their relationship and all their hard work. He would tell you that one of his great accomplishments were to sire and hire only the best people. He would tell you that the customer always comes first. He would also lament the fact that he did not travel or have as much fun as he could have.

There are so many good memories from our family and business life: The time he drove with Butch Harrington with us kids from Burlington to Ft. Lauderdale for vacation. The night the naked woman came to the door when mother was at bridge club and he was at a complete loss as what to do!

The time my brother in law Tim and I had a very successful blue water fishing trip and we gave him and mother a few really big ones. We transferred the fish to his little boat out in the river, so he could take them back to the harbor and tell folks he had caught them right off the harbor rocks. The next day there were 50 people fishing off the rocks. He thought that was funny.

Pop lived the fullest when he was working at Burlington Chemical. I was privileged to have worked with him there for almost 30 years. He taught me the importance of people in business whether they were customers, suppliers, or employees.

He took everything about his business personally, and like so many of the “greatest generation”, did not separate his personal and business life. This made for some challenging Thanksgiving dinner board meetings.

He told me once that the greatest joy he had in his life was creating opportunities for other people. He loved seeing young people come into the company and grow with the company into valuable members of the community. He liked to think of the hundreds of families that benefited from Burlington Chemical. He liked to see hard work and believed strongly that it always paid off.

He was a man who could charm the skin off a snake or make you so mad that you wanted thrash him…but he always demanded and got, your respect.

In his last years, there was much pain in his life. The decline of the textile industry coincided with the decline in his health. For the last two years he was in a great deal of physical pain as his spine collapsed and his breathing became more labored. He struggled to keep his chin up and I will never forget his last visit to my house in 2002, as he, Wade, and I toasted in the New Year. It was the last time I saw him really laugh. I cried that night because I knew it was the end of a normal life for him.

My fraternity brothers always called him Lord Bascom when they came over to wash their clothes and visit when we were in college. He loved this. Wade Harrison always called him the Captain. He always called Wade the kid. I always called him the Chief at work, and Pop at home. I will miss him every day.

Deeper understanding of community

2005-03-23T08:04:00.000-08:00

I was doing on going research on the changes going on at Burlington Chemical as a result of the destruction of the textile industry. We continue our reorganization to creatively adjust the textile segment of our business. Within that analysis, I discovered that from 1955-1995, 90% our business was in the textile industry and the majority of our customer were within a 250 mile radius along the infamous "lint-head highway".

As I look back on the success of the firm during that period, BCC used this geography to its advantage. We delivered weekly or in some cases daily. We were in constant technical conversations and co-development with our customers. We were in constant dialogue with the regulators, the developers of policy that would impact this community. We lobbied these regulators and worked with them to develop policy. We all had a lot at stake. There there was a ferment, a critical mass that developed because of our financial, technical, and geographic immersion in this community.

Many of the skills developed to be competitive within this community, became core skills for the company. Rapid production, rapid communication, logistical readiness, response to policy and regulations, and process and product development as a result of understanding policy, were proudly proclaimed in marketing literature as evidence of our commitment and expertise in the textile wet processing community.

When this community (marketplace) was destroyed by globalization, and BCC was forced to reorganize into new markets, I underestimated the influence of community related effects on the essence of the business. The majority of our core skills were tied to performing within this specific community. Disassembling the structures built in response to fulfilling these specific market needs, were a major impediment on the speed of organizational change. The mental models developed over 40 years as experts and service providers to this regional textile community-based marketplace, created organizational structures that were in fact, the essence of the company. When the community was destroyed, all the relationships built around this community were destroyed. The immensity of that loss destroyed the identity of the company for many of the employees and left a shadow on the capabilities of the company for new markets.

If value is created when companies control complexity for their customers within specific marketplaces, creating efficiency, then Burlington Chemical had numerous legs to support it in the textile marketplace. When the textile community declined, all of those supports were unnecessary for new markets outside of the textile marketplace. This is one of the primary organizational impediments, in my view, to radical change within a paradigm of creative destruction.

As a restructuring strategy, it may be best to develop an instrument to analyze the effects of geography and community relationships on the business, and then perform surgery as quickly as possible on those bits that rely on the community relationships to produce value. Had we been faster in our analysis and approached the analysis in this fashion, we could have been 3-5 years further along in developing our new identify within our new markets.

Instead of rapid radical surgery, we took what we thought was a more humane pace for the change, but we underestimated the costs. It was only after all of the residual effects of the textile portion of the business were eliminated from marketing, sales and technical development, that the non textile business could grow.

This is a valuable lesson.

Its a jungle out there

2005-02-07T10:23:00.000-08:00

Organizational change has been, and will continue to be, a hot topic in business management. How to get personnel to see and embrace the new trends motivating change, is one of the major responsibilities of strategic planners. As a manager, it is easy to produce memos, hold meetings, send out articles, etc., to induce awareness, but this rarely enables employees to fully "buy in" to possible future trends ... especially if they threaten incumbent enterprise models (status quo).

With expanding information systems, trends of change and the market's responses to these trends, are readily available for analysis. However, the difficulty is putting together logical "what if" scenarios based on this analysis that can demonstrate the value of proaction. Scenario planning offers a tool that can provide the verisimilitude enabling proaction, but the "story" must be told correctly and all the facts and figures must be correct, or the scenario will have little use as a planning tool, even if the story is a good one. One of the best books on this topic is The Living Company by DeGeus.

I think that efforts towards sustainable enterprise (SE) suffer somewhat from this malaise. SE produces good arguments for the ethical and ecological legs of the triple bottom line, but economic success is not yet firmly linked to SE. One of the goals of my research is to produce more obvious links to intentional sustainable management, especially for small to medium sized enterprises (SME).

Why are SMEs important? I believe the research indicates that networks of smaller firms will become more efficient than their larger counterparts. This may be due to information technology, the development of global supply chains that behave as networks, and the forces of sustainable development.

Recent economic publications describe this current period of rapid technological advances and economic globalization as Schumpeterian, or having characteristics of rapid change forcing destruction of incumbent structures. This is due to the rapid spread of technology and communication systems and capitalism. Described in layman terms, this means that the status quo, or many incumbent enterprises of commerce, are being rapidly replaced with new networks of enterprises that are evolving as a result of new efficiencies developed under the stimuli of Schumpeterian globalization, i.e., rapid technological and economic development.

The Price Equation, one of many descriptions of evolutionary factors, describes evolutionary market forces in terms of: selection effects, the diversity in technological development, and innovation effects. Selection means success and survival. The diversity of technological development is the size of the gap between the lowest level of technology and the highest. Innovation effects describe the rate of innovation from slow to rapid.

Within the Price Equation, selection is directly influenced by technological innovation and the ability to move rapidly to fill the needs or gaps in the market.

Schumpeter's "creative destruction" is an important influence on innovation effects. When new ideas must grow in the presence of incumbent structures and paradigms, they are always retarded in their growth as the incumbent systems resist becoming obsolete and hold capital close for its own use, keeping necessary capital from the upstart. As incumbent systems fail or are intentionally destroyed and removed, they no longer provide friction or resistance to the change that is offered by newly minted ideas and paradigms. This is the power of “creative destruction”. It is the removal of the structural and philosophical resistance to change.

If we begin to understand the evolutionary factors for modern business, including creative destruction, globalization, rapid communication, and dissemination of information, we find that the opportunities for small firms to take advantage of their ability to change rapidly increase. SMEs have the ability to respond and unwind complexities and inefficiencies that result from technology, market and sustainability, and to do it rapidly. Large incumbent firms are self retarding, especially in their ability to take advantage of the efficiencies of networking because networks threaten existing structures. Therefore, smaller firms working in evolving markets with evolving structures, especially networks of these smaller firms, will see dramatic opportunities develop.

When smaller firms work in developing markets, where the technological gap is large, and they apply their quickness within a context of sustainable enterprise, SMEs offer the most efficient way to control complexity for their customers. This is of course, the purpose of markets and of enterprise: to control complexity and thereby create the customer. One of the challenges is for the market to see these networks as stable, or at least as stable and efficient as large multinational enterprises. The market is already finding out that networks produce cost effective structures for meeting supply chain needs, the larger question may be their reliability and longevity. Can networks of SME be cohesive enough and last long enough to be reliable as a multinational company. This remains to be seen.

Within this rambling is one case for adoption of sustainable enterprise for small business. Working rapidly, within the messy interface of new market paradigms, SMEs will evolve as efficient networks, perhaps even sustainable networks of value, if we can envision these networks as long term and not ad hoc. Can these networks assume the responsibility for the environmental and ethical factors that are being imposed on multinational firms by NGOs and civil society, or will SMEs and their networks be like so many of the small pests that plague our world that we don’t see and feel until the damage is done? Termites and the rats of the Black Plague are good examples: killing one termite or one rat does not stop the network termites from eating the foundation of your house or stop the rats from breeding and spreading fleas. To make these networks accountable, one has to destroy the hive or habitat.

Networks of SMEs are more efficient suppliers of goods and services for the global market, but if the networks do not develop the ethics and accountability for their actions, these structures can produce more efficient consumption and productive networks that accelerate the current trends of environmental and social degradation.

Post election blues

2004-11-03T08:37:00.000-08:00

I have not posted for a while, as work, life and the pursuit of happiness have gotten in the way. I must say how disappointed I am with the lack of productive dialogue on topics that matter during this presidential election. I thought the debates were good, but it appears to me that the American people forgot how poorly Bush represented himself in the debates and how foolish we must look to the rest of the world.

There was no true debate on energy issues, no significant message of hope for future generations, no vision on anything but keeping the status quo. America is riding on the coattails of a fool...and he is now our fool again for 4 more years. If he keeps up the pace on spending, it will not be long before our bonds are worthless and we will see an economic decline such as not been seen since the 1930's.

I weep for our country that turns to fundamental religion for easy answers for difficult questions. Soon, there will be no difference between the fundamental religious fervor of Christian right and the Muslims. In the end it will be who runs out of assets first. Will it be the US and its bomb-debt or the Muslims and their oil...Either way, welcome to more chaos, uncertainty and more unhappiness. Welcome to Bush, Act two.

Senge et. al, does it again

2004-08-02T13:40:00.000-07:00

Peter Senge's team has written a new book, Presence, published in 2004 by The Society for Organizational Learning (SOL). I, like so many others, have found Dr. Senge's books of great value throughout my working career. He has found ways to describe systems and systems thinking in ways that have literally changed the world. I have also had the opportunity to meet Peter and work with him on serveral occasions and have found him to be a delightful person as well.

This new book on how to approach visioning and acting on future possibilities (life) breaks new ground. It is written as a dialogue (no surprise there) and it is written in a series of stories or episodes, each with a message and a lesson.

I took away several really fine learnings and experiences from the book that I will be able to use in my work, in and out of the classroom. His idea that we can project possible learning from anticipated futures, if we view life as a process, rather than series of projects, provides a whole new way of leading and working in organizations. He paints a vision of future leadership that is inclusive not exclusive, that is about providing learning conditions in our organizations that provide opportunites for as many as possible. With the lurking environmental and social limits of technological globalization apon us, never has there been a better time for a new skill set, a new leadership based on how to accelerate and improve our ability to learn.

But this book is more than that. This team of outhors builds on the work of many intellegent people who are finding it hard to "live their lives in color when we paint our world in black and white". So much of what we value is carteasian while practical wisdom is dismissed. We leave a whole palettes of possbilities locked away, and we search for the truth through science and economics, while a whole new reality may be open to those who are bold enough to admit that there may be room for all. Ken Wilber has worked on this for many years, this disconnect between science and philosophy of letters, but this team has demonstrated practical value in a broader view. Approaching organizational learning by enfolding broader value systems will produce broader scenarios. When planning for the future actions of your organizations, this may make your organizations more successful and certainly it can make life more fulfilling.

It will take me several readings and pondering on the book to "grok" the fullness of it.

Switzerland

2004-08-02T12:57:00.000-07:00

Our family had a great vacation this summer in Switzerland, staying mostly in the areas in and around the lake of Constance. I have a great friend there and it was good to spend time with them.

It was pretty expensive. Fuel was $5 a gallon and dinners were ~30 a person, but it is certainly one of the most beautiful places in the the world.

From the terrace of our flat, we could see the Alps on one side and the lake on the other. The road that passed by our flat had bike lanes and there were almost as many bikes on the road as cars. If you took the motorbike into consideration, the two wheelers certainly out numbered 4 wheelers. Small trains passed by about every 20 minutes. It struck me, as I was sitting there having a glass of wine and feeling very European, that if oil trekked up to $10 or $20 a gallon, this country could get by without a huge change in lifestyle.

I have tried to discuss this with several people, who cite that yes, it is like that in Europe, but it is so small relative to the US. I would argue that if we broke the US into communities and looked at the investment return over the long haul, verses the true cost of a petroleum based transport system, that it is feasible to do this. Of course what we must have is the will of the public.

This, of course, is not being discussed in our election year debates, but the candidates have implied that they will get the cost of the oil down. This will not be possible. Petrol is now a limited resource. Because us poor Americans cannot think or plan past our current reality, we will continue to spend billions on security that is being used to protect us from terrorists that we have created with our energy and lifestyle policies.

It is so sad. We are fulfilling a destiny that could be so different with just a bit of change in perception of what is possible and what makes for a good life.

When the petroleum shit begins to hit the fan hard, it will be a whole lot better life in Switzerland that in the US, because they have retained the value in their communities and they have paid for it over generations.

The Opportunities for Communities in globalization

2004-06-22T12:46:00.000-07:00

If you are in the manufacturing business, there has been catastrophic impact on your business from globalization. I know of no manufacturing sector of the economy, or perhaps any sector, that has survived the meta-nationalization of markets.

If we stand back and look at this as simply another round of rapid change caused by the explosion of the information age, then a reasonable person would think that when one door closes another one opens...And a good business person should damn well be looking for the open door. Well here in America, I think we have forgotten how to look for the open door. So we sit around and whine a lot about how Congress has given away manufacturing and are content to see the lowest cost producer get the marketshare and Wal-Mart get the distribution rights. This type of activity is not going to get us much of anywhere.

So let's stretch this analogy a bit. If we remember our natural history, it is surmised that around the peak time of the dinosaurs, some big comet hit the earth and created a catastrophic change. The big organisms at the top of the food chain, i.e., the dinosaurs, being cold blooded, could not adapt to the colder temperatures and rapidly changing environment. They, from all accounts, died out. During this time however, small furry mammals found niches where they could survive and even thrive. They learned to get away from the cold, find food and water, and even went to sleep off the coldest times of the year. They adapted and grew until man evolved to sit atop the food chain.

If we apply this analogy to the current business environment, there might be something to learn. Let's assume that globalization is similar to the comet hitting the earth. Certainly for the manufacturing workers in the country, a similar percentage of manufacturing companies have died in the change. There was an immediate scurrying about to find jobs in the "service sector" which was to be the savior niche, but lo and behold, those companies moved globally as well to chase the lowest possible wages. The jobs that are left are working for the "big box" distribution companies, food service, health care or infrastructure maintenance.

Underneath the radar however, is the beginning of a micro economy, even in the manufacturing sector, for specialized goods and services with companies that are producing unique things. Sometimes these unique things get "found" and they become global themselves and get sucked into the black hole of commodity-ism (their value declines as sales volumes increase with a loss of uniqueness). Other times, the value remains constant because the market niches are limited and customers like the quality or regional nature of the product or service.

Here are a couple of analogies. Fresh fish at the coast. There are always a few fish mongers at the coast who sell locally caught fish. There is no opportunity for commodity-ism because the source is limited and the further the fish goes from the coast, the less flavor, etc, it has. When one goes to the coast, one buys the fish there, pays more, and even gets some to take home to cook the next day. Wal Mart is not going to get that business. It is safe and people are not looking for the commodity experience here.

Another analogy comes from the book "Creative Destruction" by Cowen. Special music is created in Jamaica. Because it is an island, before global communications, it never got off the rock. If you were to hear it, you went to Jamaica. Because of globalization, this music has expanded and grown beyond anyone's imagination. It was a niche that was discovered, and because the value of music increase with the number of people that experience it, the niche become global.

These are two very different value propositions. One, the fish, is driven by geographic and logistic concerns based on scarcity. The music is based on a niche that can be expanded because the value proposition is based on abundance.

So rather than whining about globalization, the American businessman needs to understand the value proposition of his perceived enterprise. Is it based on scarcity or abundance? Is it of more value locally rather than globally. If it has a huge local following, why...And can it be expanded or will expansion "devalue" the product or service. Instead of globalization increasing the sameness of civilization perhaps it can be the foundation of a new creation of unique goods and services that in turn promote unique communities.

I am sure there will be more on this later..

Travels in Mexico

2004-06-16T07:55:00.000-07:00

Spent last week in Monterey Mexico at a conference about integrating sustainable development into university operations and curricula. It was a good experience with a good group of people.

It seems clear that the Mexican and European universities see the need to act on getting SD into the mainstream to improve their prospects for a better life. While US universities are working, it is not as broadbased an initiative, because there are different driving factors for us.

The other parts of the world see SD as a way to create a better life, but the realities for us in the US, is that SD is viewed as an additional encumbrance or a cost center to be added to an already burdensome group of regulations constraints. What most people in the US are beginning to feel in their gut, is that globalization and the increase in the prospects for the poorer regions of the world are going to impact negatively their future earnings. The data backs this up. The average family income in China in 2002 was $750 USD, in India $450 USD, in Germany $27,000 USD and in the USA, $43,000 USD. Guess what? For development to occur in these less developed regions, we have to pay for it. Within a closed system, the books must balance. If theirs goes up, ours must go down.

This gives us in the USA an interesting opportunity to straighten out some of our societal problems, such as looking at people as something other than consumers, working again within local economies and embracing the uniqueness of each community and building value in that, trying to become locally more independent rather than dependent, making the best use of our natural capital. The list can go on and on.

So we have to give up some income to give to make the world more peaceful and less hungry, but we will have to change our consumerism. If we were to do this, and get something done on sustainable energy, mass transit, and some universal health care, our quality of life would go up, even if we bought less stuff.

The trick is going to be to educate the university student to this consequence. Like it or not, this generation will not have the same opportunities of my generation because this generation will not have the natural capital to freely exploit. This is not to say that they cannot be wildly successful pockets within the local and international markets, but they it will take a new kind of inventiveness and this is what we must teach our students.

One additional note...Sitting on the student union at Monterey TEC and observing... The student's listen to American music, dress like American Students and are studying highly technical and diverse topics with great instructors...At this one university there are 150,000 students. It is not to be underestimated. These folks may out compete us because they are moving up not down.

Small Business in America

2004-06-03T07:05:00.000-07:00

I have just read an interesting book as part of my reading for my PhD. "A History of Small Business in America", by Mansel G. Blackford has provided me the perspective to gauge the rate and type of change currently experience by Small to Medium Sized Enterprises(SME). Everyone tends to think that their experiences and situations are unique in history. What Blackford has provided is proof that what is old is new again.

It is very clear from his research that SMEs are successful if they have a profitable niche to work in and can stay specialized enough to be invisible to large companies, and I would also have to add as a result of my research...Invisible to regulators.

As globalization continues with the formation of mega-enterprises, I think we will also see a resurgence in formation of SMEs due to outsourcing of services that the megas do not want to do and markets where they cannot compete with smaller, more nimble and specialized SME. This makes finding the reasons for an SME to act in a socially responsible manner, imperative.

Think about it in this way. Say the owner of a small manufacturing company is approach by a meta-national firm to provide cleaning chemicals for its stores. The chemicals will be used by another SME, who provides the cleaning contract services to the meta-national. The meta-national sets the price they will pay for the cleaning chemicals and says that they want them to be safe. The service company uses the chemicals and finds a problem with the toxicity of a chemical. This is reported to the regulators, who cite the meta-national...but guess what...the meta-national is not involved in the manufacturing, selling, or purchasing of the chemicals...that is an arrangement between the two SMEs.

The importance of this scenario is that the use of SME, which is like a small mouse in the food chain invisible to most predators(regulations), to do the "dirty work" of the meta-nationals does not enhance progress towards social responsibility or sustainability. Thus creation of SMEs to do these jobs is similar to "sweat shop ethics". It therefore becomes important to educate the entrepreneurs that run SMEs not to be used in such a fashion...to allow meta-nationals to be as bad as the law allows through sub-contracts of services where the only competitive advantage the SME has is regulatory invisibility.

In Blackford's book, he does not mention that this has been an historical benefit of being small. This may be a new competitive advantage that is ancillary to meta-national enterprises and globalization. For this reason, the ethics training of business people to help insure behavior that supports the rights of future generations to exist is crucial. How do we get small business owners to buy into such ethical behavior. The hook needs to come from success. If the successful SME behave ethically and this is a benefit rather than a liability, then the behavior will spread. If less-ethical behavior promotes success, then this type of behavior will be reinforced.

Historically, Blackford is able to show that SMEs will respond to positive stimulus and change to enhance economic performance...and it can happen quite rapidly. He is also clear on what happens if SMEs do not change to increase profits and efficiency. They go the way of buggywhip makers...and become footnotes in history books.

Organic food companies will not buy organic apparel

2004-05-26T09:13:00.000-07:00

With the addition of the American Organic Standards for Fiber Processing, Version 6, the OTA makes the quality of organic products for textiles a reality. The question is: is the organic food industry ready to support their cousins, to help build demand for the organic textile products? Over the last 5 years, several companies have been working to replace the non organic t-shirts used as advertising by organic food companies, with organic product, only to be told that the garments are "too expensive" verses traditional t-shirts or fleece wear. This seems to be oxymoronic at best. Organic food products sell at a premium because the consumer learned what they were taught about the quality, health, and value obtained from organic products. It would seem that the organic food producers would be the first group to support the production of stylish, distinguishable, organic textiles, by purchasing organically produced garments that meet the new organic standards and promote civil society. Sure, these garments will cost more than the products produced in Chinese factories, made from non-organic cotton, but the same advantages that drive the growth of organic foods also can be the qualities that create a fertile marketplace for organically produced textile materials.

In this case, existing organic food markets, distributors, and producers, that use printed t-shirts as promotion or work wear, can be the nucleus for a growing, sustainable customer base for organic textiles. The same dynamics that are creating new sustainable jobs in agriculture through organic foodstuffs can recreate a more sustainable local and global textile industry. However, this can only occur if there is market demand. Every time an organic textile producer loses an order to the non-organic product, especially when the customer is an organic market or food producer, there is a not so subtle message of "no difference" between organic products and non-organic products. Our goal is to make "All Things Organic" and sometimes that means putting your money where it can do the most good...Especially when we are trying to build value in a new standard and teach the consumer.

One of the stated principals in promulgating a new textile organic standard is to create the demand for greener chemistries and production methods for textiles. This occurs when there is enough demand to interest the technology leaders. Currently, organic textiles are the flea on the back of the world textile elephant. Does this remind anyone of the situation that existed in organic foods in the 1960's? We should be shameless promoters of organic textiles and the first to support the development of this infant segment of this ancient industry, not the one's behaving like the big box retailers, whose only idea of value is how cheaply something can be made. Gandhi spent time each day spinning cotton in support of the local Indian textile market, can we not emulate him and support a new niche for organic produce?

Wear organic!

O' Canada

2004-05-26T08:49:00.000-07:00

I spent part of last week at the Sustainable Enterprise Academy, which is a consortium for executive training for sustainable development based out of York University in Toronto, UNC, and several other universities. Each time I go to work in Canada, I get the distinct feeling that they are different from Americans in a very tangible way. After several in depth discussions, I think that it has to do with the pace of life and fear.

In America, we are now ruled by fear. Fear of losing our jobs, our economic success, our health insurance, our way of life. We are convinced that if we work harder, increase the pace of our activities, that we can overcome (or at least repress) our fears. We are sure that our capitalism and individualism, will allow us to lead.

The Canadians on the other hand seem to believe in the strength of the collective with a bit more socialism built in. I think that the basis for this is their national health insurance plan. With this safety net, there is a decline in pace that allows for deeper discussions and collaboration that may produce longer lasting solutions to problems. It is not the endless discussions that take place in Europe (I'll never forget the Dutchman who told me the national product of the Netherlands are meetings), but a purposeful pace that is inclusive of dialogue without a rush to make a decision, good or bad. There is an emphasis on good dialogue that produces good decisions. I have been to the center for dialogue in Vancouver, BC and seen the new Business School at York University. All of these facilities are like the Canadian people...Built to sustain a dialog based process of decision making.

I think that it would be interesting to see how tension levels would drop in the US if we had national health insurance. For our company, other than sales, insurance costs are the most inflationary, uncontrollable cost we have. How do you put a price on health and when we do, we get the frenetic pace that we Americans enjoy today. We should learn from our good neighbors from the North.

A Passing

2004-05-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

Today one of my colleagues at work died after about 1 month of severe illness with complications from lung cancer. He is the second one to die in less than a year. Today is also my 49th birthday.

I have paid little attention to birthdays in my 20's, 30's and 40's, but as I get closer to my 50th and I began to have colleagues die, its a little disconcerning. Father Time stares back at me in the mirror every morning.

The kids will all be in college next year and life is more unsettled than it has ever been, but strangely, I am finding great peace and solace from working at my farm. Unlike the work I do in management and research, each day on the farm is a finished project. Whether you are sowing or mowing, planting or plowing...or just weeding, you seem to get finished and you can see what you have accomplished. It does kind of piss you off though when the bugs or the deer eat your hard work. Tomorrow I will work out there all day and I will be a happy boy.

I watched the tape of that guy being beheaded. They must have had him drugged out of his mind... because he did not struggle. I would have been cussing and fighting all the way. Plus the video did not look that real.

Reasons for work on sustainable development

2004-05-12T05:51:00.000-07:00

Our company is part of the continued decline of the US textile business. Part of our strategy to survive the destruction of the domestic textile industry by globalization has been a transformation of our textile-based technology into non textile areas. In the 1980's-1990's, our company spent a lot of money on 'green chemistry' and developing greener processes for textile wet processing. We also were responding for new limitations on the aquatic toxicity of textile wastestreams. This account has been published in the Journal of Cleaner Production 12 (2004) 585-601 in an article that I co-wrote with Larry Ausley of NCDWQ.

As we have moved through our transformation by creatively transforming our textile business, what we have discovered is that the efficiencies and process improvements made in our quest to become more sustainable, are indeed robust business assets that have aided in the change processes within our company. Many of narrowly defined technical issues that were specific to textiles have not translated into long-term assets, but...many of the greener improvement have translated.

I think that this may be one of the major reasons that manufacturing firms should work to be socially responsible...not for marketing or advertising but to produce durable business advantages.

The beauty of CSA (Community Supported Agriculture)

2004-05-11T07:15:00.000-07:00

This year, my wife and I joined a group supporting Timberwood Organics. This is a small organic farm located in Mebane, NC. Ray is the farmer and we paid ~$500 for 28 weeks of fresh produce. I run down to the farm and pick up the 'greenbox' once a week for ourselves and several of our friends. The quality of the produce has been excellent so far and I enjoy my weekly visits with old Ray. The beauty of this is that you know where your food is coming from, the land is being taken care of, and the money stays in the community. A CSA also spreads the risk for the farmer, who gets his money up front but the patron runs the risks of weather, drought, insects, etc.

I really do like the feel of this arrangement and wish that I could find a similar situation for meats and dairy.