EclecticLip

Much has been made of emergence recently — how complex systems develop / exhibit behaviours based on the interaction of simpler individual components.  An example might be how extraordinarily complex economies can develop, through the interaction of thousands or millions of individual “agents” in an economy, buying or selling as per their individual whims.

It occurred to me that the phases of nature (solid, liquid, gas, plasma — or “earth”, “water”, air”, “fire” for any Aristotelian holdouts) are themselves emergent phenomena. 

An individual molecule can’t be solid or liquid: these stuctures require the coming-together of a bunch of molecules, either into a lattice structure (solid) or a continuous-but-not-as-ordered one (liquid). 

Gases consist of molecules floating about freely (unbonded and unconstrained to each other) but if you only had a single molecule in a vacuum… there would be a distinct lack of other atoms by which to assess which phase it belongs to.

And since plasmas are gases where some fraction of molecules are ionically charged… i imagine you need a multiple number of molecules to assess whether they could be termed a plasma or not.  (If a lone molecule was present, and it was charged, one would presumably call it an ion, not a plasma.)

I’ll check in with a physics professor on this topic.  Hopefully I’m correct. 

We read The Human Side of Enterprise recently, wherein Douglas McGregor (that’s McGregor, not MacArthur!) contained the wisdom nugget that:

“management gets the labour relations it deserves”.

I doubt McGregor coined the expression — it’s the kind of pithy phrase that floats around for years before being credited to a famous person — but it rings no less true. 

The general theme is a karmic one: if management mistreats labour, labour will eventually form a feisty union.  And contrarily, if management treats its employees well, union relations will tend to be amicable (if there even is a union).  Furthermore, while trust and respect grow slowly over time (like pearls!), bad memories have a way of lingering for a very. long. time.

In that context, I wonder if management in the West is still paying for the bad karma it earned during the Industrial Revolution.  If the explosion of industrial wealth was shared more equitably, or barons weren’t so slow to improve working conditions / recognize workers’ rights, perhaps labour unions wouldn’t've become so militantly anti-management.  Heck, maybe Marx and Engels wouldn’t've even been inspired to write their little pamphlet!

I’m perfectly unfamiliar with labour relations / extent of union militancy in other countries, but it would shock me if the Nordic economies (or Japan, with its fairly egalitarian corporate pay scales) have similarly confrontative labour relations.  After all, it’s difficult to have a class struggle if the different “classes” of employees (management, labour) enjoy reasonably equitable pay, and decent working conditions.  And I’d expect that economies with a heritage in the British Industrial Revolution tradition (US, UK, Canada, Australia) would have more confrontative unions.  After all, those union traditions would’ve been born in a desperate context of obscene wealth and even-more-obscene squalor.

So it would seem reasonable to consider militant unions a form of karma — a carryover from the bad ol’ days (correction: the very bad old days) of the Anglo economic tradition, when owners really should’ve cared more about their employees.  And given how long it can take for bad karma to dissipate, I imagine confrontational labour relations will be a feature of industry in these cultures, for a long time to come.

Roger Martin’s The Responsibility Virus was the book club’s 20th selection, marking a return to the theme of organizational dynamics, previously visited in First Break All The Rules (book 12).

Though the author makes strained analogies to the laws of physics, the book offers dead-on insights as to the process by which individuals abdicate or usurp responsibility for workplace initiatives.  Examples might be how employees buy out of a management initiative (as opposed to buying into it), or how a supervisor might meddle intrusively in a struggling subordinate’s project.

Fortunately, the book offers suggestions — born from Martin’s experience as a consultant — to resolve these issues.  And more fortunately still, the methods are of the “ensuring everyone’s concerns are met” variety, as opposed to the ever-popular “manipulate others’ behaviour” type.

As always, if you enjoy the book summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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The Responsibility Virus - summary

Not originally intended as a book club selection, the insights of John Michael Greer’s The Ecotechnic Future on biological succession in the natural environment, seemed to effortlessly explain trends in the energy sector.  On these grounds, its arguments and speculations were deemed highly relevant to company employees, given the firm’s involvement in high-tech energy systems.

In brief, Greer argues that deforested areas are likely to be dominated at first by weeds, which reproduce rapidly.  Over time, however, efficiency counts more than growth rates, and so such areas tend to return to forest, which cycle nutrients more effectively.  In the short run, speed wins; in the long run, efficiency counts.

The energy technology parallel could be that fossil fuels have held a key advantage for centuries, on account of their being ease of exploitation.  (As with weeds, their inefficiency with respect to GHG emissions could have been a small weakness relative to their scalability.)  Energy technologies currently being pursued offer better efficiency (lower “carbon intensity”) but are generally unable to scale rapidly.  Solar panels, wind turbines, fuel cells and even nuclear power plants generally require a much larger up-front investment of energy and money, than their fossil-fuel counterparts.

As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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The Ecotechnic Future - summary

David Allen’s personal productivity guide Getting Things Done was chosen as the 18th book club selection.  An invaluable guide to navigating a world awash in email, it is to the past decade what The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People was to the 1990’s.  But while Steven Covey’s opus provides an overarching framework for being more effective at work, Allen’s book is an SOP from a guru of desktop jiujitsu.

Earlier in my career, I implemented several of Covey’s ideas — without success.  In the end, I found my four “quadrants” (a 2×2 matrix of important and urgent tasks) got bogged down with a torrent of ideas.  In the past couple years, I’ve enjoyed sustained success with the ideas from Getting Things Done.  Particularly useful were the “waiting for” folder for tasks where I was waiting a response, and the “next actions” folder, for items awaiting my next move.  Prefacing each item with a due date has allowed me to avoid a sense of overload, as I can pre-schedule activities months in advance, knowing that their presence on the list is okay, because they’re post-dated.

As always, if you enjoy the book review, please consider supporting the author by purchasing the book. 

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Getting Things Done - summary

(Originally written Aug 11; posted Sept 5) 

I’ve noted a few times that gold rises pretty much during the university year, and falls in the summer months.  Being the conscientious and only mildly obsessive-compulsive type, it irked me that I didn’t have (favourably-selected) data at my fingertips to back up my statements. 

Fortunately, an American mutual fund manager pulled the data together recently; more fortunately, I stumbled across his editorial piece; and most fortunately of all, when I write these things, it looks like I’m hard at work. 

One of the funny things about investments is that they tend to follow loose patterns — they’re just predictable enough that you think you can make enough money on them, and just unpredictable enough to prevent you from doing so. 

One of the better-known investment rules — and one which actually works — is “sell in May and go away“.  The lesser-known back-half “and stay away until St. Leger Day” (roughly equivalent to Hallowe’en) sadly, is shrouded in relative obscurity, not unlike the three other stanzas for O Canada.  …what?  You’ve never heard “O Canada! Where pines and maples grow”?  Tish, tish…     

The funniest part of the “sell in May”/”buy in November” rule is that… it actually works.  From the Wikipedia article, the phenomenon has held up in 36 of 37 countries, and has worked in Britain for the past three hundred years.  As Wikipedia drily notes,
 
      “According to the efficient-market hypothesis, this is impossible.”
 
…which pretty much tells you all you need to know about the efficient-market hypothesis!  One wonders if ancient encyclopedias concluded their discussion of Magellan’s circumnavigation of the world with “according to the flat earth hypothesis, this is impossible”.

Oh — and bear in mind that a three-hundred year trend might have an off-year that one November you decide to bet everything on “black” at stock-market roulette. 

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But back to gold.  As explained in the article, and annotated by some charts, gold’s typical rise from August to May is largely a function of demand: weddings in India, Christmas festivities in the West, and Chinese New Year.  (The author also mentions Ramadan, but Ramadan shifts back by about ten days every year.  As such, over time, it won’t mesh with the others, which stay put in one part of the calendar.)

During this time period, there’s usually a swoon around October and one around March.  These tend to be due to the fact that investor “chum” notice the uptick in August-Sept or Jan-Feb, put in some savings, causing temporarily overbought conditions… leaving conditions ripe for market sharks to feed. 

Jim Collins’ Good to Great was selected as the seventeenth book for the book club.  A monster best-seller, it popularized the idea that companies should be “hedgehogs” — focusing only on areas where they could beat their competitors.  It was commendable for trying to pair great companies with mediocre counterparts, in an attempt to discern those characteristics that distinguished the two. 

The book has also come under fire.  Not all of the eleven “good to great” companies maintained their market-outpacing greatness in the decade following publication (being 2000 to 2010) — indeed, three of them went bankrupt or needed bailouts.  As a nod to the critics, for its 21st volume, the book club covered The Halo Effect.

Despite its flaws (and indeed, what human endeavours lack them?) the book represents an earnest attempt to study corporate success, and some of its insights — e.g. that “stop doing” lists are as important as “to do” lists — disclose a valuable wisdom.

As always, if you enjoy the summary, please consider supporting the author by purchasing a copy of the book. 

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Good to Great - summary

(Originally written August 4; posted Sept 5)

We used tar-sands oil aplenty on our Rockies trip, despoiling what’s left of the nature we motored about to see (most gasoline on the West Coast comes from Alberta — happy driving!).  The “tour de sightseeing” from Banff to Jasper was notable in that we met the same fellow tourists at every scenic viewpoint and pullout.  There were so many of her fellow countrymen around that when Aya asked people to take photos, she went straight to Japanese. 

We soon learned not to pull over in the hopes of spotting wildlife, unless at least two other vehicles had already done so — not unlike how a Venus Flytrap won’t close unless two of its trigger hairs are touched in quick succession.

A high point was getting a photo of this mother mountain goat and kid, from just across the highway.  Off-camera, papa goat looked on, perhaps wondering if our car was a Chevrolet.  (Louis Chevrolet’s last name was a corruption of “Chevre Lait”, or “goat’s milk”.)  But alas, it was a rental Sentra, tricked out with a/c, iPod connector, remote entry and power windows.  Features which have coincidentally become must-haves for our next vehicle. 

(Part 1 is here.) 

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(Originally written August 4; posted Sept 5) 

While shopping on the weekend, I noticed some funny packaging on the Hellman’s mayonnaise containers.  So, like a piqued bee browsing the flowers, I wandered over for a closer look.

Turns out that in North America, all Hellman’s “half the fat” mayonnaise now uses free-range eggs — thirty million jars’ worth in fact.  They’d attached some promotional stuff to their mayonnaise jars; clearly, in my case it worked. 

While light mayonnaise is their only product using free-range eggs in North America, all Hellman’s mayonnaises in Europe switched over last year.  The reason we’re behind the times… is because they weren’t sure if there was enough North American supply for their full product line (!). 

This is an excellent example of how activists can co-opt private enterprise into behaving better.  Free-range eggs are more expensive because the hens have access to the outdoors, instead of being cooped up under terrible conditions; they’re also more humane, for the same reason.  By getting enough “early adopters” to to pay a premium for the free-range product, activists created a big enough market signal for behemoth corps to take notice.

In this case, Unilever has decided to get an edge on Kraft (”Miracle Whip”) by making this change.  Hopefully, Kraft will respond by trying to one-up Unilever in the “ethical sourcing” sweepstakes.  The incremental cost of free-range eggs is largely irrelevant to the products’ profitability, as both Hellman’s Mayonnaise and Miracle Whip are brands, and are priced as such.  They don’t compete with no-name spreads, just as Coke doesn’t worry about “PC cola” and BMW doesn’t care that Kia’s are cheaper. 

Other food examples include fair trade coffees and Cadbury’s fair trade sourcing of chocolate for all its British “Dairymilk” bars.  On the consumer side, after a Greenpeace campaign Apple recently beat its PC competition to removing arsenic, mercury, PVC and brominated fire-retardants from various components.  And the success of the first-generation Toyota Prius (despite its Aztek-esque aesthetics) prompted automakers to start looking into hybrid technology.

While cynics point out that hybrid lifecycle costs are probably higher in North America, we’re a bit of an anomaly.  Since Texas used to be the Saudi Arabia of crude, and Alberta promises to be the next Saudi Arabia of oil, it seems unlikely we’ll see the kinds of gas taxes found elsewhere in the world.