At Capacity

At one point last year, a lifehacking management book with what might have been a Mormon slant mysteriously set up residence next to the toilet in the old Beijing apartment/IT office.

Given its location, it got read. Nobody made it cover to cover, and I don't think there was a whole lot of attention paid to most of it, but it did start one thought bouncing through the house.

It got us talking about productivity and production capacity. As I remember, the book's basic point was that you'd better be careful if you ever asked someone to work late too many nights in a row or come in too often on weekends. At a certain point, when people get tired and burnt out, they start doing more harm than good.

Perfectly reasonable, and definitely worth considering, given the amount we had all been expecting each other to work at LanguageCalls.

I think tonight's probably one of those at capacity nights for me. There's heaps I want to write, heaps I should write, but I just don't think my brain's up for it.

I want to write about labeling and ratings and carbon footprints and quantitative measures of social and environmental responsibility.

I want to write about investing in forests: "According to one recent calculation, during the next twenty-four hours the effect of losing forests in Brazil and Indonesia will be the same as if eight million people boarded airplanes at Heathrow Airport and flew en masse to New York." (From this article from a late February issue of the New Yorker.)

I want to write about the fact that I might get a chance soon to make my second ever guest blog post. The first was about tropical fruit. I left it as a comment in August 2006 on my friend Tom's since abandoned food blog, and Tom decided to promote it to the big show. I actually like my comment about figs better than my post about durians, soursops, and miracle fruit.

I want to write about my conversation with one of the founders of Oso Eco today. They live out in Ken Kesey's old neighborhood, and they're about to launch something very cool.

And, finally, I want to write about another sentence from this week's Wall St. Journal Op-Ed Page that raised my hackles a little bit. There's a new book out called Gross National Happiness, and, apparently, according to the reviewer, according to the book, the distilled version of the recipe for happiness in the USA is:

Get a job, get married, go to church and don't listen to wild-eyed utopians.

Bummer. Maybe I'm crazy, but if there's one thing I think the world needs more of, it's people that haven't lost sight of utopia.

Nothing wrong with being realistic. Nothing wrong with baby steps. But wouldn't it be complacent of us to fully accept imperfection?

We won't ever get to perfect. Zeno's paradox stands in the way. But there's no reason to think we can't take it right up to the edge. And there's no reason to think we can't have fun doing it.

Ok. Enough. I'll be back with something more coherent in a couple of days.

Wrong Again, Karl Rove

Starting in February when I moved in with the Acorn Energy folks, I've been keeping a pretty close eye on the Wall St. Journal Op-Ed Page. I can't say I've found a lot of philosophical soulmates on the editorial board there, but Acorn is Nasdaq listed and has its roots in the New York City investment world, so I figure it's a good idea to stay keep a finger on The Journal's energy economy opinions pulse.

I did a little catching up tonight. I saw some pretty strange electricity subsidy numbers I'd never seen before. I learned that New Zealand's Kyoto commitment might force them to ease back on their sheep economy. I found out which books about presidential campaigns are Karl Rove's favorites. And I consider it absolutely outrageous that Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72 didn't make the list.

If anyone is fascinated by the intensity of this year's primaries and curious to see things play out between now and November, I suggest you dig wherever you have to dig to find yourself a copy.

It's a brilliant book.

First of all, Hunter S. Thompson can flat out write. With force. With humor. With grace.

Second, his suspension of journalistic rules and conventions is totally transparent and thus, in my opinion, packed not only with irreverence but also with a highly rarefied form of integrity.

And, finally, the story takes place at the political center of a hugely compelling moment in American history.

Nixon had been president for four years. The progressive momentum of the '60s had stalled and maybe died. People on the political left were terrified. And, suddenly, emerging from the Democratic primary came a candidate that offered something new, a candidate that captured the hearts of even the most skeptical, a candidate that seemed like he might just be able to change the game.

I'll leave it at that. Hopefully you'll read on.

And, once again, I don't know what Karl Rove was thinking...

The Story of Abundance

Been a lot of talk lately about the gas tax holiday. A lot of chatter from the candidates. A lot of commentary from economically minded journalists. The occasional outlying opinion (if anyone agrees with this guy or even understands what he's trying to say, please let me know). And there's also what I think is a really nice effort by the folks at Breakthrough Institute to turn the discussion in a more productive direction.

Lindsay Meisel, the most active contributor to the Breakthrough Blog, acknowledges the tragedy of the political pandering, but, instead of making it the focus of her article, she steers us toward a simple but powerful observation: emphasizing the gravity of global warming and asking people to make short term sacrifices for the long term good of the planet isn't working very well.

She drops some numbers. According to a poll (it's a .pdf; I'm sorry) put together by ABC News, Time Magazine, and Stanford University, 68% of people oppose "increasing taxes on gasoline so people either drive less or drive cars that use less gas."

Lindsay thinks we have a storytelling problem.

We need to stop framing public policy as a response to global warming apocalypse. Instead, we should start talking about how to create a new clean energy economy that also addresses voters' concerns about energy prices, jobs, and national security.

And she offers more numbers. Another poll, this one by CBS and the New York Times, asked the same question a little differently and got significantly different results.

Would you be willing to pay higher taxes on gasoline and other fuels if the money was used for research into renewable energy like wind and solar?

64% said yes.

Now, I understand that it's difficult to compare polls from different pollsters, and I acknowledge that it's totally reasonable to be suspicious of people's answers to hypothetical questions, but I think Lindsay is onto something.

A renewable energy economy is a ridiculously exciting prospect.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos a few months ago, Larry Page, one of the founders of Google, said something that hit me pretty hard.

He was answering a question about reconciling the need to fight climate change and the need for food and infrastructure and energy in the developing world, and he illustrated economic development's dependence on electricity and combustion:

If you look at the US, you have the equivalent of 10,000 people helping you every day with energy use. They're pushing your car. They're carrying your water to you. If you work out the number of calories you'd have to use as a person to do all the things that you do, it's something like 10,000 people.

I think that's important to keep in mind, because, in the developing world, things are different. People have Larry's "helpers" in Malawi and India and China and Brazil and Papua New Guinea and Tajikistan, but they have a WHOLE lot less than Americans do.

Energy is wealth. Food and water and the materials out of which we make fun and useful things are wealth too, but energy is a nontrivial component of that wealth mix. Transportation. Heating and cooling. Materials extraction and manipulation. Agriculture. Water distribution. All those things require energy inputs. They need force that our bodies can't exert without help.

If that energy comes from fossil fuels, of which we have a finite supply, then it's difficult to imagine getting thousands of extra helpers worth of energy to billions of people in the developing world without taking thousands of helpers away from people in the developed world. A fossil fuel economy, because of the scarcity of the fuels, is, by nature, a zero sum game.

Even if we discovered a suite of instantly commercially viable carbon sequestration technologies, deployed them worldwide, stepped up extraction, stepped up generation, perfected our energy infrastructure to enable radically efficient energy use, brought helpers upon helpers to the developing world, averted climate crisis, and did it all tomorrow, we would still be dealing with what is ultimately a scarce resource. In time, we'd run low; prices would rise; and lots of people (eventually everyone) would lose their helpers.

A renewable energy economy, however, is different. Scarcity is not an issue when you talk about the sun, the wind, and the heat beneath the surface of the earth. To steal some words from Bill McDonough, an economy powered by renewable energy is one of abundance, not one of limits.

And I think that's a compelling story. Tell people where gas tax revenues will go. Tell them their capital will work to improve existing renewable energy technologies and work to find new ones. Tell them the goal of those tax dollars collected is to provide everyone, evrywhere with of cheap, renewable power. Tell them their sacrifice is an investment, an investment in the creation of an economy in which energy will become increasingly abundant and increasingly inexpensive.

And they might just jump on board.

It's a dream, for sure, but I agree with Lindsay: this is a situation in which big, positive vision and effective communication of that vision are lacking. If the numbers Lindsay showed us are any indication, the political will to transition to renewable energy might be easier to muster than we think.

*Note: The helper discussion kicks off this 45+ minute video, but, if you have time, I recommend watching the whole Q&A video and the whole pre-Q&A panel discussion. It is a time commitment, though, so if you need more convincing before surrendering to well over an hour of YouTube, maybe my blog posts here and here will help you decide.

Another Gift from Google

I think it was about a year ago when I started doing the RSS feed aggregation thing, and my instant complaint about Google Reader was that you couldn't attach a little comment when you shared something. I had urges to share certain articles, but sometimes they looked long or boring or irrelevant or like opinions with which only total lunatics would agree, so I'd hesitate.

As of Monday, however, I'll be hesitating no more. And, starting pretty soon, if the people whose shared items I read start using the add note feature, I'll have a much easier time deciding which of their shared items to read.

Exciting.

So, if anyone wants to keep up with what I'm reading and recommending (and doesn't want to wait for me to write rambling manifestos on this blog or deal with my messy del.icio.us account and the fact that I use it more as a Gonna Barrel than a real social bookmarking tool), subscribe to my shared items.

I'll add notes to everything I share, so you'll be able to ignore the recommendations that seem ignorable. I'll rein in my propensity to race down all intersecting tangents and keep the notes to a sentence or three. And I'll try to be broad about what I share. No fun reading only about energy infrastructure and proactive consumption. I'm pretty sure dinosaurs will make their way in every once in a while, and I'll even (against my better judgment probably) throw in the occasional Joey Headset article to act as a sort of proverbial dose of the old smelling salts.

And if any of you use Reader and share at all, please send me links to your shared items so I can subscribe. An RSS feed aggregator by itself is a beautiful thing. It becomes a much more beautiful thing when real live people feed you recommendations AND add notes to help you filter them quickly.

@Ndugu

I took some time yesterday to catch up on Google Reader, and, apparently, while I was in LA, a new web celebrity emerged. Stacey Monk, founder of Epic Change.

People continue to whisper the story down the lane a little bit, so the legend hasn't solidified, but, from what I gather, it goes a little something like this:

Stacey spent some time last year in Tanzania working with Mama Lucy Kamptoni at a school called Shepherds Junior. Last July, developers bought the land Mama Lucy was renting and started planning for the hotel they'll be building sometime in 2008. Mama Lucy called Stacey. They strategized. And Stacey quit her job to start building Epic Change, a nonprofit that provides loans to schools or other community organizations and works with the organizations to turn their stories into revenue streams to pay back the loans.

In addition to being a social entrepreneur, Stacey's also a bit of a social media junkie, and, one night, as she sifted through Tweet Scan, she found a post from blogger Sam Lawrence about the fact that he wanted to take the night off. She didn't know Sam at the time, but she was feeling outgoing, so she asked him if she could write his post for him. Joking, he told her to go for it. Stacey figured yes meant yes, wrote an article about Epic Change and how it connects to Sam's go big always thesis, and sent it to him. Surprised, he polled the Twitterverse, asking whether or not he should post it. He got a positive response, so he threw it up on the blog. People read it. People liked it. People wrote about it. And now we know Stacey.

While the story of Stacey's past few days is exciting and relevant and worth remembering as the first chapter of a future case study in social media marketing, even more exciting, in my opinion, is Epic Change and the philanthropic family to which it belongs.

Epic Change is part of the next generation of the Ndugu Model.

If anyone has ever seen About Schmidt, you'll remember Ndugu. In the movie, Warren Schmidt, a newly retired midwestern widower played by Jack Nicholson, is up late one night watching TV, when he sees an ad for a sponsor a child type charity. Searching for purpose in his post-career, post-marraige life, he makes an impulse donation and, days later, gets a thick envelope in the mail telling him that he has adopted Ndugu, a Tanzanian first grader. The package encourages him to contact Ndugu directly and leads him to write a stream of hysterically and touchingly long letters about the trials, tribulations, life, and legacy of Warren Schmidt.

So. The Ndugu Model: direct support to individuals, philanthropy brought to life by human contact and return interaction. This being the '90s, instead of letters, checks, print photographs, and drawings in the mail, we have video streaming and blogs and mobile devices beaming OMG LOLs across continents.

And, either way, whether in its old sponsor a child form or in its more scalable online instantiations, the model's good. It pulls small donors deep into causes. It educates. It inspires. It engages. It reminds everyone that we can all contribute; we can all make meaningful change.

And that, I think, is big. There's a lot of resignation out there. A lot of good people feeling helpless. A lot of people with forgotten agency. Ndugu acts as a reminder. Agency remembered breeds optimism. Optimism stirs creativity and cooks up big vision. And big vision recruits the will and resources necessary to organize and execute the projects that make the change.

So, point is, I think Epic Change is smart to focus on storytelling, smart to create person to person contact. It will not only help their organization grow and make a greater contribution, but it will also empower everyone involved to do more good.

I'd like to note here that I think Kiva deserves a lot of credit for putting the online Ndugu Model on the map.

I'd also like to note that I think Wokai is evolving Kiva's ideas in the right direction. Wokai is a retail fundraising and information exchange site for China microfinance founded by some friends of mine. Keep your eyes out for a late summer launch. They are all about storytelling and donor-microentrepreneur interaction.

Finally, I'd like to bug some other friends, the founders of Power Up Gambia and the Starfish Greathearts Foundation, about taking the plunge into individual storytelling and online community exchange. Power Up Gambia is providing renewable electricity to off-grid hospitals. Starfish is working with AIDS orphans. The stories are there. The stories are what has made it possible for the organizations to do the work they've already done. But there's much more to be told. A much wider audience would both love to listen and benefit from doing so. Go big.

Sons of Scotland...

I caught up on the past couple of weeks of Umair Haque today, and, as always, he didn't disappoint. I don't know if the blog medium is ever going to inspire William Wallace style goosebumps, but, in his latest post on the HBS blog, Umair made a pretty good run at it.

Very simply:

Today's crop of investors and startups are perhaps even more economically autistic than megacorporations. Too many are willfully blind to today's deepest and most essential strategic truth: that the path to radical value creation isn't cutting more deals (dude, high-five!!) - but in rebuilding a flawed, false global economy: one which actively transfers wealth from the poor to the rich, from the sick to the healthy, from productivity to cronyism.

He's sick of it, and he thinks people are getting complacent.

If you're a revolutionary, then be one: put your money where your mouth is, and fix a big problem that changes the world for the better - if you really have the courage, the purpose, and the vision, that is.

And he'll contribute.

I think these problems are so important, I'll take a bit of time away from setting up my new lab, to advise five startups, funds, or companies that I think have the greatest insight into fixing them.

I'm going send the man an email. Braveheart's still echoing in my head, so I figure why not give it a try. I'll be in Boston in a couple of weeks, so I'll see if I can convince him to let me swing by. I think an economy in which consumers choose to support the businesses that do the best things for the world is an economy in which he'd be interested. Who knows. Maybe I'll charm him with my rave about Beijing bike mechanics.

Milken It: Part Two

Went back to Beverly Hills for another round of the Milken Institute's Global Conference today. A lot of discussion of biofuels. A mention of the fact that the world should be ruled by philosopher kings with PhDs in economics. And plenty of half-complete and incoherent thoughts spinning in my head.

Here are some questions from my notes, in no particular order:

-There was quite a bit of reference made today to the power of the US corn industry. There was total acknowledgment that that power is an economically bad thing. There was acknowledgment that that power is ultimately the product of corruption. And everyone laughed about it. Are we really resigned to a government held hostage by a greedy special interest group that doesn't want to have to compete?

-A panel of investors agreed that all the pieces are in place to keep plenty of capital flowing into cleantech, if oil stays above USD 70 per barrel. What happens if it drops below USD 70 per barrel?

-Should we discuss in a serious way how we ought to adapt to climate change? Or would that be resignation and thus counterproductive? How about geoengineering? Should we think about it or talk about it (geoengineering, for those that haven't heard the word, is doing crazy stuff like shooting particles into the atmosphere to deflect sunlight and cool the poles)? It feels apocalyptic, but it is a potential "solution," and there might come a time when it's our only weapon against catastrophe. Might it be good to have that weapon ready? What if we started a conversation with: yeah, this stuff is crazy, but there might come a point at which doing something crazy is better than doing nothing at all? Would that be psychologically acceptable? Would something like that push us to strive harder for sustainable solutions, or would it lead to feelings of helplessness and resignation?

-Apparently California has a "de-coupled system" in which electron producers and electron distributors make more money if they help electron consumers consume less. Is that true? If so, how did they pull that off? And why don't other states replicate the California system?

-You have a handful of money. There are three basic things you can do with it. You can spend it and get instant gratification. You can save it for when you really want to use it. Or you can invest it: risking that you might lose it but hoping it'll grow. If you spend it all, you don't have any leftover for savings or investment, and if you save or invest it, you don't get to spend it; you need to consume a little less in the short term. As a society, we're at a point at which we really ought to make some long term investments. For one, we ought to support the creation of a sustainable energy economy. We ought to allocate a solid chunk of our available capital to investment. If we do that, the prudent (or, if you'd rather, economical) response would be to live a little leaner, to consume less (as an economy: government bodies and individual people). Apparently, however, American political leaders can't accept trains of thought like that. In order to get elected, politicians have to promise lots of investment and lots of consumption (as governments and for their constituencies). The problem with that is that, once the investment has been made, there's no more cash for consumption. Unless you go borrow some. And thus the American way of life. Should we be worried? Are we really incapable of voting for leaders that ask us to consume less now in order to allocate more resources to creating a sustainable future?

Note: Over lunch today, we watched Michael Milken interview Arnold Schwarzenegger. It was a discussion about investment in infrastructure (roads, bridges, schools, power transmission lines), and, somehow, it was highly entertaining. Not as entertaining as this, but a good time nonetheless.