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Scarcity Disease, The Plague of the Industrialist

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Day 15 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

“You will get all you want in life if you help enough other people get what they want.” Zig Ziglar. You either live in a world of abundance or in a world of scarcity, and whichever one you choose effects every decision you make.

Companies that live in a world of abundance will flourish in the Participation Age.

Conquest Destroys the Conqueror
The 21st century Industrialists are wrong. Business is not a zero sum game. They believe there is only so much to go around, so the game is to get yours before the next guy gets his. And in its worst form, the objective is to get it all and leave none for anyone else, as the early Industrial Age monopolies demonstrated.

Industrialists also believe there are only so many good ideas or great potential products out there, and after that, it’s over. So if we have to buy out or destroy the other guy who invented something cool, we’ll do it.

Cash Cows, Not Creativity
Rather than being built to create, innovate, and move us all forward to the next great thing, Industrialists build companies to take over the world by living off the creativity of others. To do so they build incredible cash cows that squeeze every last dime out of existing products and services.

And because they are so heavily invested in the present, they naturally resist change. They work hard to maintain the status quo, especially if innovation threatens their status quo products. It’s no wonder that people don’t like Industrialists, they just need to stop mistaking them for Capitalists.

Crony Industrialists, Not Crony Capitalists
Banks and most financial institutions on Wall Street suffer from the attributes of an Industrialist. Scarcity is a powerful driving force amongst them. They are not “crony Capitalists”, but “crony Industrialists.” Nobody hates Capitalism, which has driven local economies for centuries. They despise the scarcity-minded Industrialists who abuse Capitalism for their own gain.

It is unusual for one Industrialist to learn from the downfall of another, and the fact that the publishing industry has not yet seen their future in the demise of the music industry or similar Industrial giants being dismantled in front of them is not at all surprising. The drive for world domination, eliminating competition, and maintaining the status quo are so ingrained in some industries that they will be arranging the chairs on their various Titanics even after the water is over their heads.

For the Capitalist, Big is a Result of Great
True Capitalists live in a world of abundance. They focus first and foremost on creating, innovating, solving problems and moving the world forward through their creativity. They get big if that serves them in being creative and making a contribution. But for a Participation Age Capitalist, getting big is a RESULT of being driven to create, it is not the main motivation, as it is with an Industrialist. Capitalists have no fear of destroying the present for the future, and regularly introduce advances that make existing products and services obsolete.

Where You Start is Where You End Up
GM, which at one time was the largest company in the world, almost all through Industrialist acquisitions, has struggled to find an innovative way to move into the future and would have gone bankrupt if it were not rescued by another Big, the government. At the same time Ford reached back into it’s creative Capitalist DNA and innovated its way to profitability without outside assistance.

The lesson is that companies which focus on being creative and innovative (two attributes of abundance) are much more likely to build a lasting presence than those whose founding DNA is scarcity. GM, whose DNA is more Industrialist than most other modern companies, has been stuck like a fly in a spider trap, while Ford has moved on ahead.

Scarcity is a Mirage
Most Industrialists truly believe they sell in a limited market with finite boundaries, and that since there is not enough to go around, they have to get theirs before the greedy people do. It’s a Darwinian world, and the scarcity-minded intend to be the last man standing. It has to be that way. If someone else is left standing, their presence might destroy ours. It’s a zero sum game.

But the scarce world the 21st century Industrialists are so afraid of doesn’t exist. The markets are always expanding and new products and services are being created at a dizzying pace. Scarcity thinking is just a lousy excuse for being lazy, uncreative and boorish in a world constantly expanding with new ideas, new markets and new generations of people.

The slow and long-term decline of companies like GM, United Airlines, and other stolidly Industrialist companies is a direct result of this scarcity thinking. It causes them to focus on acquiring the other guy’s creativity, eliminating him, and then maintaining the status quo so they can milk the existing market, instead of creating the next market. When you think about it, it’s actually a lot more childish than macho. The “great Industrialists” were doing a lot of compensating.

Abundance – Hard-core Capitalism
Abundance isn’t kum-bah-ya stuff. It is a hard-core Capitalist success habit. It builds a culture of trust, credibility and service to the world around us. People want to work with those companies, and will go out of their way to find them.

Do you live in a world of abundance? Are you committed to helping others in your industry get to their goals so you can get to yours? Whichever one you choose, scarcity or abundance, effects every decision you make.

Which do you choose?

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

Education: One of the Business Diseases of the Industrial Age

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Day 14 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

The uneducated (those who learn without school) are, by almost every measure, doing much better than their mortar-boarded friends. Our Industrial Age education system would like you to believe it’s not true, but the fox is guarding the hen house.

Before the education system, us uneducated folk were doing just fine. In the early 1800s Noah Webster (spelling book), Walter Scott (novels) and James Fenimore Cooper (novels) sold five million or more copies each to a population of only 20 million, a staggering 80 million books each in today’s numbers. Even though their prose was complex and highly allusive, this makes them the three best selling authors in history by far.

In 1840, before compulsory education, 90% of northerners and 81% of free southerners were literate. By 1850, it was closer to 97%. In 1852, Massachusetts passed the first compulsory education act, requiring everyone to attend public schools. Nearly 80% resisted. The Barnstable parents were over run by militia who marched the children off to school under guard. The education elite justified it by saying, ” In too many instances the parents are unfit guardians of their own children. The children must be gathered up and forced into school”. Industrialists always believe people are stupid and lazy.

At the time, literacy in Massachusetts was 98%. Today national literacy fluctuates between 60% to generously 80%, depending on whose statistics you follow.

Get a High School Degree – Become a Fortune 500 CEO
A recent survey said “the school of hard knocks”, featuring CEOs who dropped out or never even attended college, was the number one source of CEOs of S&P 500 companies; not Harvard.

Drop Out of High School Or College – Get Rich
Forrester says a stunning one out of five of America’s millionaires never attended college at all, and a much higher percentage never finished. 63 of the top 400 richest Americans never finished college and half of those never bothered to start. With Bill Gates out of the equation, billionaires with only a high school diploma are worth an average $5.3 billion, while billionaires with a PHD are worth $3.2 billion, and those with a bachelor’s, $2.9 billion. Dropouts and non-attenders do the best by far, even without Bill Gates.

Beware – Finishing College Will Make You Miserable
If you measure success by personal well-being or happiness instead of money, a study has found that completing a university degree leads to lower levels of happiness for 23 to 25 year olds, compared to those 23 to 25 year olds who instead got an apprenticeship or vocational training.

Good Luck Learning Something In College
If you measure success by sheer learning, a third of college graduates gain no measurable skills during their four years in college.

High Schoolers Work The Hardest
If you measure success by productivity, only 59% of high school graduates waste time at work, compared to 66% of those with a bachelors, 65% with a masters, and taking the top spot, PHDs at 67%.

But College Grads Make a Million More…
And finally, if you measure it by salaries, high schoolers win there, too. “College graduates make a million dollars more in their lifetime than non-college graduates.” It’s an urban myth perpetuated by education junkies and an education system that needs your money to keep it afloat.

In a classic “fox watching the hen house” study, Georgetown University released a study in 2011 that the media intelligentsia loved. But the college junkies didn’t bother to look closely at the facts and how Georgetown avoided them.

Let’s Leave Out The First Seven Years
The report didn’t measure any earnings before 25 years old, lopping off seven years of earnings for high schoolers while their college counterparts are going backwards into debt. Let’s not start the clock at the beginning of the race; we won’t look as good; a ridiculous omission that invalidates the results right out of the gate.

Let’s Use Bad Math
The study also just piled up this year’s earnings 40 years in a row on top of each other, which skews the numbers in the favor of what they are selling. But after lying about the $1million number, in small print at the end, they tell you if you use the actual accumulated net worth number that any bank or financial planner uses, the lifetime gap between a college grad and a high school grad isn’t a million, it’s $593,000. Add back in the seven unreported years of income at, say, $45,000, and the gap shrinks to $224,000 in raw numbers.

Let’s Not Mention That College Costs Money
Georgetown also didn’t bother to include the cost of the education itself or the living expenses while there, or the $24,000 in average debt students are stuck with after it’s all over. Include all these and the high schoolers now make more. But we’re not done.

Let’s Assume No High Schooler Saves
The study also doesn’t bother to compute in the money saved by those not attending college. If the high schooler or their parents put even half of it in the bank instead of spending it on college, 40 years later it puts the high schooler way ahead, by hundreds of thousands.

Let’s Ignore That The Product Is Not Delivered 33% Of The Time
And then there is the rest of the untold cost story. The Georgetown study doesn’t address the inconvenient fact that 30 percent of college students who get loans drop out, with only the debt and no degree. At for-profit universities, it’s a staggering 50 percent. Any other product would be under federal investigation for non-delivery at these rates.

College is a cost in search of a benefit.

Let’s Ignore That The Highest Growth Jobs Don’t Require a Degree
And finally, Georgetown conveniently left this out – you don’t need a degree to get hired. 18 of the top 24 occupations with the largest expected job growth through 2018 will require no four-year college degree, including the top seven occupations on the list. This doesn’t even include the idea of starting your own company or working for yourself – that’s #21. Most of the remaining six highest-growth occupations, which are at the bottom of the list, will still accept people without degrees who have learned the necessary skills in other ways.

Industrialists Run The Schools
Industrialists run our school systems. Just like Wall Street titans, these are people who want to dominate and be the only players in town. They want to keep a closed market, they resist change and progress, and they see innovators as a “competition” and a threat. Educators fulfill at least four of the six attributes of an Industrialist, and you only need to fulfill one of them to wear the label “Industrialist”.

Fortunately Their Time is Very Limited
I predict the university system and the compulsory education system, as we know them today, will largely be dismantled in the next five decades, and replaced with “education technology”, locally, in the homes, and online. It could even happen well inside 15 years. It’s already well on its way.

The Industrial Age is receding behind us like water receding behind a broken dam. And as it does, the legacy school systems that were developed specifically to feed the Factory System are being exposed below the water line. They are rusty and full of holes, and in most cases simply resting on the bottom, unable to move.

The compulsory education system and most of the universities were boats built for another time, and the farther we get from the Industrial Age, the more obvious it becomes. As it does, the pressure on one of the last giant monopolies of the Industrial Age will grow, until once again the small and local learners take over and rebuild the great learning opportunities that have alluded us ever since we made education mandatory.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

The 21st Century Industrialist Is Not a Capitalist

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Day 4 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book, Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea

The 21st century Industrialist is one of the core business diseases to come out of the Industrial Age. “Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me. Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful; that’s what matters to me.” – Steve Jobs

People who hate business think that Wall Street and all it’s excesses, actually represents capitalism, and therefore hate Capitalists. Capitalists want to do “something wonderful”. But Wall Street and most of the Bigs of today are not Capitalists at all. They are just old-fashioned Industrialists running smokeless, digital factories. I’m a fire breathing, rabid Capitalist who wants to do something wonderful. I can’t find anything in common with either the Industrialists of the 1800s or those of today that masquerade as Capitalists.

Attributes of the 21st century Industrialist
Following are six distinct attributes of a 21st century Industrialist that separate them from traditional Capitalists who are focused on doing something wonderful.

Attribute #1 – Being Big vs. Being Great
Being big, not being great, was the primary driving force behind the famous Industrialists of the 1800s. 21st century Industrialists like Microsoft, GM, the publishing industry, and most banks assume it is the holy grail of business. For them, being big trumps being great.

Attribute #2 – Closed Markets
The Industrialist’s goal was not to be the best, but to destroy everyone else in a zero sum game of dog eat dog. The modern day 21st century Industrialist works hard alongside politicians to keep the markets closed to small newcomers.

Attribute #3 – Resistance to Progress – Status Quo
Industrialists are brilliant at squeezing the last dollar of profit out of the present market, and are unparalleled at doing so. But this massive investment in legacy systems make it very difficult to adapt and move forward in a fast-paced world. The constantly changing world threatens the Industrialist’s dominance, and puts them at an extreme disadvantage to newcomers. Progress is the enemy of the Industrialist. The status quo is their friend.

Attribute #4 – Users, Not Creators – The Cash Cow Rule
Industrialists rarely create, invent or innovate. They are users of existing products, services, sectors and industries in order to gain power for themselves. They look around for proven winners that can be controlled and spun up to great efficiencies, with bigger opportunities to dominate and be powerful. It’s about building a cash cow, not creating or innovating.

Attribute #5 – Focus on the Competitor (Destroy, Mimic, or Buy)
Industrialists worry a lot about what the other guy is doing, because the other guy could end up creating something that will take market share away from their fiefdom. Instead of focusing on being more creative, they work to destroy, mimic of buy those who might threaten their control.

Attribute #6 – Short-Term Decision Making
Businesses controlled by investors make almost all of their decisions based on what is good for the company’s quarterly report, even if it hurts them in the long run, which it usually does.

Industrialists Are Not Capitalists
Let’s stop lumping Capitalism in with industrialism. Instead, let’s identify which companies are embracing 21st century Industrialism for their own short term gain, and which ones are focused on building sustainable companies that Make Meaning in the world around them, for the benefit of everyone in the process.

This is a summary of a chapter of Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

Greed Doesn’t Drive Wall Street

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Day 3 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book.

Greed did not drive the giant Industrialists of the 1800s, nor does it drive companies we love to hate on Wall Street today. It’s something quite different.

As with all empire builders who passed before them, it is about power; money is just a new measure of power. In the Industrial Age, for the first time in history, you could build a fiefdom alongside a government that would not send armies to destroy you, but actually protect your right to do so.

Power To The Few
There is little doubt that most of the big Industrialists, when they were still small, likely ignored some moral or ethical boundaries to begin to accumulate wealth. Greed drives them at first, but once they have experienced wealth, the desire to be powerful is the unique and much rarer driving force behind those few people who want to dominate and crush the competition.

Bernie Madoff may have been greedy when he was a bit player on Wall Street, but very shortly it became about being powerful, well known, and highly influential in elite circles. Giant banks may start out focused on accumulating wealth, but that is quickly replaced with a focus on power and domination. After someone has significantly more than they need, it becomes about power. And power requires winning, beating the other guy.

Kings and Kingpins
The basic motivations of feudal lords, politicians and 21st century Industrialists are identical. For all of them the most intoxicating motivation is to be able to control the lives of other people, which gives them power, control, and prestige. The feudal lord accumulates armies, the politician accumulates votes and the Industrialist accumulates money, all with the same motive – domination of their respective worlds and elimination of potential threats.

Cornelius Vanderbilt was a feudal lord ruling over a fiefdom. He was so powerful he was able to destroy the entire railroad industry by shutting down the Albany bridge, the only rail bridge into New York City, which he owned. Winning at all costs, and the power that came from being on top, was the intoxicating way of life for the Industrialist. And it still is for many business people and politicians who make up the 21st century version of the Industrialist.

Sumner Redstone, the American media magnate, summed up the motivation of the 21st century Industrialists we love to hate, “They don’t think in terms of money, they think in terms of winning. Not some times. Every time.”

You see the same transition from greed to power in criminals. Small criminals may be greedy, but big criminals are motivated by power. When the Colombian super-cartel was broken up in 2012, the top three leaders, who were worth hundreds of millions each, were all found living in modest city apartments, working out of cafes, driving regular cars, and essentially living regular middle class lives. Living modestly was what made it hard to find them. When asked why they had continued selling drugs for so many years when they couldn’t spend the money, one of them replied simply, “It was for the power.”

Power Through Philanthropy
Virtually all of the big Industrialists of the 1800s gave away staggering sums of money in their later years. But even in their philanthropy they sought to crush the other guy and build a bigger library, concert hall or museum. If they were driven by greed they would have kept their money. But a building with their name on it would continue to give them prestige and a form of power even after death, and help prove to future generations that they won. That was worth more than money in the bank. Power always trumps greed.

Which Big Do You Love?
Big loves big. They have to. Big government and big business may not be fully in synch, but they are co-dependent and DO love key things about each other that will help them both remain in power. Most people find themselves rooting for one Big or the other, without realizing that decades ago both Bigs lost touch with everything small and local.

In the final analysis, both Bigs have a cozy, symbiotic relationship where donations, cronyism, favors, free trips, power, and money are flying in both directions regardless of party affiliation. They understand clearly how much they need each other in order to stay in power.

Small Is Becoming Powerful
But Big is in trouble. The Participation Age, and the ability to share information easily via the internet, is exposing the power-grabbing practices of the Bigs, at a time where returning to small and local community is becoming one of our highest values. In the coming decade, Big will be less and less necessary in our lives, and the advantage will go to the small and local businesses that are in touch with the “small” guy on the street.

Stop Rooting for the Bigs
But we will accelerate the process when we stop whining about the greed of the Bigs, and focus instead on requiring a level playing field that does not concentrate power in the hands of a few and does not favor the Bigs over the Smalls.

Do you love one Big (business or government) more than the other, because you think it will be better for you? Think again. The Bigs aren’t working to help the Smalls, but to continue to increase their own power.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

The Problem with Big

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Day 2 of 21 days with Chuck’s new book.

Jerry Garcia said, “Too much of anything, is just enough.” But “Big” is one of the core business diseases of the Industrial Age; a very new business solution devised by Industrialists to serve themselves. Big has big problems that Small will never experience.

It took a long time for us to fall in love with Big, in the 1970s, almost at the very end of the Industrial Age. But since then, we’ve become addicted to big. We can’t help ourselves. Big “anything” is just too cool for school.

Why is Big so Big Now?
Big Government has been around a long time, but Big Business as a dominant force is brand spanking new. There are just 167 companies in the world older than five hundred years, and only one of them has more than 100 employees. The rest are Smalls. After thousands of years of running economies on the backs of the Smalls, we now just assume Big is the best and only way to go.

The Problem With Big
Big has special problems that it doesn’t share with Small. Whether it is business, government, dinosaurs, hurricanes, or snowstorms; the really big ones have two intrinsic problems that Small doesn’t have:

1) The bigger they are, the more problems their complexity creates, for themselves and the world around them.

2) The bigger they are, the greater impact their mistakes and problems have on themselves and the world around them.

In 2008, one giant financial institution, Lehman Brothers, collapsed, which created a domino effect, threatening the entire banking system. As a result, in 2009, and for almost two years after, the U.S. economy was stunningly rated by the National Security Agency as the highest threat to U.S. national security, higher than terrorism or any other outside threat. The United States addiction to Big had become our own worst enemy.

Big is Bigger Than Ever
How did the two Bigs (business and government) respond to this internal threat to our nation’s security? Big Government gifted hundreds of billions of dollars to a few giant banks without so much as an I.O.U. Free money with no strings attached. Big government had to do it. Big business was holding the government and the entire country hostage by sheer virtue of its size. The big banks are now all bigger than they were when they were “too big to fail.”

What did the giant banks do with the bailout gift? They put it in their pocket and stopped lending to small business. Small business in America was crippled by this one act which went largely unreported by big media, and is still the largest underlying cause of the slow recovery.

Big Impact
As this shows, the reach of bad decisions by the Bigs can be devastating. When Big does something stupid like Lehman Brothers, the impact is global. When Small does something stupid or intentionally detrimental, it’s no less acceptable, but the scope of the damage is localized and controlled. It’s the difference between the mistaken detonation of a hand grenade or a nuclear bomb. Both are bad, but only one is global in scale.

Big Has a “Get Out of Jail Free” Card
And too often, when Bigs get stupid, they get a pass. In 2012 the U.S. Justice Department found that HSBC, one of the world’s three largest banks, had “spent years committing serious crimes”, regularly laundering money for terrorists and drug cartels. But the Justice Department decided HSBC was “too important to subject them to disruptions”, and shielded them from any criminal prosecution.

Micro-solutions for Micro-problems
Another problem with Big is that it creates macro solutions for micro problems. Even with the best of intentions it is simply too big a task to ask macro-entities to solve local problems. The problem is not the systems, but the size of the systems; the size of business, size of government and the resulting accumulation of power and decision-making into those few hands.

The reason size is a problem is simple. The old adage is that “all politics is local.” The same is true for problems – “All problems are local.” Big never solves local problems.

Size Matters
Does small always work better than big? No. It is easy to find both local businesses and local governments that make self-preserving decisions that aren’t in the best interest of their constituency, just like the Bigs. But because they are small and local, the negative affects are never as damaging.

Returning to local government and local business for answers to our local problems would push as many decisions down the food chain as possible. This is difficult if not impossible for both national politicians and big business leaders to accept, because they would lose control over their own macro-power.

There is a place for both Big Business and Big Government, but experience says we would be better off, and certainly safer as a nation with less of both.

Tomorrow we’ll discuss why greed doesn’t drive Wall Street; it’s something much bigger.

This is a summary of a chapter from Chuck’s new book, “Why Employees Are ALWAYS a Bad Idea (And Other Business Diseases of the Industrial Age)”. Click here to pre-order this new ground breaking book at a discount on IndieGoGo.com until July 28.

It’s Good To Be The Big

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And Big Wants To Be King.

If a bank was accused of thumbing their nose at regulators for years, systematically breaking the law and knowingly aiding terrorists, they would lose their license, right? Only if they were a small bank. The law doesn’t apply to the Bigs. If this wasn’t happening in America, you would believe these stories were coming out of some corrupt third world kleptocracy.

According to U.S. bank regulators, HSBC (the world’s second largest bank) “spent years committing serious crimes” by knowingly laundering money for terrorists and drug cartels. Regulators said these kinds of crimes should automatically have resulted in the loss of HSBC’s U.S. banking license.

But the bank will not face prosecution. A few weeks ago, Assistant Attorney General Lanny Breuer told the press, “Had the US authorities decided to press criminal charges, HSBC would almost certainly have lost its banking license in the US, the future of the institution would have been under threat and the entire banking system would have been destabilized.”

Smalls Need Not Apply (for special treatment)
But small banks live under a different judicial system. In November 2011, tiny SunFirst Bank in St. George, Utah was put out of business for connections with Internet poker. In 2012, the Feds charged miniscule Abacas bank in Brooklyn with mortgage fraud, after the banks officers themselves proactively reported suspicious activity of one of their loan officers. No bank officers were involved in the problem, and Abacus’ mortgage loans are performing 10xs better the big banks. They’ve been forced out of business by the Feds.

Big Loves Big
One of the illusions is that big business is at odds with big government and vice versa, but more often they recognize the advantage of propping each other up, for the sake of keeping both Bigs large and in charge.

In late 2008, Big Government gifted $850 billion to a very few elite, giant banks without so much as an I.O.U. Free money with no strings attached. Big government said they had to do it because big banks were holding the government and the entire country hostage by virtue of being “too big to fail”. In 2009, the National Security Agency rated our own homegrown giant businesses as our top national security threat, above terrorism.

Let The Show Begin
So the Big politicians huffed and puffed and created Dodd-Frank to ensure they would never be too big to fail again. Within 18 months, those 15 or so giant banks that had been gifted the $850 billion now had a LARGER percentage of the banking industry then before Dodd-Frank. Who did that legislation actually destroy? You guessed it, the small banks.

The Smalls Get the Shaft
A recent report shows the Bigs are buying up the Smalls in 2013 at an accelerating clip. Jim Chessen, of the American Bankers Association, said, “We have seen an avalanche of new regulations, and while the impression was that the legislation was targeted at the largest institutions, the fact is that it’s had a widespread impact on the smallest banks in the country,” Dodd-Frank is making it easier for the Bigs to get bigger by eating the Smalls, who are the roadkill being crushed by the politicians.

This isn’t about banks. GM and decades of other giant failures in many industries have been bailed out of long-term, epically bad management practices, while the Smalls are crushed by big banks and big regulations.

Don’t kid yourself. No one is looking out for Small, regardless of what form it takes. Do you believe all the noise big business makes about hating regulations? (Hint: they help write them to make sure they come out like Dodd-Frank). Or are you a fan of the noise politicians on both sides of the aisle make about loving small business and reining in the Bigs? That rhetoric plays well on the news, and politicians know that most people just don’t check in later to see how it all worked out.

What Can You Do?
1) Stop choosing sides with one or the other of the Bigs. Neither big business or big government (on either side of the aisle) has your best interests at heart.
2) Stop believing them when they say, “we love small business”. They love using it.
3) Become a “Smallist”. There are now two classes of people in America. The Bigs and the Smalls. Those are the two choices left. Which one do you choose?
4) If you choose to be a Small, start demanding that big business and big government stop colluding with each other to get and be Big at the expense of Small.

“Anyone who thinks they are too small to make a difference never went to bed with a mosquito.” Mahatma Ghandi

Your voice matters. Make a difference. Become a Smallist.

The Participation Age

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Are you?

We’re out of the Information Age and well into the Participation Age. It’s your time – are you participating?

In 2006 two of us were flown out to Silicon Valley to accept an award by Sun Microsystems for branding, messaging and design work. At this conference some Sun leaders and outside consultants were talking about the new “Age”, called the Participation Age. Quite a few other leaders and publications have used it as well, and I found it to be a compelling description for the new Age in which we find ourselves. The hallmark of the Participation Age is “sharing.”

You First. No, I Insist, You First.
The Participation Age has seen the organic and viral growth of a dizzying array of sharing systems; from weekend software projects tackled by people all over the world who don’t know each other, to co-creation of products and services by companies interacting directly with their customers, to Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest and a myriad of other sharing platforms.

Linux, an open-source software operating system, owned by no one, runs the fastest computers in the world and tens of millions of cell phones. The development of Web 2.0 was based on sharing of information, services, products, knowledge and opinions to the point that companies don’t own their brand anymore; those who participate in sharing about it on the internet are the owners.

Small Is Now Big
United Airlines discovered this painfully when Dave Carroll wrote a song called “United Breaks Guitars” (they broke his) and posted it on the internet. Within a four days of the posting, it had received millions of hits and United’s stock value plunged $180 million. Before the Participation Age, companies like United regularly wrote off one badly treated customer at a time, knowing they had a limited reach. But now, one person’s shared view of the world has a power that it never had before. The Participation Age has made your small voice more powerful than any time in history.

We’ve also seen sharing create massed responses to a single person’s plight from all over the world, and the proliferation of crowd-sourcing and crowd-funding companies that help people in ways they could have never imagined.

Participating Through Work
The Participation Age has changed the way people relate to each other, but most importantly it is changing the way we relate to work, allowing us to go back to a more natural relationship to work that was dominant for thousands of years before the strange and interruptive blip in history we call the Industrial Age.

Past generations that grew up in the intimidating shadow of the Industrial Age were taught to react, respond and at times even to contribute, but not to participate and share. Participation demands that we be proactive and creative, which is our basic human nature. The Industrial Age did not want us being proactive and creative; it wanted us to be extensions of machines and loyal and almost indentured servants to the company (via the golden handcuffs of in-house retirement plans).

I Double-Dog Dare You
At our core, we are not made to be extensions of machines. We are made to Make Meaning, not just money, and the Participation Age, more than any time in human history is daring each and everyone of us to find our voice, be uniquely you or me, and encourage the world to participate in what each of us is building. Get after it; create, innovate, bring something unique to the world around you; share it and let others participate in making you and it better. How much fun is the Participation Age? It kicks the Industrial Age’s ass, for sure.

My next book will share a lot about our move to the Participation Age, and how too many companies are still stuck in the Industrial Age.

Share with us – what are you building?

Yahoo’s CEO Marissa Mayer Is Officially An Industrialist

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Home Alone.

After I wrote my last post on why working 9-5 is a bad idea, I found out Yahoo’s CEO Mayer was killing telecommuting. It’s a classic failure of leadership and will get her the opposite result than she hopes.

This last week, Marissa Mayer ended telecommuting for all Yahoo employees. The few retro voices in the archaic wilderness trumpeting this move as “good”, say it will make Yahoo more “innovative” and “collaborative”. Uh…cubes. They’re being stuffed back into cubes.

More Productive?…No.
This definitely won’t make them more productive. All the data old and new confirms this. Until after 1850, the majority of all manufacturing and other productivity was done at home. Salary.com research shows people waste an average of 25% of their day in the office doing nothing. Other research shows that people in an office waste up to 50% of their time “managing up” (brown nosing). Telecommuting is proven to increase productivity.

More Innovative and Collaborative?…No.
And there is no data that suggests that putting people back in cubes makes them more innovative or collaborative. Mayer’s decision was lazy and lacked any innovation on her own part. There are a hundred better ways to make sure telecommuters are touching base in an innovative and collaborative way with each other and the company, but that would have taken some energy to figure out. Reintroducing the brass steam whistle and the time clock was much easier, but is a short-sighted decision.

Yahoo Employees Are Now Stupid and Lazy
But the worst reason for doing this is that it reinforces the traditional understanding of the “employee”. In 1903, Frederick Winslow Taylor wrote his views of work that became the foundation for Scientific Management theory, which governs our view of work today. He said there are two basic assumptions you must make about employees, 1) they are lazy (he called it soldiering – doing as little as possible to keep from being fired), and 2) they are stupid “the average employee is so stupid that they more nearly resemble the ox than any other type.”

If employees are stupid and lazy (a view not common until well after the 1850s and convenient for Industrialists to believe as they treated them like indentured servants), than you need smart and motivated people to manage them – thus the modern separation between “employees” (stupid and lazy), and “management” (smart and motivated).

Mayer Is An Industrialist
Mayer’s move is a confirmation that she is a modern Industrialist (click to see my post defining this), and believes her people are definitely lazy, and almost certainly stupid (can’t figure out how to be productive on their own). But the problem isn’t with her employees; it’s with her leadership. Great leaders inspire and motivate people to be owners or “Stakeholders”; self-managed and proactive adults who take ownership of their jobs and the company’s future, and are consistently creative and innovative, always working to make the whole “system” better.

Mayer lacks leadership. She can’t inspire and motivate adults, so she has gone to the fetal position of Industrialism, requiring that all the stupid and lazy children now check themselves into the day care center that is the office so that managers can keep them from running into the street or messing on the carpets.

The Opposite Result
Yahoo needs engaged Stakeholders – adults who can work with her to pull Yahoo out of the morass. Instead she is creating employees – children who will be managed and told what to do. Innovative and collaborative, my eye.

A classic failure of leadership, made worse because her actions blame the Stakeholders for her own lack of vision. This is nothing more than calling all the elephants to the graveyard for Yahoo’s last rites.

Industrialists Are Not Capitalists

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but they’re all over the place, even today.

People love to throw stones at Capitalists, but it’s the Industrialists who are the problem. And they are a very different animal. I’m a fire-breathing Capitalist, and I don’t relate to these guys. Let’s throw stones in the right direction.

I’ve been working on and blogging about my next book on the Industrial Age for 18 months. The production area of the modern company has changed radically, having left the Industrial Age forty+ years ago. It’s full of clean suits and nano-technology. But the front office is still dragging its knuckles through practices developed in the 1800s for the Industrial Age.

Dilbert still reigns in the front office. And it’s largely because old-fashioned Industrialists are still in charge of the businesses.

Following is a chart from one of the chapters in the upcoming book showing the stark difference between true Capitalists, who are regularly doing great stuff, and Industrialists, who are more often up to no good. I can only find one thing they do in common (take risks), and even that is driven by entirely different motivations.

Do you work for the Industrialist on the left, or the Capitalist on the right?

If you want to work with the guy on the right, but you’re working for one on the left, get moving. Start aggressively looking for the company on the right, because they’re looking just as hard for you. They’re out there – don’t settle for less!