Of #Risk – as the stakes keep getting higher

Aside

Nassim Taleb, whose book The Black Swan added a term to our vocabulary, has offered a brief discussion of how we might anticipate. As we continue to reflect on the enormous damage done in 2008.

His point is basically to draw a distinction between linear and exponential factors. As well we know, with Moore’s Law driving core aspects of technological change, the impact of exponential factors may be expected to increase, exponentially (my point, not Taleb’s).

Here is his key para:

So here is something to use. And the technique, a simple heuristic, called fragility (and antifragility) detection heuristic works as follows. Let’s say you want to check if a town is overoptimized. Say you measure that when traffic increases by 10,000 cars, travel time to grows by ten minutes. But then if traffic increases by 10,000 more cars, travel time now extends by an extra thirty minutes. Such asymmetry shows that traffic is fragile and you have too many cars, and need to reduce traffic until the acceleration becomes mild (acceleration, I repeat, is acute concavity, or negative convexity effect).

A Method of Detection of Fragility: How to Detect Who Will Go Bust — Nassim Taleb.

Tech and Corporate Culture: #social #DC #Gov2.0

Posted on June 14, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Two great posts today – an interview with the “federal CTO” and a book review in Atlantic – come to a neat focus: the core problem of corporate culture, in government and business. I’ve written about it before, and I shall again. We have not quite exhausted the issue. For now, a brief comment, and a suggestion that you read these two pieces in parallel, one with each eye, and see what you see.

The book is about how our elites are failing us. Part of its argument resembles mine yesterday on the problems of the “expert” and an expertise too narrow to bring with it judgment or innovative capacities. Part is more focused, and like the reviewer Conor Friedersdorf I am more taken with his summary of the analysis than with the solutions proposed by the writer. But the book looks well worth a read, and I plan to add it to my list.

The interview draws my attention to one of the deep problems of Washington – that its assemblage of thousands of smart, hard-working people seems increasingly inadequate to the task of leading the world’s most advanced civilization through fast and cumulative change. My point is entirely bipartisan. I was interested that the panel I moderated at the Tech Policy Summit last week in Napa agreed that whoever wins the upcoming election will not make much difference to the tech/innovation agenda. There’s no question that the current administration has taken many steps in the “right” direction, including the CTO/CIO appointments. Yet (read the interview) these smart people have little strategic impact. They are some way down the totem pole. The brief campaign suggestion (did I imagine this?) of a CTO in the cabinet did not go far. (Fyi, I have argued for “under-secretaries for the future” in every department and agency; a new White House Council along the lines of NEC, NSC, DPC; and the inclusion in cabinet of the science adviser as well as these two C guys. Still waiting for a call asking me to fill in the details so the executive orders can be drawn up just right.)

Point is, and this needs to be shouted from the roofs and stuck on every bumper, DC’s core problem is a corporate culture problem. It is, as it were, the ultimate old-economy corporation, with guaranteed revenues, tenure for most of its operatives, and the most elegant blinkers that elegant minds can design.

This is where the power of “social” to transform institutional culture is potentially vast, since it opens the doors to fresh and powerful forces that will if unimpeded force the (re)alignment of the organization with its customer/citizen base. We tend to call this “social” when it comes to biz, and “Gov2.0/3.0” when it comes to democracy and its systems of governance. Point is: This is the strategic rather than the tactical significance of social media. It’s a huge challenge to take this in, especially as so many of the leaders in government and biz are, ahem, decidedly old-economy in their thinking. And talk is not enough. I keep referring to the bizarre fact that hardly any of our top 250 corporate CIOs use key social media (Google Mark Fidelman’s HBR piece or search this blog for my discussion of it). Here’s another (sorry, enthusiasts for the present administration). In a revealing speech in 2010, the President shared the fact that he does “not know how to work” the iPod, iPad, XBox, or PlayStation – the whole speech is worth reading for the decidedly negative context in which these technologies are viewed. Point here is simply this: Like the aforementioned CIOs, the President hires good people and tells them, at a certain level, to get on with it. Until corporate culture fundamentally shifts, that is going to make only a tactical difference. Strategic shift is awaited and will depend on two things: The appointment of leaders at the highest levels who are intuitively in sync with radical innovative approaches and can lead from the top; and the co-ordinate opening of the organizational boundaries to unstoppable pressures from the customer/citizen base.

There is much more to be said, not least in that the mitigation of the ill-effects that can also flow from these technologies (from uber-surveillance to killer drones to job destruction to fundamental dehumanization) will only ever be addressed in the context of an embrace of the pace and scope of change that is implied in the Moore’s law-driven digital revolution.

The Obama speech:

http://www.google.com/hostednews/afp/article/ALeqM5hcoyG-Ck3-VwZB7fqpUFXbffoObg

Atlantic book review:

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2012/06/why-our-elites-are-failing-us-and-how-to-fix-it/258492/

CNN Interview with the US CTO:

Obama’s chief tech officer: Let’s unleash ingenuity of the public – CNN.com.

Specialism, Generalism, and the Meta Option: Death to Silos

Posted on June 13, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I was struck by this HBR post last week and reminded of it this evening by conversation on Twitter. Not everything I learn comes through that hose, but a good bit of it . . . .

Vikram Mansharamani tackles head-on the triumph of the expert – and the coming death of expertise as the core skill-set in C21 (I hope that is a fair summary; link below – and do read it; neat piece and not long). Generalism is set for a come-back.

It’s important to see it as a come-back, since while “expertise” has always been deep, it is rather recently that narrowly focused specialism was regarded as key – not simply to the detailed study of X (plainly, it is key) but to managing people who study X, and managing them, and discoursing on the wider significance of X, and on and on.

I endorse @Mansharamani’s analysis, but I’m not sure whether the term “generalism” quite gets us there. Partly of course because it has become a term of reproach, but partly because what I am after is something perhaps more dynamic and future-oriented than it implies.

I’m pasting below also a longer post I wrote two years ago, “Hanging Together Lest we Hang Separately.” Feel free to browse. It’s about the other side of expertise, which is silos, and the problem of silo’d thinking (which as Mansharamani notes is not resolved just by getting people out of their silos and into work groups; not least because of the problem of salience and other well-known group dynamics issues).

The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Washington, DC, hosted a distinguished panel some months back to address the subset issue of “convergence” between disciplines in science and technology, and the need to find ways to address cross-cutting questions and questions that required scientists to cross their disciplinary borders. We began with a panel from MIT, and then leading policy people (including the FDA Commissioner) made their comments. The most memorable observation was that perhaps we now need a new discipline of inter-disciplinarity. I had to stifle a guffaw at this point, as I could just see this fresh silo being built and yet another problem specialism being added to the pile.

But there was also something to be noted in that generally silly suggestion, in that while mere deep expertise is less and less relevant to fast-shifting, innovative, cross-cutting questions, shallow jack-of-all-tradesness is not quite the alternative. We need people who can hold their head up high in one silo, or two, or three. But also, whether scientists or technologists or marketers or lawyers or accountants (yes, even accountants), they need to have high-level second-language skills in a series of other silos and an ability to flip to Esperanto when needed to communicate, raise questions, and shape vision, across the whole. Let’s feel after a word. What about meta-expert?

There are many components in this discussion, some of which I take further in the commentary below, including the exponential growth of knowledge which is now exploding faster than we can create new sub-specialities. But the core questions now span our silos, and if they are going to be addressed so we can gain competitive advantage and propel our vision for the markets and culture of tomorrow, only those operating with meta-expertise will cut it.

Hiring, promotion, and education are just going to have to move along this way. But it won’t come easily. What does?

All Hail the Generalist – Vikram Mansharamani – Harvard Business Review.

https://futureofbiz.org/2010/11/21/hanging-together-lest-we-hang-one-by-one/

Hanging together, lest we hang one by one:

Posted on November 21, 2010

The C-PET Mash-up and American Leadership in Century 21

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Washington, DC

At the heart of our C-PET view of things lie two convictions. First, that knowledge networking is the way to go; and every articulate view should be round the table, not because we naively believe win-win is always possible or indeed desirable, but because a positive sum outcome is always both. Second, that while silos may be necessary (we need strong expert communities) they need to be connected – in fact, connected more deeply than ever. As the sheer quantity of knowledge explodes in giddy exponential fashion (the Petaclasm was my word for it), the knowledge bearers in their tight-knit expert communities need to engage more across and outside them. Or to put it another way, with every new petabyte of data popping from the cauldron of knowledge, the meta-community becomes more important. Of course, this is the opposite of what you would expect. It’s the opposite of what most people expect. More data needs more experts; build bigger silos; bring in bigger forklifts. Fordism in the ever vaster databank.

Yet aside from the eternally valid and inexhaustibly funny Peter Principle (younger readers may need to Google that; studies keep suggesting that Lawrence Peter was absolutely if zanily on the button – and you should read the book; flip from Google to Amazon and grab it before you forget) – the vastness of data creation is what gives the lie to the warehousing siloism we have inherited. The fixation with data threatens to engulf us in a tsunami of facts that quenches not only wisdom (now there’s a word from the past), but the capacity for innovation; like those curious and generally elderly people whose houses are stuffed with every newspaper they ever purchased. What’s leadership tomorrow? Well, let’s start with a mash-up of these two. Wise innovation? Innovative wisdom? Either of those would do us nicely. Fordism in the petaclasm offers a decent, intelligent, worthy way to decline and a suffocating, bureaucratic, death. We need to devote our energies to finding, defining, working, another approach altogether. The new leadership is light-touch, scarily flexible, focused on influencing more than ordering, vision-setting every hour of every day, framing and reframing the lives of everyone on the team, and living at the hub of a metanetwork that hums and whines and fizzes with people who know more than the leader, but who see in the beat of the leaderly baton an order that both descends from and ascends towards tomorrow.

The silos are not, of course, just those created by academic disciplines, though as we know that is bad enough; really bad. Many of our smartest minds end up in the academy, on the receiving end of the substantial federal largesse that the NIH and NSF and other agencies pour into the careers of researchers in the world of STEM. Vannevar Bush, that other Bush (no relation, apparently) whose influence looms large in the America of today – larger, surely than he or his wartime patron FDR could ever have imagined in that far-off world of the 1940s – set up the model in response to his president’s request that the wartime experience of science and government snuggling together be replicated in time of peace. So a measure of government’s commitment to S and T has become its funding of the NIH/NSF apparatus. I’m not offering a view on this conventional-wisdom measure of commitment to innovation, the future, the common good, rationality, and more. (I note my esteemed friend Dan Sarewitz’ recent questioning of this idea, in the hallowed journal Nature of all places; his bearded head, thus extended above the parapet, I am expecting soon to see displayed on a stake over the doors of the National Academies.) But it is undeniable that the billions we are pumping into STEM (well, mainly STE) are shoring up the silos (not sure if that extension of the metaphor works) and underwriting the structure of an S and T establishment in which inter-disciplinary collaboration is as rhetorically appealing as it is destructive of silo-dependent career paths. And while I’m not deliberately setting out to lose my remaining friends in the academy, I do think that academic tenure and the path thereto (there is of course no path therefrom) represent one of the nuttier ideas to have hit the west (aka, for this purpose, America). Sure, put huge pressures on young researchers to achieve A, B, C. Then give them a sabbatical and a pile of moolah. But then start over. The alternative of ensuring that inter-disciplinary efforts are lauded in the tenure process is as plausible as expecting those whom we now charmingly refer to as non-state bad actors to be good sports and kiss the opportunities of asymmetry goodbye. People tend, almost, almost always, to act in their interests.

Yet my point is broader. Little by little academics are collaborating across traditional boundaries; hurrah! It will undoubtedly happen more, partly since academics themselves are developing new mangled disciplines like bioinformatics and of course nanoscale science and engineering, in which the trad distinctions just don’t work.

But the silos in Washington are on another scale, reflecting of course fundamental assumptions within the culture at large but, as tends to happen in the world of policy, drawing them out into an exaggerated and deeply contrasted form. Business. S and T. Policy-in-general. Values. Innovation. Of course, there are relationships. But this fragmented vision is deeply, deeply flawed; and it’s at the heart of our malaise as we seek to face the future – a future exponentially rushing from the past like an express train. We in C-PET are out to put the pieces together. It is together that they will define America’s success in the years ahead. It is together that, at a more profound level, they will define the human future. It is together that they possess the potential to reshape our politics. It is together that they offer leaders, from putative presidents all the way down, an opportunity to shine even as they take up the task of refurbishing an aging policy culture.

Which is my point about hanging together. If we can’t correlate these questions and their respective knowledge communities, they will all fail. In their networked connectedness lies the last best hope of success, the kind of transcendent success that would give to America the commanding heights in century 21 that it attained in 20. Because it is precisely in the correlation of these things that leadership lies. I’ve made the point elsewhere that America must set itself to be both global competitor and global citizen – the true friend as well as the rival of the emerging economic powers. There are many reasons, though network logic is plainly one; without friendship and the affect that it brings, stability in the economic if not the political order will always be in jeopardy, and stakes of all kinds are being raised all the time. We need, if you will, a social Marshall Plan to engulf the rising nations of Asia and Latin America, so that our children truly see our peoples as sharers of one exceedingly small planet and a common human lot. Only that will free us for the kind of economic competition on which the future also depends, but without the xenophobic sense that it is a zero sum game. Remember: tech is deeply changing things. In X years, X being a finite number, we shall have realtime translation devices that enable Facebook friends (or more likely friends on the various interoperable networks that will succeed MZ’s genius creation; by then he will be playing Bill Gates and giving it all away) to span all, all, language groups, in a magnificent reversal of the curse of Babel.

My suspicion is that the technologies will then also, finally, favor the little guy. The bad news? They will instantiate asymmetry, which could lead to continuous strife as a background radiation. The good? They will make things harder not easier for both commercial and governmental control. Such developments will give globalization a whole new bite, and popular movements wholly fresh impact on the global scale. Let’s say Twitter’s successor has two billion members in eight years from now, and something starts to trend and keeps on trending – public opinion as a global force will have arrived. The current (problematic) situation, in which the United Nations treats NGOs (which are often highly partisan) as the representatives of the global public, will be over. I’m not sure the UN will then be the point (I think the UN as in Security Council and GA will be oldline; UNESCO and other elements in the UN system could become a bigger deal, but on the political/economic front groups like G-20 will have all initiative); but whatever intergovernmental organizations there are, we shall see the emergence of global publics.

The point of this seeming digression is to illustrate the kind of world into which America’s projection of leadership will increasingly take place; a world in which silos are breaking down, in which people power will make life a lot more challenging for national governments, a world in which old-style structures like the core of the UN system, with their constitutions and procedures and Robert’s Rules on steroids – in which they remain in place as they fade in significance and are supplanted by the ad-hocery of the G approach. G-whatever is just a bunch of governmental guys who get invited round for a beer. It’s a high-end tweet-up. Now: combine the tweet-up “UN” which the G system is bringing in and global people power through translation software and son-of-Facebook apps, and you can begin to understand the context within which America will be acting, and needing to look good, in just a little while.

So back to integration. By pumping the innovation agenda, and bringing smart and strategic business perspectives to bear on the policy community, we are working to get the long term at the core of Washington’s politics. Embracing the future in a way that is imaginative but non-naïve, we begin to address the impacts of such diverse and extraordinary developments as virtual reality, the brain-machine interface, synthetic biology, humanoid robotics. Once their potential impacts begin to be examined, we are into risk assessment; and in tandem where those impacts stand in relation to our existing notions of the good life, and the varied political traditions that seek to sustain them. In other words, consideration of risk and values issues arise directly from a future-embracing vision. Marty Apple, President of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents and a member of C-PET’s Board of Directors, has raised the question of our handling of risk on a succession of occasions at our monthly roundtables. He urges a principle of caution, which assesses risk side by side with tech developments. He distinguishes this from the “precautionary principle” commonly spoken of in Europe, which seeks to resolve risk issues before developments take place. And Marty’s risk approach could be readily paralleled by a critique on the ground of human values (aka ethics). If you look ahead, you can be circumspect, and work on risk and values side by side with technology. Parallel processing is the key. This kind of embrace of innovation and future-mindedness represents the summum bonum for the tech community. By the same token, they know well that societal values just like environmental and other risk aspects are crucial to commercial success. Which is not to suggest “win-win.” I dislike the concept, not least as it demeans genuine disagreement and devalues the deep value of unresolved, conflicting vision. These are vital elements in progress as well as in the critique that ensures that “progress” really takes us forward, and does in a manner that is (in all its many senses) sustainable. Not win-win. But yes, positive sum outcome. Clarifying key issues; teasing out where agreement and disagreement lie, as all voices are invited to define the issues as well as speak to them; building consensus where possible and establishing both the nature and the weighting to respective parties of issues that remain outside the consensus circle. This process, which bridges silos and builds the knowledge network across disciplines as the context for decision-making, is future-oriented and inherently embraces innovation. But it is not naïve as to risk, it candidly acknowledges that all human conduct is driven by human values, and it recognizes that unease and disagreement in the values arena are huge questions for investors, business leaders, and policymakers alike. That is, the silos interconnect – and do so the more where future and potentially disruptive developments are concerned.

Point being: unless we hang together, we investors and values advocates and innovators and policy mavens and risk gurus, we shall surely hang separately. Build an open-textured knowledge network, draw in all articulate voices, frame and ask tomorrow’s questions. That’s how we man up for today’s decisions. And that’s the C-PET mash-up.

#Facebook and the #IPO again . . . @Wadhwa ‘s latest salvo

Aside

Vivek Wadhwa has emerged as one of the sharpest critics of conventional wisdom at the meeting-point of innovation, business, and finance. As entrepreneur, biz school prof, and now leader at the NASA-hosted Singularity University, he has plenty of street cred. And he is also a ferocious writer.

His critique of the IPO model is timely, and Facebook offers an example too good not to address. As he points out, they now have $16bn on hand for new tech and acquisitions; on the other hand, they face market pressures to deliver profit and growth that in their innovative space will unquestionably be hard to reconcile with the “social” purpose they have set – and on which, a la Catch-22, hopes of long-term success probably lie.

I’m interested in examples of innovative financing and governance that straddle the IPO/private/acquisition/nonprofit standard options. I think they will emerge at the interface of social, social enterprise, and new technologies. Perhaps in Facebook’s successor.

Don’t get tangled in the IPO yarn – The Washington Post.

Is #Facebook Doomed?

Posted on June 4, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Perhaps the strangest feature of the Facebook Phenom is how pervasive the network has become, how much time so many people spend on it, and how little we actually talk about it. This is a taproot of the crisis in valuation that has led the stock to sink today down above the $26 mark. I’m not bearish, at least in the short-to-medium term, as Facebook is making money and may yet find ways to make a ton of money. I’m more, shall we say, weirded out by the whole situation.

I’ve touched on this before, but to sum up and move along a bit here are some key statements I would wish to defend:

1. In general, I’ve argued that social media will soon be utilities, interoperable, and therefore not capable of generating economic profit or, in consequence, justifying these very high valuations. The future is not an AOL-style walled garden named Facebook with X billion inhabitants.It is something a lot more like the USPS. Or the power grid. I don’t know how long “soon” is. But it’s soon.

2. Back to my point about lack of discussion: My suspicion is that most of the enthusiasm for the Facebook Phenom has come from two groups: Generally older people who have little first-hand experience of social media (little, not none) (Group 1); and much younger people whose entire experience has been decisively shaped by one social medium, namely Facebook (Group 2). Group 1 has generally looked to Group 2 to confirm its sense that the Facebook Phenom is a big, big deal – whether their kids or the youngest people on their staffs. This scenario offers, at the least, a rather dire approach to risk management.

3. In the article linked below, an analyst has pronounced that by 2020 Facebook will have gone the way of Yahoo – still likely a profitable enterprise, but with far lower value and in a position of strategic insignificance. He is probably correct, although his focus on the problematics of mobile may be wrong. We all know that the shift to mobile, which is more rapid than anyone expected, has proved challenging as ad revenues are much more difficult to come by in the mobile environment. My suspicion is that Facebook like the many other companies caught in the same situation will come up with some ideas that work, even if they are not obvious today. In parallel, the shift to mobile may help power the move (which I see as highly desirable and in the long term inevitable) to subscription-based social that is protective of user privacy. And, at root, while ads make a lot of sense in search, they make little in social. There are other ways in which companies can occupy social space (branded high-end content will become increasingly important, for example), but if you want to see your friends’ pics you are not ever going to be that interested in clicking links for autos.

4. Sorry, many smart people, but the idea that Mark Zuckerberg‘s very clever development of the Aol/MySpace enterprise will end up as a multi-billlion-member walled garden I find risible. Aside from the glow already fading from what was once almost (never quite) hip, as granny signs on, there are just too many reasons why barriers to entry will fall (or be knocked down by regulators) and basic social become part of the comms wallpaper.

Which draws attention to what I find enormously creative and popping with potential about Twitter. Facebook is very complex, keeps getting moreso, and has really only one core role. Twitter is very simple, has stayed that way, and has many roles. It’s the pathway to tomorrow. Which is one reason I hope it can be saved from the Facebook IPO fate by something a lot more creative in the financing/governance arena.

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/future/why-twitter-matters/

Facebook Will Disappear by 2020, Says Analyst.

Has the Social Media #Bubble Popped? #sm #IPO #Facebook

Posted on June 2, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

I posted earlier on the debacle of the Facebook IPO and some longer-term considerations in respect of the valuation and staying-power of these early-generation social media brands. And they are early-generation. Part of the problem we are facing is that we are in the throes of exponential change. One thing that means is that we have faced dramatic shifts, which we are tempted to see as lasting and offering us a fresh gently-rising plateau as we look ahead. The fact that the exponential, disruptive bombs are getting bigger every day is too hard to grasp. So we don’t try. So we behave dumb. (Yes, there’s a book there to explain what I’m on about; and yes, I am working on it, so there. Back off, plagiarizers, but join the convo!)

Briefly:

1. In general, this is early early days. Which makes future-scoping (a) very hard, and (b) very necessary. More of both (a) and (b) every day.

2. We’re talking about the brands/companies that have been quick out of the box in, essentially, social media round 2. Round 1 was shaped and dominated by AOL; its curious corporate survival and the bizarre Time takeover blur our capacity to reflect on how revolutionary was Steve Case’s invention ( which has pretty much defined everything social since; Zuck owes him big. . . .). The key brands of the past decade have been awarded huge valuations on the naive assumption that the barriers to entry will remain high and that interoperability and utility status is not around the corner. Yeah, right.

3. As we look ahead, we see multiple converging streams that include “social” a la Facebook, social marketing leading to profound shifts in “social business,” CSR/social enterprise parallel and convergent developments as a subset of the foregoing, Gov. 2.0 (3.0), wholly new developments in global governance (of which more in another post), and . . . well, point is, we have just begun. It’s why Facebook and Google, qua biz model and tech trailblazers, are so important. It’s why, qua brands, they will be proved to have been relatively insignificant.

4. While we are at it: Facebook’s curious upcoming vote on a privacy change reminds us that, ultimately, social networks will be mutually owned and driven by crowd-sourced decision-making. I am actually astonished that Zuck (whom I greatly admire) has not tumbled to this. But one thing one learns is that innovators are often successful precisely because they don’t see most of the context, rather than because they do.

The future is social. But that social is not ad-driven, privacy-destroying, IP-wielding, reaping economic profit. It is in general mutualized, open-sourced, and ultimately a thrilling constantly innovating utility environment for much human activity. Getting there is messy, but since when was getting anywhere worthwhile not?

http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/2012/05/21/facebook-being-dumped-says-reuters-whats-the-real-issue-well-there-are-3/

The Social Media Bubble has Popped.

Federal #Science and Ideology: #DC and the #Valley

Posted on May 31, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

In a largely historical op-ed in the Capitol Hill newspaper Roll Call, Michael Lubell of CUNY and the American Physical Society lambastes the current parties for their inability to agree on the priority of science funding – in marked contrast to earlier efforts over the past generation when, despite differences of emphasis, bipartisan collaboration led to big increases in the public funding of science and technology.

My take? Three quick points.

1. This brings us back to the question of the question. How is it framed? Little by little, broader concerns with budget, disaffection with “big government,” and stories of weird research projects (always findable, and some plainly are weird), have chipped away at the semi-consensus. I think there’s more to it, and am not sure if the big increases in public science finding would continue anyway for several other reasons. But the issue is framed differently now.

2. I sat round a table recently with the CTO of one of our major tech companies and asked him why, when his organization has strategy people working for the chairman, and R and D people working for him – all with timelines of 7-10 years in their heads – they have federal relations people in DC told that around 18 months should be their time horizon. That is, why have not our major tech companies done the heavy lifting in driving forward the politics of the long term? Also a big issue. My sense is that their deciding to do so, and agreeing long-term goals on which for all their diverse interests they can work together, will prove central to the possibility of a prosperous and secure American tomorrow.

3. Back of the conflicting ideological agendas in Washington lies a remarkable degree of unanimity in, as it were, the “corporate culture.” I have written elsewhere about the divide between the District and the Valley (search this blog or see my Kindle e-book Innovation President). It is vast. Our creative, entrepreneurial culture is almost entirely divorced from our political culture. This is true across the parties, and despite fine people and good initiatives. The cultures are deeply misaligned, and few people at either end care. That’s the core issue here. Budget levels, and an inability to collaborate on agreeing them, are presenting problems. Their cause lies elsewhere.

It’s not my view that more money is “the answer,” though federal S and T spend is very important. There are many other questions that need to be addressed if we are going to ramp up American S and T leadership, and resulting innovation, for the next generation. In the past I have proposed the abolition of academic tenure (through an appropriations rider), restructuring of funding agencies (we could start off with a new one taking 10% of existing non-DoD spend and based in the Valley), cabinet positions for the Science Adviser, the CIO, the CTO; and more besides. I’ve also proposed moving Camp David to the Valley (my friends out there are horrified by the traffic implications) – as the first step in the migration of the federal government to the west coast that I believe to be probably inevitable and certainly desirable in the first Pacific century.

Our C-PET motto is Asking Tomorrow’s Questions. It’s all about the questions. Washington is a city full of smart people with answers. Get the questions right and things will change.

Lubell: Science Funding and the Ideological Divide : Roll Call Opinion.

#Apple CSR #Strategy – #Risk risk risk

Posted on May 30, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Triple Pundit has just published a strong critique of Apple’s approach to corporate social responsibility.

The leadership point is especially telling (see my post earlier today), but in general what this sharp series of points suggests to me is that with the passing of the baton a fresh approach is being explored that has yet to find its feet.

Any company so dependent for its high profits on its reputation should be first in line to address all of these concerns and others also. It should also consider, seems to me, whether taking over Foxconn or developing a joint venture in which it was the senior partner might nor prove a more aligned and coherent way of addressing the huge issues that its reliance on Chinese manufacturing has begun to raise. To be able to address these issues within rather than outside the organizational boundary would shift their status and character in a way that could only help Apple going forward.

5 Reasons Why Apple’s CSR Strategy Doesn’t Work.