Rupert #Murdoch ‘s Unfolding Disaster #CSR

Posted on April 25, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

How to Hit an Iceberg: Rupert Murdoch’s Unfolding Disaster

Reposted from 7/28 2011

As events have unfolded in the News of the World scandal I have kept being reminded of a phrase that explains much of the appeal of that (now defunct) newspaper: the fascination of the horrible. Really grim things can grip. That’s 50% of the key to “tabloid” newspapers and their stories. (The other half is celebs; and when celebs hit scandals, tabloid sales get supersized.) It is a delicious irony that the most celebrated scandal-sheet on the planet has fallen rapid victim to just the kind of story it has always loved to report. The fact that it also saw itself as a campaigning newspaper – crusading on the side of truth and goodness as it drove up sales –further seasons the feast. There’s nothing more grimly gripping on the planet than a loud-mouthed and out-and-out hypocrite.

We don’t know where this will end, and neither do Mr. Murdoch, his executives, shareholders, and those who wish him well or ill. What we do know is that we are looking at a corporate empire under threat. We don’t have to speculate about the potential use by U.S. prosecutors of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (which makes bringing foreign officials, like British cops, a particularly nasty federal offence) to note the potential impact of public sentiment on a corporate empire. Or, in other words, of values on value. We may find it curious that the public seemed to care little for the hacking of celebrities’ cellphones – which was round one of the scandal – but was thrown into rage by the use of that same news-gathering technique on a victim of crime. But for the very reason that the British public is a vast consumer of “tabloid” news its appetites are fed by sensation and sentiment. Sentiment has swung with a vengeance. Murdoch’s big move to control the key satellite broadcaster has been condemned by all political leaders. The police have placed several of his top execs on notice that they are being investigated. He and his team are being invited to be quizzed by parliamentarians. And here in the United States, Congress is waiting in the wings.

What’s the moral? Well, first, look at the impact of technology. Before there were mobile phones all we had were clunky answering machines. Now there are great vats of highly sensitive and potentially valuable private information digitally accessible from any telephone in the world – if you punch in the right sequence of digits. Asymmetries are breaking out all over. Low-level people under pressure for stories break the rules. High-level people may pay the price and market value may be destroyed. What’s the moral? Simple, really: the leveraging that emerging technologies are bringing to business make it far more important for values to be aligned throughout the organization than they were before. Dumpster-diving for discarded correspondence is one thing; pumping 4,000 names into a spreadsheet, bribing the Head of State’s security detail, eavesdropping on the victims of crime and terror, and hacking the phones of cops who are investigating, is quite another. That’s the power of the handset in the hand of the representative of an organization that, at some level, has been shown to be corrupt.

Sure, you can argue that every organization has bad apples. In the nature of the case scandal-focused journalism operates on the edge. The boundaries overstepped did not look so big at the time. All correct. But some lessons learned. First, bad apples are now far more toxic to organizations than they used to be – because of the combination of technological leverage and reputational damage so devastatingly demonstrated here. When all is said and done, the little nexus of private detectives and journalists at the heart of this story may end up destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value. Second, the edgier the effort – whether sensationalist publishing or, say, healthcare systems where physicians can be rewarded for the denial of care – the more central the need for unambiguous, enforced values to pervade the organization from head to toe. Third, just as corporate leaders are now post-Enron required to sign off on the accounts, they need to sign off on the values that pervade their entities. Not because Sarbanes-Oxley requires it, but for an even more pressing reason: their building sustainable value for investors does. We don’t need a SOX for values. We already have one. It’s called the bottom line.

Go figure. And watch News International’s value in weeks to come.

First posted on the US Chamber of Commerce BLCL site.

We Need to Talk – about #Twitter: Reciprocal Knowledge Engine PLUS

Posted on April 15, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Some time back I wrote and then revised a piece on both my Twitter use and the power of Twitter as a machine for building knowledge through mutual or reciprocal curation – what perhaps we can designate a “reciprocal knowledge engine. ” Google just told me that it could not find the phrase, so it looks like it’s mine. Here’s the piece: http://nigelcameron.wordpress.com/future/why-twitter-matters/

I don’t really have a lot to add on that score; seems to me this medium/platform is pregnant with capacities to enable the building of cross-disciplinary, convergent knowledge, in a world defined by the data explosion of the exaclasm and the exponential need and opportunity for understanding – as a prelude, one would hope, to wisdom in decision-making in the face of global risk.

Point about Twitter, though, is that it is also many other things, and yesterday’s post discussing the proposal that our @ addresses serve as our personal universal locators is not without merit. Then again, it’s a source for every crowd one could wish, from flashmobs during demos to the nuclear flashmob that was unleashed on SOPA. And market research. And (another recent theme in this blog) C-Suite engagement with stakeholders. Of yes, and if you must, the Lady Gaga fan club and the PR people from our favorite pols. And on and on.

Which suggests: Twitter as a corporation or a brand may or may not have immortality. In general, businesses in this space are ageing fast (not good news for current valuations). A rival could pick it up, mess it up, close it down. Or, more likely, a nimbler, smarter, son-of-Twitter will emerge in 20 months’ time and we will all feel how MySpacey Twitter used to be.

But in all the social media melange, in Twitter we have lighted on something far more valuable than the other platforms, useful for particular purposes though they may be. It’s why many of the smartest people on the planet are spending serious time here every day of their lives. And (back to reciprocal knowledge) they are my research assistants. And I am one of theirs.

Social in the C Suite #sm #CEO

Posted on April 14, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

TechCrunch has a handy list of pros and cons of CEOs engaging in the dark arts of blogging. They’re a little pedestrian and sometimes off-message (where did don’t micromanage your staff come from?) and I’m not sure whether they get to the real point.

Because the real point is not whether the CEO is a writer (another off-piste point) (though goodness, how anyone gets to run anything without a certain fluency in the QWERTY dept is a mystery, though it has happened) – it’s the cardinal principle we discussed in the CIO context: executive leadership is first and foremost about engagement, immersion in the culture of tomorrow’s markets; and, very specifically, in the emerging digital-social culture whose dimensions and implications we presently grasp only vaguely, but which is the thresshold to whatever happens next. In other words: Unless you are personally engaging in social media, you should get another job. By all means blog about your hobby and tweet about the weather, but immersion can’t be replicated.

Of course, the defensive posturing that still characterizes a lot of corporate thinking on internet use in the workplace has to go. One reason it is still so influential lies precisely here: At the top there is still remarkably little facility with these media, and therefore understanding of their value (and also where the problems are likely to be met). Chicken and egg, indeed.

Seems to me that 100% participation is needed. No?

CEO Bloggers: To Blog or Not to Blog | TechCrunch.

Rolling down to Rio

Posted on March 31, 2012 by Nigel Cameron

Rolling down to Rio:
The Twin Challenges of Global Process: Sustaining Credibility and Engaging Dissent

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

I spent this past week at Planet under Pressure (PuP), a global conference on sustainability and climate convened in London under the eminent auspices of the Royal Society and the network of science academies around the planet– as a preparation for Rio+20, which is just around the corner. It’s plain the organizing committee were no fans of Rudyard Kipling or we would have been greeted on daily arrival by renditions of his splendid song Rolling down to Rio, in place of the housemusic (ahem, housemuzak) that I assume was picked by the ExCel Center (which, somewhat amusingly for a such a carbon-conscious event, is owned by Abu Dhabi). Here it is, sung by that wonderful American baritone, Leonard Warren: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uk99b7sNFzQ.

It was a privilege to be invited to participate, and admire the skills of my esteemed professional friend Lidia Brito (science policy director at UNESCO and former science/education minister of Mozambique) as conference co-chair; and Nisha Pillai, network anchor turned gracious but when necessary lethal emcee. 3,000 people, mainly scientists, filled the hall. After an opening evening and four long days it finally all came to a conclusion, and I am mulling. So take these thoughts as ideas in progress on a process of high significance for the good of the planet (which includes us) – and an object lesson in how to do, and perhaps not to do, what needs to be done. And that is true whether or not your own view lies in the climate/sustainability mainstream. The video and closing statement are here: http://www.planetunderpressure2012.net/

I had been invited to speak in the session on innovative solutions, and focused my remarks on the need to innovative the shape of the debate itself – partly by bringing other parties to the table. I summarized my comments – and much else – for those who follow me on Twitter (@nigelcameron).

On reflection there is much on my mind, including, in no special order:
• What’s the value of endless exhortations? We should, we must, everyone needs to. My suspicion is they are counter-productive. There were hundreds. Life in an exhortatory community is depressing and a little tedious. And it was left to Oliver Morton of the Economist to ask pointedly that speakers not say “we” without defining who. EC science adviser Anne Glover’s push-back on this point was not helpful.
• What’s the value of advisers and committees? We are awash with them. And while I don’t object if the UN Secretary-General wants a science adviser and an advisory committee to boot (one leading idea being ventilated), it is hard to see what difference this will make in the scheme of things; as if an exponential, hockey-stick increase in the number of advisers and committees will solve the problem (whatever, precisely, the problem is).
• Has the emergence of the scientific community as, may I say, a lobbying community, been useful for science or for society? I suspect not at all. I’m all for scientists taking ethical views and engaging society; but their operating, or seeming to, in a manner that makes them look like a labor union or enviro pressure group has been less of a good idea. And (note to the more enthusiastic) shrill is always a negative factor in the effort at persuasion.
• The old joke that insanity may be defined as doing the same thing over and over expecting a different result kept haunting me.

Participants in the Conversation

1. I opened my remarks with the suggestion that the debate is running backwards. If the capacity of the global science/NGO community to shape policy on the broad climate/sustainability agenda is weaker than it was pre-Copenhagen, what does this mean? Inter alia: That people need to get better at listening and learning –and focus on reshaping the discussion. The alternative reality of international conferences is not doing the trick.
2. I argued for much greater inclusion, around the table, of the business community. PuP had a smattering of business speakers – one of whom was the subject of a demo (sigh). Unless the discussion of sustainability and the global environmental good is owned by industry and, more specifically, by those who shape the global capital markets, it may make activists of the NGO or science professor variety feel good, but it will not leverage planetary decision-making. Where was Goldman Sachs? Innovation leaders such as IBM, GE, Google, Apple? Top VCs – like Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) and Peter Thiel (Facebook et al., and also one of the most stimulating global thinkers about the future and technology)? Leaders in the energy field? In complex ways the take of all these parties shapes global policy choices.
3. It’s complicated, but the “new corporate social responsibility” (CSR) is increasingly building alignment between business activity and global sustainability. Famously, Harvard’s Michael Porter – long the guru of value in the world of business – has come out in favor of a radical notion of “shared value” as the key. It’s a third-generation notion of corporations thinking about the wider impacts of their activities, after old-time philanthropy and the more recent thinking about CSR. (Discussed here in my column for the U.S. Chamber of Commerce: http://bclc.uschamber.com/blog/2012-01-11/so-what-about-board)
4. Then we come to government. At PuP, among various luminaries, we had two members of the British government speaking – they arrived, delivered their speeches, and left, making it very plain that PuP was not the main thing on their minds in the UK this week. I was thinking that it would have been interesting, for example, had David Willets stayed the full 4 days and served as respondent to key speakers. Until the G8/BRICS/OECD governments can own this process, it is not owned. IGO, NGOs, and science networks are needed and can accomplish a lot. But they do not hold the whip hand.

Subjects of the Conversation

I have neither the intention nor the competence to get into the pros and cons of the very complex climate debate. But to an interested observer, some matters seem to me to be clear after my engagement in PuP.

1. For one thing, there are various distinct logical strands in the conversation that tend to be lumped together. You do not need to be convinced that humans caused warming to see it occurring and note a need to act to contain its impacts both through mitigation and (in whatever manner) through efforts to affect the future process. By the same token, you can accept the entirety of the conventional analysis and not think it is politically possible to do much about it (a view more widely held I suspect than is often admitted). You can doubt pretty much the entire analysis and yet believe that a prudent world should act just in case it should be true. There are other variants. It would be helpful to disentangle their logic. That (ahem) is how one builds alliances and a case for action.
2. For another, advocates of the conventional view have to my mind been much too ready to throw everything into the hopper. Yes, I know, it’s all ultimately connected. But if you are looking to engage global opinion in action to mitigate the impact of warming and, separately, limit its pace, why bring the population issue to the fore? It’s a surefire way of losing a billion potential supporters here (err, the Roman Catholic Church) and a billion there. The same is true of the issue of rising differentials between the rich and the poor. It isn’t that these questions don’t matter. But, again, they are guaranteed ways to push away people who don’t buy these agenda items. By the same token, there are many particular sustainability issues (fish stock depletion?) that stand on their own two feet and do not depend on other areas of analysis for their credibility. The tendency to aggregate the issues into one, like that to aggregate views into two, is not helpful.
3. For a third, advocates of the conventional view need to be careful not to damage their case further in the manner in which they seek to make it. Feverishness in advocacy invariably undercuts credibility. Suggestions, for example (heard at PuP) that skeptics need to be given “treatment,” or that we need a move to qualified majority voting in global environmental regulation, are as rhetorically counter-productive as they are impractical; and the widely held idea that the only reason some people question the conventional view is that Big Oil is funding them is simply untrue – as well as unhelpful. In a global knowledge economy, truth wins out through respectful dialogue. (And, needless to say, “denier” language – which I did not hear this week – is as disrespectful to the victims of the Holocaust as it is to partners in the current discussion.)

These are notes, not points in argument of a thesis, so I do not offer a conclusion. But they are notes offered toward the repristination of the process. Your responses will be appreciated, as we roll down to Rio, and beyond.

Two good blog summaries of the week:

http://www.eaem.co.uk/news/global-eco-summits-compared-matrix-amid-call-urgent-action

http://www.scidev.net/en/agriculture-and-environment/planet-under-pressure-2012-2/news/science-policy-relations-stuck-in-outdated-era-.html#.T3ceQghloc0.twitter

Leadership in the Exaclasm

Posted on November 1, 2010 by Nigel Cameron

Nigel M. de S. Cameron
Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies
Washington, DC

When teens say TMI it means they don’t want embarrassing details. But Eric Schmidt, Mr. Google, has the ultimate TMI facts: until 2003, he states with customary Delphic authority, the world had created 5 exabytes of data. By 2010, we do it every two days.

This does not of course mean we have suddenly become vastly more productive; half of that data comes not from Wall Street and CERN and China People’s Daily, but my kids’ photos on Facebook. Point is: the explosion in data, and data capture, are partnered with the speed of change as drivers of complexity. How to know what matters when it comes to the future? To put it another way, what’s leadership in Millennium 3?

Back in 1998, an elderly gentleman was asked by a television reporter how he was going to vote. “If God had intended us to vote,” he responded, “he would have given us candidates.” Of course, there were two respectable candidates running that year for the presidency. But I took his point then and I take it even more strongly now. We are facing a crisis of leadership. At a time of deep geopolitical unease, with a seismic shift underway in power relations around the globe and fresh emerging asymmetries, and technological changes zipping up a curve that gets only steeper, leadership is faltering.

So what’s leadership in 2010? Well, we know about management. It was management – from Fordism on – that defined and exemplified the 20^th century. In corporate and government life, we got ourselves organized. Management theorists don’t all agree with each other, but they tend to be speaking about the same thing. You can study “management” and write papers about it. Yet not so with leadership. Leadership books, like leaders, are quirky, guru-esque. Approaches succeed that look wildly different. Last month, I was speaking at a conference on leadership for emerging corporate leaders from around the globe. Two presenters who were among the top corporate leaders were asked to speak about leadership and change. One was modest, orderly, and made much of his walking past five of his executives in first class to take his seat in economy with the cheapest ticket he could buy; leadership by example. The other, flamboyant head of one of the largest automakers, was asked what car he drove: there’s a Maserati outside, he said, and I have Ferraris in my garage. What’s more – speaking of quirky – he has one hundred direct reports, and runs his company with three Blackberries and three cellphones. And in politics? There too, we’ve had consensus-builders and consensus-breakers. A recent writer said of Churchill that in 1939-40, he “defined leadership for the rest of time.” Point is: leadership is not the kind of thing that leads to uniformity, good practice, rules to be learned.

The medievals, as usual, knew a thing or two. When you can’t define something, you can get a long way by clarifying what it is not. Hence (in their case, with God), the via negativa. We know (well, we do, but plenty of putative leaders do not!) that leadership is not management. And neither is it emulation of your favorite leader. Yet there are things we can say. Leadership is always about change. It’s therefore about the future; about knowledge – and in the context of TMI and the petaclasm, knowing what you need to know. It’s about relationships, building the network you need- so you can locate yourself at the heart of the unique knowledge network that will drive your decision-making and make you the best-informed person on the planet for your particular role. It’s about the constant interrogation of ends and goals in the interests of clarity and fidelity; and utter, ruthless flexibility when it comes to means.

To put it another way: the leader is the bridge-builder. Since we were talking about the medievals, pontifex is the Latin word – inherited from the pagan Roman priesthood. But while the pontiff (pontifex maximus, chief bridge-builder) builds a vertical bridge to God, the merely human leader builds horizontal bridges of several kinds. The bridge between her/himself and the led. This is what we know best, and it lies at the core of our politics. If you can’t build that bridge, you just don’t get to be the leader. But – note well, politicos great and small – this is a mere necessary condition of leadership. On its own it is far from sufficient. Two others, at least, set the leader in play to lead, in the flux of the exaclasm, the shifting tectonic plates of global power, the asymmetric threats that chink like Ruskin’s dreadful geologists’ hammers.

First, a bridge to the future. And the faster change takes place, the more central this becomes. That is to say, leadership that is both innovative and constantly embracing of innovation.

Second, a bridge across the silos, disciplines, communities; a networking that draws on ever more diverse sources in the midst of the data deluge and the growing inter-connectedness. Leadership through innovation through networks of knowledge.

Without these two, no leader will succeed in the 21^st century. Hence my semi-serious suggestion that all elected representatives be required every year to attend a series of conferences on technology and the future. Hence my serious suggestion that all political appointees should be screened, without exception, for their innovation-mindedness, alertness to the demands of the future, engagement in the knowledge network. Because what this analysis underlines is that we need the right kind of people in leadership. Unless they are knowledge leaders and innovation leaders, whatever their skills and virtues, their capacity to lead America in Millennium 3 is fatally compromised. They need to be the right kind of people, and they need to be operating within the right kind – of “corporate culture,” in which innovative future-mindedness, and knowledge networking, are prized. There’s no question that America shaped the global 20^th century. If it is to be more than a bit player in the 21^st, we need, well, change.

But back to the via negativa. Two things that I’m not saying. First, that in all its branches the USG lacks extraordinarily smart people who are innovative, future-oriented knowledge networkers. They are there. But who would claim that they set the pace? The general presumptions of Washington’s political culture and its priorities lie elsewhere, in the political short term. Second, that our global competitors (I’m drafting this on my way back from a trip to China) will have it all their own way. I think there is everything to play for. But other players seem, shall we say, rather more evidently aware of the fact there is a game afoot.

The genius of America’s global dominance in the 20^th has lain precisely in its capacity to capture the imagination of peoples as they have strained forward into freedom, and to twin this visionary leadership with the potency of an educational/industrial economy capable of developing and delivering technologies to satisfy consumer markets – and in the late 20^th century, the tools of change that have granted global access to the digital vectors of tomorrow. America’s challenge is now to continue to build comparative advantage at the meeting-point of freedom and technological empowerment; to demonstrate future-oriented leadership in the global knowledge economy. At the point at which high-value, creative efforts are now in the grasp of our competitors.

Stasis all over again?

Shall we? That raises another set of questions about leadership and change. I’m feeling for a category here. As we know well, there’s a tendency for stasis, or at least its expectation, to follow bursts of revolutionary change. Future fatigue? The change plateau? It’s as if once the exponential curve has delivered some game-changing shift, the players need a rest. They stop thinking about exploding the assumptions around them, and start thinking about their stock options. Yet the curve keeps on going up. To move beyond the middle ages into the Reformation of the 16^th century, a favored tag was ecclesia reformata semper reformanda: the reformed church must go on being reformed. Listen up, Redmond and Palo Alto. My other gig in Switzerland was to lead a workshop at UBS on investment and emerging technologies. Who seriously believes that in 5-7 years the two uber-brands of the web, Google and Facebook, will still be as dominant as they are now, pressing ahead, and – crucial to their current valuations – generating economic profit? One reason the naïve statements and creepy actions of both these splendid efforts on the question of privacy are so interesting lies precisely in their assumption that their ways of doing business are here to stay, and we shall need to get used to the fact. 5-7 years? Expect both search and the kind of “social networking” embodied in Facebook to be well on their way to commodity status, prematurely ageing companies in a world in which everything – including the classic company life-cycle matrix – moves faster every day. (If that’s not a lesson to learn from the great AOL-Time Warner debacle, back in the 90s when things moved a lot slower, I don’t know what is; someone paid what – $100bn? more? – to teach us a classic biz school case.)

Key point here: Moore’s Law, globalization, and much else have created a situation in which it is not technology that is characteristic of the future, but change (and change in the context of growing asymmetry). This point seems to me to have been spectacularly ungrasped by major tech leaders. It isn’t that we shan’t need search or won’t wish to share pics and news with our friends. It’s that the ageing of these branded behemoths, with their hubristic tendencies, and the smartness that drives scores of start-ups year by year, will have moved our focus elsewhere. They will feel about as hip as the telecoms do now. (And this just in: who noticed the “Fear Award” delivered to Mark Zuckerberg for Facebook’s threats to privacy at the Stewart/Colbert “rally for sanity”? That should send shivers down many spines.)

From the Edge

So leadership, always the most daunting of human tasks, in the 21^st century is intimately correlated with the two great facts of the age: the petaflood of data, and the instantiation of exponential change. The development and engagement of knowledge networks, and fundamental flexibility that grasps the change principle, have always been components in leadership, but they emerge now as the key qualifiers. The clock will not turn back. TMI will always define our data; a tempting stasis will frame our engagement with the latest change and the latest emerging technologies. We must now learn to lead not from the front but the edge.

Permission granted to reproduce in full and with acknowledgement.

Innovating our innovation talk: how do we raise the game in DC?

Posted on October 22, 2010 by Nigel Cameron

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies, Washington, DC

The most difficult issues are always those closely connected with many more. So it is with innovation. We don’t have a simple definition, though we have parameters. We know it doesn’t just refer to technology. We know the smartest inventors may not be the innovators. We know that somehow the United States has been lead innovation nation for some time. We fear the loss of this complex, potent capacity.

We should expect that something as complex would require subtlety to address. Yet like most things in Washington, it follows a pattern: smart people feel obliged to dumb down their conversation to get the attention of other smart people who have felt obliged to dumb down their receptivity. So whether you are on the inside or the outside of the vast machine of government, there’s a big element of (can we say it?) roleplay. It’s just another of the problems.

This is the context into which Intel’s Paul Otellini, among others, has been firing salvoes. The time is running out, “Washington” has to change, U.S. competitiveness is at issue; and, ultimately, the vibrancy of the economy and our children’s future depend on it.

One thing that interests us at C-PET is the connections. Between technology, values, risk, policy – and innovation. Between an innovative mindset and future-oriented decision-making. Between cognizance of the future, and competence for today. So our recent roundtable, co-sponsored by the Task Force on American Innovation, asked “What’s Washington’s Problem?” Here is the planet’s technology leader by a long, long way. But a nation whose tech leaders are consumed by unease about what lies ahead.

An issue we did not discuss, but that is surely pertinent, is the geography of U.S. technology, so much of which is based on the west coast. How do the drivers of west coast innovation see Washington? I think in two ways. First, it is a long way away. Curious the impact that geographic distance still has on power and decisions. Second, some time back a VC in Menlo Park told me that when he looks out of his window, he sees the Pacific; in Washington, they see the Atlantic. If the Valley had taken the Beltway seriously all along things could already be rather different.

Back to complexity. Our roundtable underlined the fact by the variety of its presenters and the themes they took up. And when I pressed them – as I do on these occasions – for the lead strategic issues that must be addressed, the answer was not clear. Or, it was that there are many. Which amounts to my mind to the same thing.

Here are some highlights; video will soon be on c-pet.org:

FCC’s Phoebe Yang set out the process behind the broadband plan, which is plainly key to technology success; and made a fundamental C-PET argument – that innovation thrives when rules are clear!
Marty Apple, president of the Council of Scientific Society Presidents, spoke about the conditions for sustainable innovation, including a more candid inclusion in the 21^st century of the externalities, environmental and other, that our capitalist system had managed in the 20^th to avoid. He called for a new social contract between the public, private sector, and the research community, which focused on minimizing harms and maximizing benefits – long-term. And for a new Education Advanced Projects Agency on the DARPA model to fast-track the best reforms to U.S. education.
John Palafoutas of the Inventors Hall of Fame and Task Force for American Innovation, set out some basic problems: 2-year Congress, few politicians have a science and technology background, and ultimately a handful of lead political figures actually make the decisions
Stephen Ezell, ITIF: we are in denial, politics has failed us; leaders don’t believe we can fall behind
Kent Hughes, Woodrow Wilson Center: remember the “sputnik moment” and how it woke up America, and our response the Japanese dominance of tech markets ; we need global bench-marking
Garland McCoy, TPI: maybe we should focus more on quality; India could give us a run for our money

It’s plain that there are some key policy issues – taxes and visas – on which everyone seems to agree we face pressures that are making us increasingly uncompetitive. But are these the core innovation issues? As Marty Apple and others pointed out, much of the fruit of our innovation is now going overseas for manufacture; the trend may grow.

Here are what I see as the key underlying issues:

We need long-term thinking, scanning, planning on the part of leaders in government. There is plenty of it in many locations in Washington, but they are all lower down the scale. Where we need it is at the pinnacle of decision-making, in the executive and legislative branches. Politicians need to be much better at fighting short-term political campaigns while not disprivileging long-term issues that are nonpartisan in character. Otherwise democracy will surely strangle its own future. The electoral cycle cannot be our decision-making cycle. And as change comes faster, our horizons must extend further.

So we need a disposition toward innovation and an embrace of new possibilities at all levels of government. Hence my (at least half-serious) suggestion elsewhere of an innovation-mindedness test for political appointees.

And how do we get there? It will involve a culture shift in the Washington thinks, not simply how it works. But we have to get to it. And soon.

The Ultimate Mash-up: Innovation in Washington?

Posted on September 5, 2010 by Nigel Cameron

In Aspen with Tom Lehrer on my Mind

Nigel M. de S. Cameron

Center for Policy on Emerging Technologies

Once a Tom Lehrer fan, always one; at least, you can’t keep him out of your head. So I was sitting in Aspen at the TPI innovation conference a week or two back, and this time it was his Vatican Rag. But the tagline now: “innovate, innovate, innovate.”

Of course, in tech circles innovation is the talk of the town (as in, Washington), even though it is often twinned with a sense of resignation. The problem is that politics was never designed for a society in which the rate of technology’s development is exploding at ever more rapid rates. Remember Thomas Malthus, 18^th century English clergyman and statistician, and his half-true theory of demographics? (It was resurrected for a time in the semi-hoax of the “population bomb” in the 60s.) Malthus said population grows geometrically, food resources arithmetically; ergo famine, disease, large-scale death. So here: technology’s progress is as exponential as it comes, Moore’s Law as far as the eye can see. And politics? Our system of governance? Well, it’s arithmetical in every sense. Big Bang versus Steady State. Which did not much matter when the curve was a lot flatter. We saw the future in gradualist terms, and we got away with it. No longer. We’re facing a crisis, potentially deadly, for the nation that has been fated to be top dog as the exponential tech revolution heads skyward. How is steady-state politics to fathom, let alone frame, the fissile material that is 21^st century technology?

Intel’s Paul Otellini has been hammering his theme. American needs innovation; it needs an innovation-focused Washington; the nation’s losing its edge. Earlier in the year he teamed up with the Aspen Institute to host a crisis summit at the Ronald Reagan Building in downdown DC. Otellini emceed corporate leaders, innovation gurus like John Kao, and the Obama administration’s Larry Summers and Arne Duncan. What’s innovation? Why is it in crisis? What can be done? It was impressive, an A-list event that kept the A-listers on task for 24 hours.

Then as summer came we circled around, and Otellini again was center-stage in Aspen – Aspen the place, this time, not the Institute. A glittering occasion. As well as Otellini, the Technology Policy Institute hosted CEO-turned-politico Carly Fiorina, VC and LinkedIn pioneer Reid Hoffman, Intuit’s folksy CEO Brad Smith, and Valley entrepreneur and writer Andrew Keen. And its program asked the question, over and over: is America losing its edge? (Answer does not require a trip to Aspen. It’s yes. And you can see the video online. Techpolicyinstitute.org)

My point is that the questions go deep. How shall government of the people, by the people, for the people, guided by members of Congress who dutifully ride their horses to Washington for two-year stints per the Constitution, and an administration whose decisional timeline is rarely longer, address what is best seen as a slow but quickening and essentially uncontrolled explosion? Today’s key resource that creates both wealth and security is something quite novel: information, data. Perhaps the most disruptive invention in our generation has been something which simply didn’t exist a generation ago: search. Most people think the “digital revolution” is now mainly behind us. It has barely, barely begun. And you don’t have to be a disciple of Kurzweil to believe that the curve is set to start going close to vertical in our lifetimes. One a counter-intuitive principle of living with change: the faster it goes, the more important to look ahead. We just can’t make good decisions for today without spending time in tomorrow.

Back in the early 2000s, the National Science Foundation, brainchild of that practical genius Vannevar Bush (who famously foresaw an analog version of the web using that handy but clunky old-time invention, the microfiche), convened a series of conferences on what they called “converging technologies” – nano, bio, info, cogno, the “NBIC” mantra. I presented at one, attended others, and have written of them in critical terms as they were too much influenced by a naïve “transhumanism” (which blunted, rather than sharpened, their impact) and not enough focused on engaging the policy implications of the very remarkable developments they considered. But they were right to throw the future in the mix and ask hard questions about where current tech trends are leading.

And where is there now to meet the future in Washington? It’s future-mindedness that we need more than anything other single thing. A visionary, open, reflective, awareness that science and technology are framing every emerging question. That there is no area of policy or social and personal life unaffected. That change gets faster every day. That every elected and appointed official, while they may not be technologists, must be a futurist. Must have the keenest interest in what lies ahead, in the pace of change, how things are trending, in the impacts good and bad of every shift in the power and price of the chip – and every creative thought that determines what those chips deliver. And the chips are driving it all. Synthetic biology applies engineering to genetics. Artificial intelligence and robotics are moving far beyond the production lines of Detroit. One thing we know as we look ahead: this will not be your grandmother’s future. I won’t say all bets are off, because some things are pretty clear. Two of them are the sheer extraordinary pace of change, and its pervasive, disruptive impacts.

Yet out political culture continues pretty much as it has. We fund S and T. The genome project was for a time center-stage. Now it is the $1.5 bn National Nanotechnology Initiative (on which C-PET has a half-day Roundtable discussion on 9/17; come join us). And of course the Space Program. And NIH. We all agree all these things are important, vital. Researchers, and tech business leaders, want more funding for research and development. They want a tax regime that would make the United States the most competitive, start-up friendly nation in the world. We may well think that is a no-brainer. (Why are no-brainers so hard in DC?)

But the issue goes deeper. The problem in Washington lies not just in the short-term nature of politics, but also in the privileging of issues of disagreement that often gives them more importance than they deserve, in our binary political environment; and disprivileging, as it were, of issues that don’t fit the conventional divides. Then add that few of our leaders are attuned to the future. We know there are exceptions. But we know the default. And while democracy strenuously needs principled disagreement, no nation will thrive in the 21^st century that cannot place the impact of technology – and its implications, good and bad – at the center of its view of things, and do so in manner that is both highly informed and multi-disciplinary.

Of course, no-one in Washington is actually against innovation. It sounds odd to be asking the question, when every year huge sums in federal dollars are doled out to the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health; when the Department of Defense is a vast consumer and patron of the highest tech around; when the current administration came in trailing a cloud of appointees and rhetoric from Silicon Valley and Seattle. And of course the United States dominates the global emerging technology landscape in ways that many do not quite grasp. Perhaps 75%. Yet this extraordinary dominance is not our birthright, and U.S. companies are busy globalizing – not least to hedge their bets.

One of the stars of the Intel/Aspen conference was John Kao, whose brilliantly perceptive book on innovation lays out an anatomy of the problem. He wants innovation-specific roles in DC, an innovation council, an “innovation czar” approach. That might be useful. I’m not convinced. It might also let everyone else off the hook, and in the process ensure the failure of the “innovation” appointees. And it assumes a model of government as problem-solver that many of us question, especially in the 21^st century and in the area most open-textured and dependent on initiative. Yes, by all means let’s have the most innovation-friendly tax (and immigration) regimes in the world. But that is government removing obstacles rather than trying itself to solve problems. The issue is pervasive and needs a pervasive solution. How about this? We all read the news stories about the vast questionnaire required of potential Obama appointees. What about adding a smart instrument to test engagement, aptitude, awareness of innovation and its future? – an innovation/futurist litmus-test for every political appointee? That’s the kind of thing a seriously integrated, pro-innovation government would take forward.

As a congressional newspaper put it recently, Digital Nation, Analog Hill. And the issue is not simply the Hill (which, for the record, has full-function email, although remains one of the few places on earth where faxes are still in routine use). It’s appointees to thousands of offices and hundreds of boards. It’s the think tanks. Washington has (literally) hundreds of them. There are half a dozen big ones with wide-ranging portfolios and the intellectual firepower of universities. Where is technology, innovation, on their agendas? The issue is one of pervasive corporate culture.

And what about the west coast, the Valley, the tech heavyweights? Well when they get into town, they tend to do what people in town do: focus on the next year, focus on language issues, lobby the FCC, work on tax breaks for R and D. Which at one level is fine. Yet their cynicism about policymakers and their focus on immediate issues go hand in hand. All very logical, especially when they have been assured by their policy people that there is no chance of influencing the culture, game-changing, paradigm-shifting. Washington’s time-horizon is if anything shorter than before. Get over it, and get in there and lobby. Big, big mistake. We gotta change the culture. How? I have ideas, we all have ideas. We have to work at it. Keep working at it. America needs our efforts, and if we keep at it, year in year out, on a corporate and social rather than a political timescale, we may succeed. If we don’t, one thing we can be sure of is that we won’t.

Fortune 100 corporations work with 5, 10-year plans and in the tech sector are constantly scoping beyond the next decade. And that’s what they need to do in DC, side by side with what they do now; lobby for the short term, work for change in the long. The corporate culture of our political establishment is sick, it is antithetical to the interests of the nation as well as its technology companies, and it is failing to face the radical implications that emerging developments will have for its own agenda. Employment. Healthcare. Security. Education. Technology policy has long since ceased to be chiefly about technology – but, as Michael Caine would say, not many people know that.

And the next big thing? We listened in Aspen while Otellini warned that unless Washington changes, it will not come from Silicon Valley. The world is flat, and getting flatter.

Much flatter than back in the 60s, when globalized threats were of another kind and Tom Lehrer sang his satire on the loyalties of the famous German rocket scientist whose skills had laid the foundation of the space program. But Lehrer’s caustic humor is as relevant now on a very different competitive stage. “And I’m learning Chinese, says Wernher von Braun.”

Lehrer lyrics at http://www.lyricsfreak.com/t/tom+lehrer/

Join us for C-PET’s Emerging Technologies Roundtable on Innovation in Washington over lunch on October 13 in our G Street offices. Register at c-pet.org.

Permission to reproduce/circulate if unedited and with attribution.

What Technology itself is up to

Posted on July 7, 2010 by Nigel Cameron

I’m interested in the way in which the mainstream media have begun to pick up on developments and ideas in the technosphere. Of course, they have a very long way to go. But they are on their way. Which is good for technology and, indeed, the rest of us. Is “technology” to be considered, as it were, one of us? Well, that’s the question raised obliquely by the title of Kevin Kelly’s much-awaited book “What Technology Wants,” previewed in this healthily quizzical NY Times blog by Robert Wright.

Wright’s blog is titled obliquely enough itself – “Building one big brain.” And as Wright notes, “Kelly does say in ‘What Technology Wants’ that technology is increasingly like ‘a very complex organism that often follows its own urges.'” Hmmm. After the selfish gene, the selfish chip?

What is Emerging from the WH?

Posted on June 16, 2010 by Nigel Cameron

News a couple weeks back that the Office of Science and Technology Policy had established an inter-agency working group on emerging technologies was tantalizing – and potentially important. Its announcement by means of the OSTP blog means that we know about it but not very much. It was described as “part of an effort to give special attention to technologies so new—such as nanotechnology and synthetic biology—that their policy implications are still being gauged.” A somewhat curious statement. It implies that the policy implications of older technologies are already gauged (oil exploration?! internet/IP/privacy . . .?) – and also that nano and synbio are “so new,” when they were in the news a decade ago. Indeed, Bill Clinton’s memorably Caltech speech that launched the National Nanotechnology Initiative was just over 10 years ago.

These may be quibbles, but they point to substantive issues of neglect that, perhaps, are being made good. We shall see. Inter-agency groups are both the most necessary and the most demanding of federal activities. The pervasive and cross-sectoral impacts of emerging technologies may prove the ultimate test of our capacity to develop policy responses through our silo-driven mechanisms. So the ETIPC (yep, it has an acronym, so it must be authentically federal!) is a promising initiative.

Its parties comprise OSTP with the office of the US Trade Representative and the Office of Management and Budget. We shall watch its efforts with interest.