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| | Home25 yrs lost truth storiesOxford Union Debate 27 Wonders of GandhiLearning's
Future Y24 |
| | 2007 is my tenth year as one
of the world's deeper researchers of trust-flow. What saddens me is that the system mapping debates on governing
trust-flow are getting less diverse. Unseen Wealth reporting peaked around 2000 in time to provide many clues
of compound risks that century 21 would sail disastrously into, but like many issues that need systemic not soundbiting attention,
they have no home for annual revisiting. I wish oxbridge union debates wherever world citizens A B C D E muster become truth's home. chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk - us tel 301 881 1655 | We will also demonstrate how gutsy Oxbridge Union debates got in century 20 and asked whether there is anywhere on
the internet or in societies where 21st C can host such renunions - as well as ask what sustainability debates you -and your
networks uniting beyond individual place boundaries - would love to see opposite sides transparently and fearlessly
questioning. What are the digital, cultural and truth divides world citizens collaboration nets must bridge before 2012 if TRUTH is to become grounded 1 2 - and neither globally inconvenient nor non-existent in the way that the world's largest organisational
systems measure numbers? |
Death of Distance Debating Year 24 Future HistoryNet Futures - The 2024 Report | Back in 1984 , Norman & Chris Macrae wrote "The 2024 Report: a future history of the next 40
years". It was the first book to:
- provide readers with a brainstorming journey of what
people in an internetworking world might do
- predict that a new economy would emerge with revolutionary new
productivity and social-entrepreneurial benefits enjoyed by all who interacted in a net-connected world
Our 1984 scenario of an internetworking world
The great technological
event of the next 40 years will be the steady rise in importance of the Telecommunications-Computer terminal (TC for short)...
Eventually books, files, television programmes, computer information and telecommunications will merge. We'll have this
portable object which is a television screen with first a typewriter, later a voice activator attached. Afterwards it will
be minaturised so that your personal access instrument can be carried in your buttonhole, but there will be these cheap terminals
around everywhere, more widely than telephones of 1984. The terminals will be used to access databases anywhere in the globe,
and will become the brainworker's mobile place of work. Brainworkers, which will increasingly mean all workers, will be
able to live in Tahiti if they want to and telecommute daily to the New York or Tokyo or Hamburg office through which they
work. In the satellite age costs of transmission will not depend mainly on distance. And knowledge once digitalised can be
replicated for use anywhere almost instantly.
Over the last decade, Norman has written many articles
in The Economist and delivered lectures in nearly 30 countries across the world saying the future should be much more rosy.
Chris has worked on pioneering projects for the UK's National Development in computer assisted learning and today
shuttles between Paris and worldwide multinational clients reporting what they didnt know local societies wanted most
from their next new products. This book explores the lovely future people could have if only all democrats made
the right decisions.
Norman and Chris Macrae, 1984. Changing communications, and what makes people distant, bossy etc
Telecommunications are
now recognised as the third of the three great transport revolutions that have, in swift succession, transformed society in
the past two hundred years. First, were the railways; second the automobile; and third, telecommunications-attached-to-the-computer,
which was bound to be the most far-reaching because in telecommunications, once the infrastructure is installed, the cost
of use does not depend greatly on distance. So by the early years of the twenty-first century brainworkers - which in rich
countries already meant most workers - no longer need to live near their work.
All three revolutions were opposed
by the ruling establishments of their time, and therefore emerged fastest where government was weak. All three brought great
new freedoms to the common man, but the railway and motor-car ages temporarily made access to capital the most important source
of economic power. As most men and women did not like being bossed about by capitalists who could become more powerful because
they were born stinking rich, they voted to give greater economic power to governments during the railway and motor-car ages.
This was economically inefficient, and also made tyrannies more likely and more terrible. The information revolution was fortunately
the exact opposite of the steam engine's industrial revolution and of Henry Ford's mass production automobile revolution
in this respect. The steam engine and mass production has made start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur larger and larger,
so that in both the steam and automobile ages to quote Bell Canada's Gordon Thompson in the early 1970s, there was 'no
way an ordinary citizen could walk into a modern complex factory and use its facilities to construct something useful for
himself'. But, as Thompson forecast, the databases of the next decades were places into which every part-time enthusiast
could tele-commute. In all jobs connected with the use of information, start-up costs for the individual entrepreneur in 1984-2024
have grown smaller and smaller. It was 'never thus', said Thompson, 'with power shovels and punch presses'.
In consequence, in the TC age, the most important economic resource is no longer ownership of or access to capital,
but has become the ability to use readily available knowledge intelligently and entrepreneurially.
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| Continuing year 24 of Death of
Distance Journey as scripted 1984 for open citizen debates around the cross-cultural world of peopes and communities
rising Changing national politics
For a region's people to succeed in the Telecommuting Age
there are four main requirements - satisfied in places as far apart ad Guam and Queensland and Cape Province and California
and Penang and Scotland. First , as the prophet John Naisbitt said in 1982, 'the languages needed for the immediate future
are computer and English'. Second, the area has to be a nice one in which to live. Third, it is important that all income
earners should adapt happily to a 'cafeteria of compensation' schemes. These allow the individual employee to decide
what mix (s)he wants of salary, job objectives, career aims, flexitime, job sharing, long or short holidays, fringe benefits
or fringe nuisances. Fourth, there needs to be a competitive and quickly changing telecommunications system. The TC age is
making understanding of these requirements increasingly transparent among human beings worldwide.
Governments
at first tried to impede or regulate much of this, but an early discovery of the Telecommutung age was that we could change
the way we chose our governments. Until the 1990s we had pretended to ourselves that we could alter our lifestyles by choosing
on each Tuesday or Thursday every four years whether Mr Reagan or Mr Carter , Mrs Thatcher or Mr Kinnock, was putting on the
tribal demonstration which at that particular moment annoyed us less. After the advent of the TC we found that the more sensible
and direct way in which a free man or woman could choose government was by voting with his or her feet. The individual could
go to live in any area where the government - which could from then on be a very local government - permitted the lifestyle,
rules and customs which suited that human being.
Changing Economics
The introduction of the international Centrobank was the last great
act of government before government grew much less important. It was not a conception of policy-making governments at all,
but emerged from the first computerised town meeting of the world.
By 2005 the gap in income and expectations
between the rich and poor nations was recognised to be man's most dangerous problem. Internet linked television channels
in sixty-eight countries invited their viewers to participate in a computerised conference about it, in the form of a series
of weekly programmes. Recommendations tapped in by viewers were tried out on a computer model of the world economy. If recommendations
were shown by the model to be likely to make the world economic situation worse, they were to be discarded. If recommendations
were reported by the model to make the economic situation in poor countries better, they were retained for 'ongoing computer
analysis' in the next programme.
In 2024 it is easy to see this as a forerunner of the TC conferences which
play so large a part in our lives today, both as pastime and principal innovative device in business. But the truth of this
2005 breakthrough tends to irk the highbrow. It succeeded because it was initially a rather downmarket network television
programme. About 400 million people watched the first programme, and 3 million individuals or groups tapped in suggestions.
Around 99 per cent of these were rejected by the computer as likely to increase the unhappiness of mankind. It became known
that the rejects included suggestions submitted by the World Council of Churches and by many other pressure groups. This still
left 31,000 suggestions that were accepted by the computer as worthy of ongoing analysis. As these were honed, and details
were added to the most interesting, an exciting consensus began to emerge. Later programmes were watched by nearly a billion
people as it became recognised that something important was being born.
These audiences were swollen by successful
telegimmicks. The presenter of the first part of the first programme was a roly-poly professor who was that year's Nobel
laureate in economics, and who proved a natural television personality. He explained that economists now agreed that aid programmes
could sometimes help poor countries, but sometimes most definitely made their circumstances worse. When Mexico was inflating
at over 80 per cent a year in the early 1980s , the inflow to it of huge loanable funds made its inflation even faster and
its crash more certain. The professor set Mexico's 1979-1981 economy on the model, pumped in the loaned funds and showed
how all the indicators ( higher inflation, lower real gross domestic product and so on) then flashed red, signaling an economy
getting worse, rather than green, signaling an economy getting better. ..The professor then put the model back to mirror the
contemporary world of 2005, and played into it various nostrums that had been recommended by politicians of left, right and
centre, but mostly left. The dials generally flashed red. Then the professor provided another set of recommendations , and
asked viewers who wished to play to tap in their own guesses on the consequent movement of key economics variables in the
model. Those who got their guesses right to within a set error were told they had qualified for a second round of a knock-out
economic guesstimators' world championship. Knockout competitions of this sort continued for viewers throughout the series
of programmes.
In the second part of that first programme, the presenters dared to introduce two political decisions
into the game. They said that government-to-government aid programmes had been particularly popular among politicians during
the age of over-government, but there was growing agreement that government-to-government aid was the worst method of hand-out.
The excessive role played by governments in poor countries was one of the barriers to their economic advance, and a main destroyer
of their people's freedom. Could anyone have thought it would be wise to give aid to President Mbogo?
In consequence,
the most successful economic aid programmes had been those operated through the International Monetary Fund, which imposed
conditions on how borrowing governments should operate. The professor showed that IMF-monitored operations in most years had
brought more green flashes from the model than red. But this involved IMF officials - often from the rich countries - in telling
governments of poor countries what to do; and one of the objectives of this town meeting of the world was to diminish such
embarrassments.
The first questions to be asked in the next few programmes, said the compilers, were 1) which
countries should qualify for aid? ; and having decided that, 2) up to what limits and conditions? ; and 3) through what mechanisms?
They promised that later programmes after the first half-dozen would examine how any scheme could be used to diminish the
power of governments and increase the power of free markets and free people.
Changing employment
In a typical 21st C scene, obedience to consumer needs is shown by
every car plant in the world because of better and more customised information available on all our TCs. Most people buying
a car in 2024 will key into their special requirements into their TCs.
The TC will reply: "You can get a
customised car which meets all of your specifications by putting personalised instructions on the software of the assembly
line's robots in one of these factories (choice of nine) requesting that the next car on the line be modified as you dictate.
But that would cost up to $40,000 (Click to factories for quotations and credit facilities). For a fifth of that price, you
can meet most of your requirements by the following standard computer programme at present scheduled for production in June
at Nissan Kanpur; or July at Ford Manila (and so on). Click to factories for precise specifications and prices.
All
of this has become commonplace after 2000. How has it affected employment?
For a new industry of
2019-2024 let us cite the intendedly short-lived example of the Clark-Schmidt Robot Gardener. Matthew Clark was a 53-year
old on his third university course (he had started the other two at the ages of nineteen and thirty-seven respectively) telecommuted
through the University of Southern California, although he took it while living in his native Australia , when, together with
two other student's telecommuting through USC's database, he devised a system for a robot-driven lawnmower which could
also scan soil and assess the possibilities for reseeding. It signaled the videos to be called up on your TC to show alternative
uses for the soil in your garden. If you picked one video display that particularly suited your taste, you keyed in its number
into the Robot Gardener and it signaled back, 'put such-and-such chemical into my tank and seeds 1234, 3456 (et cetera),
plus software program 29387 - both orderable through your TC - into my reseeder.'
Clark and his two colleagues
put their tentative ideas for this device on the researchers' database monitored by the University of Southern California.
The entry numbers to the USC database were held by people who had promised to accept the computer's judgement of the value
of any ideas they might contribute to projects entered on it. In all, 1213 people - domiciled from Hanoi through Penang and
Capri and Bermuda back to Queensland in Australia itself - tapped in suggestions for improvements, of which 176 were accepted
nby the computer as worthwhile. The payments recommended by the computer ranged from $42 ( for a cosmetic improvement recommended
by an eleven-year-old schoolboy) to one tenth of the equity (eventually worth several million dollars) for a proposal by a
research team from another telecommuting university which proved important enough for Clark to feel slightly guilty about
calling the Robot Gardener after himself.
When the improvements suggested by these 176 contributors had been incorporated
by Clark into the appropriate software program for making the Robot Gardener , it was advertised on USC's entrepreneur-browsing
program available on any TC. Entry numbers for the lowest echelons of this can be bought for a very few dollars, but the Robot
Gardener was put on a higher echelon because USC's computer had signaled this was a potential quick winner.
One
of those who had paid for an expensive entry number into browsing among good 'proffered opportunity products' (POPs)
was a Dutchman called Carl Schmidt. He had become a successful 'arranging producer' in an earlier venture, and now
occupied himself browsing through his TC looking for a second bonanza. He made an offer to Clark to tale an option for launch
in return for a fairly complicates programme of profit sharing, which in practice (because arranging is nowadays a more skilled
job than inventing) eventually gave Schmidt more money than Clark. Clark accepted this and Schmidt produced a prototype within
three days by reprogramming robots in an experimental plant. A video of the prototype was put on consumers' TC channels
worldwide the next week, and most of the 400 odd gardeners' TC channels round the world picked it out within days as a
'best buy'.
Schmidt's video advertisement said 'If you key in your order now with your credit
number, you can get a Robot Gardener for a bargain price (applies to the first 10,000 orders only). Tenders are also invited
for part of the equity.' The advance orders and bids for equity made it possible to finance assembly of the Robot Gardener
for early-bid customers within a few weeks...
Note that there was never any intention that Robot Gardeners Inc
should grow into a huge and long-lasting company. Clark and Schmidt are already researching and browsing into other possibilities,
on separate courses. About fifty of those who succeeded by early participation in this venture hope to become the equivalent
of Clark and Schmidt in other things.
At no stage has this enormously successful manufacturing venture employed
more than 1000 people. It is therefore true that the loss of nine-tenths of manufacturing jobs , which we saw has been highest
in car-making in rich countries, has also been true there in manufacturing jobs as a whole. Where these countries had 20-40
per cent of their workforces in manufacturing in 1974, they typically have 2-4 per cent now.
This is not an unprecedented
rundown. In the 1890s around half of the workforce in countries like the United States were in three occupations: agriculture,
domestic service and jobs to do with horse transport. By the 1970s these three were down to 4 per cent of the workforce. If
this had been foretold in the 1890s, there would have been a wail. It would have been said that half the population was fit
only to be farmworkers, parlourmaids and sweepers-up of horse manure. Where would this half find jobs? The answer was by the
1970s the majority of them were much more fully employed ( because more married women joined the workforce) doing jobs that
would have sounded double-Dutch in the 1890s: extracting oil instead of fish out of the North Sea; working as computer programmers,
or as television engineers, or as package-holiday tour operators chartering jet aircraft.
The move in jobs in
the past fifty years in the rich countries has been out of manufacturing and into telecommuting.
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Growth depends on never letting politicians spend more than one quarter of GDPOxford Union Debate of 30
May 1996
For the motion : Norman Macrae (CBE and Japanese Order of the Rising
Sun), economist, market futurologist, writer of over 2000 editorials, mainly retired after 5 decades of journalism at The
Economist and The Sunday Times Against the motion: Rt Honourable Michael Foot, UK Member of Parliament for Plymouth
(1945-1955), Ebbw Vale (1960-1983), Leader of the Labour Party (1980-1983) and succeeded by Rt Hon Neil Kinnock (1983-1992)
Original text for debate forwarded by Norman Macrae "Mr
President, Sir, On the night I was conceived in 1922, by a then junior British diplomat in New York, the lucky Americans
similarly enjoying themselves around him had only 8% of their GPs spent by politicians. So Americans in that decade brought
the world's cleanest environment revolution, as they triumphed over that pollutant vehicle the horse, put mankind on motor
cars' wheels, and built sudden industrial strength which alone meant that Hitler, who by my 18th Christmas in 1941 held
Europe from Atlantic to 20 miles from Moscow, was not quite strong enough to shove into gas ovens tiresomely argumentative
people like me - and it would later, sir, have been you and all those so happily arguing still in this House. After
the war, we dinosaurs doddered. As I think the second oldest speaker tonight, I am properly desolate, sir, that we hand on
to you of my granddaughters' generation an advanced world, at present divided into what comprehensive schoolteachers would
call three halves. In the 15 countries of our west European home, politicians spend between 42% and 63% of our GDPs,
in deadening ways so job-losing and so sclerotic that - has old Oxford not noticed this, or does its brain hurt? - unemployment,
especially for those whose European youth has been less gilded than yours, rises at each comparable stage of each successive
trade cycle, and must thus continue until you see why. Politicians' spend of GDP dwindles to "only"
35% in Europe's next two clear competitor countries. In America and in Japan which I briefly economically advised 35 years
ago when its real GDP at yen exchange rate was one eighth of what it is now. The surge after 1950 by Hiroshimaed Japan in
(eg) life expectancy (49 years for a Japanese in 1950, way over our 79 for its old ladies now) - plus its leapfrog beyond
us in living standards, in education for its humblest inter-city children circa six times better than ours, in lower crime
- was to us who tended it then by far the most exciting sudden forward leap in all the economic history of the world. Do note
that it started, and had its main impetus, when its politicians spent only 24% of its GDP. In both Japan and America state
spending has been subjected to an upward creep - a good soubriquet, that, for Clinton and Blair and Hashimoto - but since
politicians' GDP pinch is still curbed to only 35%, both still exceed Europe in faster innovation and thus fuller employment.
The 1950s-1960s role of Japan is now carried forward by the third group of competitors poised to pinch
our patrimony. The Hong Kongs and Singapores, which were coolie countries when I first saw them, have duly passed Britain
in living standards, in inner city non-yobdom, in far better education than ours for the mass of their 17 year olds - even
though, no sir, because their politicians spend, by IMF valuation, only 18% of their GDPs. Has the penny really not
dropped among Oxford's dreaming spires? When technology surges forward as in this computer age, the new wealth of nations
springs from three main manifestations of human wit. One, a relentless daily search among a million competing profit centres
on how best next to improve use of that technology next morning. Second, maximum competition in forecasting and guessing and
experimenting with what the future may bring. Never allow politicians' monopoly in that. Third, I am sorry if this offends,
avoid yesterday-cuddling trade unionisation of who does which, when, at what fixed price, and traditionally how. In our lifetime,
it has been proven (a) that free markets bring forth those three qualities circa six times more efficaciously than when politicians
say "let's appoint a monopoly organisation to produce some bright wheeze like a channel tunnel", ooh; and proven
(b) that international institutions and politicians (of all parties) fib incredibly about the statistical results of this.
When Brussels said that communist East Germany had surpassed Harold Wilson's Britain in prosperity,
and Ted Heath and a credulous BBC trilled agreement, I went to East Germany. Anybody who noticed a Trabant was not worth a
Mercedes, could see East Germany outproduced even Wilson's Britain only in pollution and steroid-drugged lady shot-putters.
In its most showpiece factories I assessed productivity at some one-sixth of Wilson's Britain's factories per man
and per almost every other unit of input. When the Berlin Wall came down, my assessment proved to have been a little too kind
to socialism as usual. If you compared the state factories of North Korea with the private factories of South Korea, you'd
get the more dramatic figures typical of Asia. In the early 1990s the nationalised telephone utility of India had 40 times
more employees than the privatised telephone utility of Thailand, although little Thailand was then just passing mighty India
in the number of telephones actually working. In Europe, we have the usual figures which might seem rude
to the right honourable ex-member of Ebbw Vale. In the dozen years since British steel was privatised, its productivity per
man has risen six times. If he says this is because of wicked sackings and shuttings, remember that Oxford's Attlee in
1947 told Britain's then 367,000 coalminers that coming public ownership would ensure nobody producing such valuable stuff
as coal would lose his job this century. It is only the long overdue privatisation that can save even 12,000 of those jobs
now, but don't let me claw at scabs of old wounds. The question for your generation, sir, is whether
you are going to drive ever more underclass Britons into unemployment by allowing five vital industries (accounting for three
quarters of public expenditure) to be run by politicians at circa one sixth the efficiency that freer markets would bring.
These are (1) social security insurance; (2) education; (3) health insurance; (4) a regulatory bureaucracy now five times
larger than in Kaiser Wilhelm's Prussia; (5) crime non-prevention. In education you will have to move
to competitive vouchers, with payments highest for those who set up competitive schools in the worst inner cities, where state
teaching of both facts and behaviour has incredibly declined in the past 50 years, while private industry has spread once
unimaginable durables like colour tvs from 0 to 98% of households. One part of education (assessing by computer a particular
child's learning pattern, seizing from that the next questions or facts to impart) will become telecommunicable from far
countries. Bovine politicians don't see the same is true of social security insurance (if clients choose to stick to behaviourial
norms like staying in married families, you can insure them and theirs far more cheaply against most social ills), and in
health insurance (where doctors from Singapore will diagnose the right medical and diet regimes for the tummy from Wigan just
X-rayed down their screens). The world's greatest experts on these three and other telecommutable subjects will congregate
in the lands with lowest taxation, and all of you voting against tonight's motion will just be brutalising, ruining and
killing poorer people if you say that's jolly unfair to British politicians' monopoly welfare state. Crime
rates will depend on whether you elect over-arrogant politicians. In the first decade of my life America produced gangsterdom
as well as boom, because its politicians (in a folly my dad said would never be repeated) decreed alcohol could only be sold
by Capone's vicious criminals. In this last decade of my life two-thirds of British crime is drug-related, because politicians
decree sales of other drugs must be profitably reserved only for criminals. Under any sensible tax plus licensing regime such
as we now have for alcohol, you don't get 15-year olds hooked on a wild and muggery-necessitating £200 a day alcohol
mania, because a pub, fearing a loss of licence, would refer any such client for special treatment. In crime prevention we
will also have to move to the methods of Japan, which has one seventh as many lawyers as we, a court system based on "did
he do it, and how most cheaply to stop him doing it again?" which does not include stuffing hordes into expensive British
prisons which statistically make inmates more likely to reoffend. Can you see any other trade apart from
heavily trade unionised British prison screws who have actual negative gross production? Yes, a few feet away. A chart from
that Swedish Royal Commission chaired by the profs who award the Nobel prize in economics showed that the most effective number
of members of parliament for a country of Britain's size would be 90-something. We have 651, and for the imminent general
election they have pushed it up to 659 jobs for the boys. I'd like to end on a more kindly note. If
I'd been told in youth that politicians would spend 42% of Britain's GDP, which is more than Hitler spent of Germany's
GDP in 1937, I'd have assumed we would by now be living under a monstrous tyranny. After 50 years of reporting on parliament,
let me end with my favourite story which shows it just as an elephant's joke. The story is denied by the two self-credulous
politicians concerned, but confirmed by the Americans who observed it. One day in the mid-80s, a party of American tourists
was as usual being shown reverently around the palace of Westminster. The Lord Chancellor of England appeared in full gig
on a staircase above them, and he needed to talk, on some matter of altering a timetable, to the Right Hon gent's successor
as Labour leader who was disappearing down a corridor the other way. so Lord Chancellor Hailsham, in full-bottomed wig and
black and gold robe, called to the other by his Christian name. Over the heads of the American tourists, he bellowed "Neil".
Instantly, and without hesitation, all the American tourists in the middle fell fully to their knees.
A similar obsequiousness is not required to all the forecasts I have shouted at you this evening. A small genuflection will
suffice to the simple rule by which your generation could octuple Britain's real national income during the 40 years of
marvellously increasing computer technology which will be your working lives. That rule, sir, is never, never, allow politicians
to pinch and spend more than a quarter of GDP. Everything will be so easy for the poorest of your contemporaries if only you
understand that." Questions to Norman Macrae can be e-mailed via wcbn007@easynet.co.uk We
can't promise to reply to all mails but will endeavour to try to briefly answer exciting questions |  Mobile Empowerment
Principles of Iqbal Quadir -founder Grameen Telephone *what helped Europe develop over the last 1000 years was: devolution of authorities as empowerment of citizens
happened
*during the last 60 years poor countries have been subject to an opposite aid SYSTEM that empowered authorities
and took active entrepreneurship away from citizens
*economic development is of the people by the people for people- and this is the most important
networking effect we can ever systemise and open society to video click-pic  
more videos on what develops the true entrepreneurail productivities of networked age at http://economistclub.tv 
 Can we map how to value empowerment projects around
these sustainability benchmarks?
more on
empowerment economic development at http://empowers.tv more on solar achitecture at http://kibera.tv | Changing education -practitioner
download library; debating group area
There has been a sea-change in the traditional ages on man.
Compared with 1974 our children in 2024 generally go out to paid work (especially computer programming work) much earlier,
maybe starting at nine, maybe at twelve, and we do not exploit them. But young adults of twenty-three to forty-five stay at
home to play much more than in 1974; it is quite usual today for one parent (probably now generally the father, although sometimes
the mother) to stay at home during the period when young children are growing up. And today adults of forty-three to ninety-three
go back to school - via computerised learning - much more than they did in 1974.
In most of the rich countries
in 2024 children are not allowed to leave school until they pass their Preliminary Exam. About 5 per cent of American children
passed their exam last year before their eight birthday, but the median age for passing it in 2024 is ten-and-a-half, and
remedial education is generally needed if a child has not passed it by the age of fifteen.
A child who passes
his Prelim can decide whether to tale a job at once, and take up the remainder of his twelve years of free schooling later;
or he can pass on to secondary schooling forthwith, and start to study for his Higher Diploma.
The mode of learning
for the under-twelves is nowadays generally computer-generated. The child sits at home or with a group of friends or (more
rarely) in an actual, traditional school building. She or he will be in touch with a computer program that has discovered
, during a preliminary assessment, her or his individual learning pattern. The computer will decide what next questions to
ask or task to set after each response from each child.
A school teacher assessor, who may live half a world away,
will generally have been hired, via the voucher system by the family for each individual child. A good assessor will probably
have vouchers to monitor the progress of twenty-five individual children, although some parents prefer to employ groups of
assessors - one following the child's progress in emotional balance, one in mathematics, one in civilized living, and
so on - and these groups band together in telecommuting schools.
Many communities and districts also have on-the-spot
'uncles' and 'aunts'. They monitor childrens' educational performance by browsing through the TC and also
run play groups where they meet and get to know the children personally...
Some of the parents who have temporarily
opted out of employment to be a family educator also put up material on the TC s for other parents to consult. Sometimes the
advice is given for free, sometimes as a business. It is a business for Joshua Ginsberg. He puts a parents advice newsletter
on the TC , usually monthly. Over 300,000 people subscribe to it, nowadays at a 25-cent fee per person, or less if you accept
attached advertisements. Here's an entry from the current newsletter:
"Now that TCs are universal and
can access libraries of books, 3-d video, computer programs, you name it, it is clear that the tasks of both the Educator
and the Communicator are far more stimulating that ten years ago.
One of my recent lessons with my ten-year-old
daughter Julie was in art appreciation. In the standard art appreciation course the TC shows replicas of famous artists'
pictures, and a computer asks the pupil to match the artist to the picture. Julie said to the computer that it would be fun
to see Constable's Haywain as Picasso might have drawn it. The computer obliged with its interpretation , and then ten
more stylised haywains appeared together with the question 'who might have drawn these?'. I believe we are the first
to have prompted the TC along this road, but it may now become a standard question when the computer recognises a child with
similar learning patterns to Julie's.
It is sometimes said that today's isolated sort of teaching has
robbed children of the capacity to play and interact with other children. This is nonsense. We ensure that Julie and her four
year old brother Pharon have lots of time to play with children in our neighbourhood . But in work we do prefer to interact
with children who are of mutual advantage to Julie and to each other. The computer is an ace teacher, but so are people. You
really learn things if you can teach them to someone else. Our computer has helped us to find a group of four including Julie
with common interests, who each have expertise in some particular areas to teach the others.
The TC also makes
it easier to play games within the family. My parents used to play draughts, halma, then chess with me. They used to try to
be nice to me and let me win. This condescending kindness humiliated me, and I always worked frenetically to beat my younger
brother (who therefore always lost and dissolved into tears.) Today Julie, Pharon and I play halma together against the graded
computer, and Julie and I play it at chess. The computer knows Pharon's standard of play at halma and Julie's and
mine at chess. Its default setting is at that level where each of us can win but only if we play at our best. Thus Pharon
sometimes wins his halma game while Julie and I are simultaneously losing our chess game, and this rightly gives Pharon a
feeling of achievement. When Julie and I have lost at chess, we usually ask the computer to re-rerun the game, stopping at
out nmistakes and giving a commentary. As it is a friendly computer it does a marvelous job of consoling us. Last week it
told Julie that the world champion actually once made the same mistake as she had done - would she like to see that game?
I intend to devote the next two letters to the subjects I have discussed here , but retailing the best of your suggestions
instead of droning on with mine."
While the computer's role in children's education is mainly that
of instructor (discovering a child's learning pattern and responding to it) and learning group matcher, its main role
in higher education is as a store of knowledge. Although a computer can only know what Man has taught it, it has this huge
advantage. No individual man lives or studies long enough to imbibe within himself all the skills and resources that are the
product of the millennia of man's quest for knowledge, all the riches and details from man's inheritance of learning
passed on from generation to generation. But any computer today can inherit and call up instantly any skill which exists anywhere
in the form of a program.
This is why automatically updated databases are today the principal instruments of higher
education and academic research. It is difficult for our generation to conceive that only forty years ago our scientists acted
as tortoise-like discoverers of knowledge, confined to small and jealous cliques with random and restricted methods of communicating
ideas. Down until the 1980s the world has several hundred sepaate cancer research organisations with no central co-ordinating
database.
| 
From chapter 16 of Death of Distance Future History book published 1984 in 5 languages co-authored
by Norman Macrae & Chris Macrae: End of chapter 16:
Sunlight is the fuel which sustains life on earth.
The process by which plants extract energy from sunlight, using that energy to build up complex compounds from simper ones
and thereby storing the energy which animals, including humans, use to grow and move and see and think is the life-process
itself. We (human beings) have always exploited that life-process, but in the past we have only been able to do so by using
living plants as our agents. We learned to cultivate them, develop them by selective breeding, and since the 1980s to meddle
with their genes, but we have not yet learned to substitute something of our own making for the living plant. We have not
found or made a more efficient substitute for chlorophyll itself outside the naturally-occurring factory which is the living
cell.
Until we design our own systems which can deploy the energy of sunlight as efficiently as humble algae does,
we humans have no real biotechnology of our own. We have many kinds of solar cells which can extract energy from the sunlight
and store is as electricity or heat, but such devices are very crude indeed beside the technical sophistication and versatility
of living plants.
We are making a determined effort to capture and use a greater fraction of the solar energy which
falls upon the face of the earth every day. We are trying to make plants flourish in paces where at present they can only
eke out the most precarious of existence. The ideal situation, however, would be one in which we did not need to work so hard
to adapt existing plants to more hostile conditions. If we had our own artificial systems of photosynthesis we might exploit
the desert sun ourselves, without using other organisms as intermediaries. Our ultimate ambition must be to make artificial
photosynthetic systems more efficient than those which have evolved alongside side us throughout the history of life on earth.
Then and only then will we be able to claim that we are technologically self-sufficient. In 2024, this looks as if it might
be one of our children's tasks. letters from editor to facebook friends: fall 007 Dear
Clare/Rick ... friends of sustainability entrepreneurial revolution as sofia may have explained when you met in london last fortnight Rick is a photosynthesis architect and agriculture entrepreneur
with 40 years experience in innovating this field - his system revolution if nations changed the roofs of
buildings we would all have abundant clean energy Sufficiency in
every community; something global down petrochem serially starts wars to stop in the 24 years we have been tracking
photosynthesis innovation practices http://macrae.tv/_wsn/page3.html algae oil, which Rick's bubble roofs photosynthesise, has no carbon in it so however much is
consumed creates no smog , changes no climate, busts no virgins or olympics china so to speak, turns stern warnings of costs
into the greatest investments truly made both for profit and health as human progress entrepreneurs relentlessly
do it is interesting that Irish investors are accelerating rick's work to greater scale than just about
anyone in spite of the shell foundation's and others' 2 years of planning to land the greenest 100
person theatre on the London south bank alongside Queen Elizabeth (concert hall) Clare & Rick: I hope you will meet earlier rather than later in the
journeys we collaborataion entrepreneurs weave; perhaps even host Dublin's first collaboration cafe on this theme some time in 2008; equally we entrepreneurial revolutionaries would all love to see a reprint done of world citizen crisis learning guide which I sent you; take out stuff
that's not relevant; put in some trailers to the exceptional-lives heroes your book or other educational modules
will be debating over coming years; then collaboration cafes and microsummits can hand out the Dublin version of empowering
entrepreneurs from every community up |  | We're All Intrapreneurial Now - 17th April 1982 | In a survey called "The coming entrepreneurial revolution" in The Economist
of December 25, 1976, Norman Macrae argued that "methods of operation in business are going to change radically in the
next few decades, in a direction opposite to that which most businessmen and nearly all politicians expect". The survey
aroused enthusiasm and infuriation in almost equal measure, with invitations to lecture in more than 20 countries. Today Macrae
updates his views on management methods that can make even lousy businesses profitable, and those that are driving tighter
organizations to the wall. Big goes bust The 1976 survey argued that the world was probably
drawing to the end of the era of big business corporations, because it would soon be seen to be nonsense to have hierarchical
managements sitting in skyscraping offices trying to arrange how brainworkers (who in future would be most workers) could
best use their imaginations. The main increases in employment would henceforth come either in small firms or in those bigger
firms that managed to split themselves into smaller and smaller profit centres which would need to become more and more entrepreneurial.
As so often with supposedly controversial journalism, this proved to be an exercise in tentatively forecasting something
that had already begun to happen a decade before, although it honestly was the opposite of what was being most widely reported
at the time. In 1976 the textbooks being most assiduously fed to business courses were still Ken Galbraith's. "The
new industrial state" and Jean-Jacques Servan-Schreiber's "Le defin americain", each of which was a bible
to the advocates of industrial policies then subsidising British Steels, British Leylands and Projects Concorde into growing
inefficiently larger and therefore irretrievably bust. These mergers were procreated on the thesis, explicitly stated by Ken
Galbraith, that markets had been replaced by planning in favor of big technostructures so that large organisations like Chrysler
or United States Steel did not lose money any more. "By all but the pathologically romantic", cried Ken Galbraith
in 1967, "it is now recognised that this is not the age of the small man". He believed that the most economic size
for business corporations in the future could be "'very, very large".
Shortly before these two books
were -written and, instantly reached the best-selling lists, precisely the opposite trends had remorselessly begun to occur.
By 1965 small workplaces were already out-performing big ones on almost every count. Even in idealistic occupations,
British hospitals with under 100 beds had between one half and two thirds the sickness rates among nurses as hospitals with
more than 100 beds. I got my saddest quote of the late 1970s from the manager of a huge factory in Manchuria (though he could
find echoes at Detroit, London Airport, Kama River): "During the period of disruption by the gang of four many workers
came only on pay-days, some carrying placards saying I was a fly on top of putrescent meat. With 10,000 comrades here, it
was impossible to check the absenteeism, pilfering and work-dodging that went on".
The biggest world political
event since the 1960s is that communist countries have proved less able than free-market ones to escape from inefficient giantism
in state factories and farms, so they are all going bust. In free-market countries managers are eventually more willing to
lose face than their shareholders are to lose money, but tough problems are arising as even capitalist giants slim.
Since
the mid-1960s the thousand biggest firms in the United States have as a group been sensibly reducing their labour forces,
and more than the whole of the 15m private-sector jobs created since then have come in smaller firms-the majority of the new
extra jobs at any one time being in firms less than five years old, even though more than half of new small American firms
disappear out of business in their first five years. Although survey dates are jumbled, the accompanying inadequate charts
suggest the same trend is accelerating even in manufacturing across the capitalist world. The present capitalist conjuncture
is therefore one where the bigger and more stable firms are running down their employment, while more than the whole of net
new employment is provided by small firms which, however, frequently go bust. Ow! And some thought needs to be given to ways
of combining the advantages of small firms within big ones.
Make departments minifirms
In
my 1976 survey I suggested there would be two trends-in the most conventional of which, greater reliance on subcontracting,
I now think I was jejune. Subcontracting works only when the big firm has very tight quality control (as have Marks and Spencer,
big Japanese companies towards tiny component makers and the superbly entrepreneurial Italian textile industry, see later).
Subcontracting does not work when the big firm cannot measure what quality is, so that many management consultants, public
relations firms etc. are about to disappear because they are high-cost ramps.
The second system I suggested in
1976 was that dynamic corporations of the future should simultaneously be trying several alternative ways of doing things
in competition within themselves, becoming what have later been called confederations of "intrapreneurs". Two key
concepts for efficient businesses here. First, the right size for each profit centre or intrapreneurial group-by which I mean
a group of friends working together in daily productivity hunt towards the same objective-is very small, probably not more
than 10 or 11 people, however dynamic your top management. Jesus Christ tried 12, and that proved one too many. Second, firms
should not pay people for attendance at the workplace but should pay competing groups for modules of work done.
Thus,
if you need a typing pool, I have suggested it might be best to set up several competing groups of Typists Intrapreneurial.
You would offer an index linked contract to the group for a set period, specifying the services you wanted in return for a
lump-sum monthly payment. The typists would apportion the work among themselves, devise their own flexitime, choose their
own lifestyles, decide whether to replace a leaver by a full-timer or part-timer or whether to do her work and keep more money
per head. They could also decide whether to tender for extra paid work from outside. In offices with tomorrow's equipment,
there could, see later, be a lot.
A trivial example? By comparison with the gains that can be made in other fields
it is. Yet the EEC court of auditors has recently ruled that the proper output for a typist is around 24 pages a day, and
was upset that in some EEC departments the average, was only 12. In The Economist on a print-day Wednesday, when we are feeling
rather participatory, a top secretary will type around 60 pages. If some EEC departments went over to that pace through being
Typists Intrapreneurial, the stenographers could choose to work only one day a week for the same weekly wage as now, or by
slowing recruitment they could work for up to five times their existing wages for the same present attendance at the office,
or they could become five times more efficient. In practice, competition would ensure a mixture of the three, and the scope
in most other parts of the business and bureaucratic jungle is much vaster.
This survey will explore that wider
jungle, starting from the intrapreneurial mechanisms needed to breed new projects and going on through to those needed eventually
to kill outdated ones (and make it participatory fun to send them to South Korea).
About 85% of all the industrial
R & D expenditure in the United States takes place in 300 large corporations. It is done very wastefully.
Towards
inventors intrapreneurial
About 70,000 patents are issued in the United States each year. Of these, maybe
60,000 are never heard of again, because most are horse manure. There will be some hidden pearls among it, and more could
be found if patent offices were more intrapreneurial instead of often being inefficient government filing offices, some not
even properly computerised. Governments should establish competing intrapreneurial teams in patent offices, compiling competing
databases.
Of the perhaps 10,000 new patents a year round the world that are used, only about 10-20 a year are
for what the co-inventor of the ubiquitous integrated circuit, Mr. Jack Kilby, calls "major" inventions things that
change our lives. A list of the world's major inventions over the past 50 years shows that big organisations claim to
have discovered only around a third of them, and some of their claims are fibs. More than two thirds have been discovered
by individuals or small businesses.
The individual inventors' list of the past 50 years turns alphabetically
from air conditioning, automatic transmissions and ballpoint pens, through jet engines and penicillin, to xerography and the
zipper. The big companies' list runs more predictably through crease-resistant fabrics, float glass, synthetic detergents.
Note how these fit with corporate objectives; "We are a big textile or soap company, so go for something capital-intensive".
"We are Pilkington's Glass, and if we can beat plate glass by developing float glass, then every motor car in the
world will eventually pay us a royalty, so it is worth carrying on with research into solving the last three problems in the
way of float glass even through 12 consecutive years of negative cash flow."
Nobody should underestimate
the tangible and intrapreneurial excitement among a tiny group of researchers when such a big firm's opportunity presents
itself. Sir Alastair Pilkington has described how his research group into float glass was kept small enough to maintain total
secrecy, so that experiments had been in progress for seven years before competitors knew of them; how several of his team
members, after working impossibly long hours, were carried away on stretchers suffering from heat exhaustion; how 100,000
tons of float glass were made and broken before the great day which produced the first bit they could sell. But, to quote
Jack Kilby again, each invention presents a profile of opportunities and requirements, while each company has its own profile
of what constitutes to it an acceptable product. The probability that these two profile, will coincide in any given case is
not very high.
The result is that many big companies' brilliant researchers are, in conditions of great secrecy,
in their seventh consecutive year of smashing unusable float glass.
The Pinchot proposals
The
most promising set of incentives for R and D departments to stray down interesting byways has been suggested by Mr. Gifford
Pinchot III of Mr. Bob Schwartz's Tarrytown School for Entrepreneurs near New York, and they are being tried out by some
clients of the new School for Intrapreneurs run by the Foresight Group management consultancy in Sweden. I should have introduced
Mr. Pinchot before, because he is the inventor of the word "intrapreneurs", in a paper which paid kindly tribute
to my 1976 survey. His description of what is happening in semi-reforming big corporations:
Decentralisation alone
is not enough. In a hierarchical organisation, promotions can be won by special graces, loyalty to one's boss and general
political skills. Courage, original thought, and ability to observe the obvious do not necessarily lead to success. If we
are to get really good problem-solving in our decentralised corporations, we must introduce a system that gives the decision
to those who get successful results, not to the inoffensive. Such people will be willing to take moderate risks and will be
more concerned with achieving results than gaining influence. These are among the characteristics of the successful entrepreneur.
What is needed in the large corporation is not more semi-independent departments run by hard-driving yes men, but something
akin to free-market entrepreneurship within the corporate organisation.
His recommendations about intra-capital,
see the next two paragraphs, could prove one of the great social inventions.
Under Mr. Pinchot's proposals
for R and D departments a researcher wishing to plunge intrapreneurially into some project would initially have to risk something
of value to himself; such as 10% of the costs of a project, up to 20% of his salary for the duration of a project and two
years thereafter. A committee within the company would then contract to "buy" completed research in an intrapreneurial
scheme for both cash bonuses and intra-capital. If a company makes $1m on a project, the intrapreneur's share might be
$100,000, of which only $10,000 might come in cash and $90,000 might come in intra-capital which the intrapreneur can invest
on the corporation's behalf in future R and D projects of his own choice. If he is successful again, his reward will be
another cash bonus (probably larger the second time) plus more intra-capital.
This system, says Mr. Pinchot, motivates
creative staff to think practically and frees their individual initiative. It minimises politics and maximises performance
as a criterion for advancement. It rapidly puts a portion of the company's R&D budget in the hands of proven winners.
It gives any good research staffer a strong reason to stay with the company, since leaving would mean giving up control of
his accumulated intra-capital.
My own variant of the Pinchot scheme would put less emphasis on the idea of the
company undertaking projects, more on it helping to farm them out, while still rewarding the intrapreneurial inventor in Pinchot's
way. To quote Mr. Ralph Landau (founder of Halcon International, and one of America's most successful entrepreneurs),
there are two stages in innovation: (a) the conception or invention of a new or improved process, product or system; (b) the
commercialisation of it. Stage (b), the commercialisation, will generally cost between two and ten times as much as stage
(a). This great expense of commercialisation for products that do not fit a particular firm's "profile"–creates
a danger. Intrapreneurialism in R and D will not go fast enough if it becomes a device for regruntling touchy young Boffin
by pretending to put his wheeze along the company's existing production and distribution lines that are quite unfitted
for it.
Which leads to supermarkets for ideas. A big next vogue should be the sale of ideas telecommunicated between
computer terminals. Everybody should have different ideas on how to tie intra-capital into these and how the offering firm
can sift for quality; but, once competing mechanisms are established, sales of ideas should be decided intrapreneurialy, as
sales of goods already are in firms whose salesmen are virtually independent businessmen working on commission. Franchising
extends this concept. The only sales element subject to "tight central control" in such companies is the salesmen's
expense account, which is therefore the one element on which the central controller is always swindled.
|
| A steel mill's eels Mr. Pinchot's group at Tarrytown is soon going to establish in America the world's second school for intrapreneurs.
The first started when the Foresight Group (itself originally four intrapreneurial Swedes operating from their homes) in 1980
persuaded some Swedish client companies to announce on their internal notice boards: "any would-be intrapreneur come
to a meeting". In most companies 40-60 turned up, about equally upper-blue-collar and middle-management. The school wanted
2-4 from each company for the first course, each with a separate specific intrapreneurial idea. Twelve people lasted through
the first Swedish course, which consisted of six meetings-the first of a week, the next five each of three days. The course
tried to turn each fuzzy idea into a business concept, then into a business plan. From
those first graduates in 1981 there are now emerging (eg) two use-of waste-heat projects (one man is pumping a steel mill's
heat into a pond that breeds eels, another a paper mill's heat and computer knowhow into some computerised greenhouses);
a man from a building company is making prefabricated concrete elevator shafts (likely to boom in Sweden because of new environmental
rules demanding too many lifts for the handicapped); and an Esso man is converting repair garages behind filling stations
(many of which are closing) into places to store and lease out do-it-your-self equipment. Some of these look more like the
creation of small new capitalists than intrapreneurial ventures, but Sweden's silly tax law (which is suspicious of the
transfer of forgone income to capital) makes intra-capital difficult. It would be
wise for all governments to alter this sort of tax law. Other government policies "in favour of entrepreneurship"
make less sense.
Gadarene pearls Nobody should be in favour of governments granting special credit and other favours to small and innovative
firms. If governments are ass enough artificially to increase supply by granting special favours, Silicon Valleys are going
to go quickly bust. As a test case, suppose this is 1946. Here are some accurate
market forecasts for the succeeding seven years for a product that alters the living habits of over two thirds of the population
of the world. In 1946-53 sales of this product in the United States will increase by over 10,000%. America's production
costs in this very high-technology industry are now, in 1946, below anybody else's and the quality of American production
is higher. The number of firms in the United States making this eminently exportable product will multiply four times over
in 1946-53, and after 1953 the sort of growth in purchases about to be experienced in the United States will eventually spread
to countries including more than two thirds of the population of the world. You now have to decide whether to put taxpayers'
money into this industry (a) in 1946, (b) in 1953. The industry concerned, as you
may have guessed, is that producing television sets or major television parts in America. Even in the boom years 1946-53 less
than half of the American firms sometime operating in this market ever showed a really healthy positive cash flow, and in
the five years after 1953 more than three quarters closed down, increasingly on terms equivalent to going bust. Moreover, this is not an exceptional case-except in so far as it was an exceptionally fortunate one
because the product called television actually caught on. This is likely to be the usual experience in today's go-go industries
like microprocessors or biological implants or laser technology or whatever new product you will first hear of tomorrow. It
has been the usual experience in yesterday's went-went industries like airlines or computer leasing or washing machines
or real estate investment trusts-even when there has been an incredible increase in demand for their products. Correct forecasts
for 1950-82: passenger miles flown in airlines will increase by 3,200%, and by 1982 all the biggest airlines will be going
bust. The present trendiest policy of governments at the equivalent of television's
1946 stage is to provide cheap loans to small technological firms, thus ensuring that the number in the market multiplies
six instead of four times over, so 90% instead of 75% eventually go bust. At the
1953 stage the problem is not just that the domestic market is going over to replacement demand. The problem is that the industry
is now established, so a Taiwan without trade unions and lower wages may take it over. What you do as a taxpayer at the 1953
stage, with far too many firms in the market, is scream because your equivalent of a national enterprise board will be introducing
yet another one, since it has just heard that an exciting new technological product called television exists. What you do
as a businessman is either (a) make money by switching operations to Taiwan; or (b) stick to quality control and follow the
logical intrapreneurial policies for mature (not infant) firms. Next, some good
news for old countries, making old-fashioned things. Mature intrapreneurial At the beginning of this century the two largest occupations in America and Britain were agriculture
and domestic service, together employing around half the workforce. Today these two employ under 4% in each country, and until
the 1960s it seemed probable that manufacturing employment in the world's rich north would drop the same way. Now the
success of Japan, and the discovery small is more flexible, are good news for Europe's and America's manufacturers. When a multimillion-dollar factory with 10,000 men can produce more cheaply in Brazil than in Birmingham,
the multimillion Eurodollars will roll to Rio, but probably not the $50,000 for a five -man Brazilian workshop lest the five
and the $50,000 disappear to the bush. In my 1976 survey I argued that robots and computer-controlled manufacturing systems
should make rich countries' manufactories smaller and more intrapreneurial, dreaming that some might become one-man workshops.
This proved to be underdreaming since some Japanese small businessmen now have no-workman garden worksheds, where their unwatched
leased secondhand robot system hammers out a component for some big factory, while the small businessman is touting entrepreneurially
on the golf course for new orders. The Japanese have always based their continuing
manufacturing miracle on tiny entrepreneurial component-makers (one Japanese worker in six now owns a small business) and
on surprisingly small but brotherly profit centres even within huge plants. To quote Harvard University's Professor Ezra
Vogel: The essential building block of a Japanese company is not a man with a particular
role assignment and his secretary and assistants, as might be the case in an American company. The essential building block
of the Organisation is the section. A section might have perhaps eight or 10 people. Within the section there is not as sharp
a division of labour as in an American company. To some extent, each person in the same section shares the same overall responsibility. If you go into a Japanese assembly-line factory, you first see the components flowing in (maybe from
those automated no-workman garden sheds), and subjected to very tight quality check. At each stage along the automated assembly
line, most of the regular workers are also just reading dials or otherwise checking for quality, usually in those co-operative
sections of about eight men. The section is told at its daily post-breakfast meeting how many subsequent faults were later
found in its checked products, compared with the allegedly larger number of faults missed by the equivalent section in a main
rival company (loud banzai). At the end of one Japanese hi-fi-set assembly line
near Osaka I once found a rather jolly crew actually doing manual work, packing the awkwardly shaped sets into cardboard boxes.
They were not wearing Company uniforms. It had been decided that this measurable manual work, right there on the assembly
line, could be contracted out to a separate tiny firm (virtually a workers' co-operative). Question: who decided how many
workers should be on this job, and thus their working hours and income per head? Answer: the workers themselves, like my Typists
Intrapreneurial. Mr. Revans's action learning The Japanese have become the world's best businessmen partly because they do not go to business
schools. Indeed, they wisely do not believe in off-the-job government-subsidised training programmes for absolutely anything.
One foreign management academic mentioned in Tokyo with real respect is the English Professor Reg Revans of the Manchester
College of Science and Technology, of whom I had never previously heard. Since corresponding with Mr. Revans (who teaches
that "the sudden decline of the English-speaking economies of Britain, Canada and the United States is partly a consequence
of the rise of the academic business schools"), I see why his articles do not frequently appear in business school publications-although
his 900-page hardback "The origin and growth of action learning" is about to be published in Sweden with help from
Lord Weinstock and others. Mr. Revans's own system of "action learning"
is to put a small (I would call "intrapreneurial") group of four or five people into the field with a mandate like
"make the business side of that hospital more efficient", all the time recognising: that managers learn with and from each other as they work together on real problems (or opportunities) for which
no course of action (let alone solutions or policies have yet been agreed; since the problems are real, it is insufficient
that the manager should discuss or diagnose them without also taking steps to treat them. An action learning project is thus
a sustained and iterative attack, conducted in parallel with three or four others, upon a real problem by a real manager,
regularly meeting his three or four colleagues to offer and receive advice, criticism and support about the diagnosis and
treatment of the problem.... It is clear that these groups have some times brought
real advances-for example, they helped to breed the supposed Japanese idea of "quality circles"-a well as being
schoolmasters. A main difficulty is that real reform programme generally require what Mr. Revans calls two dimensions: (a)
the recognition that some particular activity needs to be ended, and then (b) a tremendous fight against those to be supplanted
who have acquired reputations as experts in the prosecution of what needs to be wound up. We are approaching the problem of
making lame ducks fly. Two that did: | Flour and textiles One of the few top 500
American companies to have grown in the past two, decades was in 1960 the largest flour miller in the world. Pause to ponder
whether you would expect this to be an expansive business, and what you would, advise it to do with its flour mills. Answer:
not expansive, and this firm prospered mightily by closing half the flour mills in America down. It got out of businesses
making 40% of its previous revenue, and split into more than 6 separate companies, some doing very different things. Next question: would you a expect corporate planner to recommend some thing like that? Answer: no,
all of the executives involved in the 40% of existing businesses to be scrapped would be up in arms, and even the Archangel
Gabriel could not sensibly suggest today that the company should go forthwith into the following 60 lines of business. So
the company did what I think is the first essential thing in corporate planning: it sacked its corporate planner, and set
up small "developments department". It decided that its strength was marketing consumer products (it had early been
successful in advertising and selling some breakfast goo). Then it invited proposals for small ventures based on this strength. The new businesses have ranged from fashion goods through toys to restaurants. A spectacular example
was that a film buff had heard that a film was being made which needed to find ways of getting more finance but looked as
if it might become a cult among kids across the world in the five- to 12-year-old age group. Intrapreneurial question: what
do we do? Answer: buy the franchise for toys with the film's name, and advertise in the trade press for small firms to
submit particular toys which, if they passed the company's quality test, would carry the insignia. The film was called
"Star Wars". Revenue went from nought to $100m in one year. Cautionary
tale. When I last talked to a meeting of this company, it seemed to have developed a matrix Organisation chart (which Reg
Revans rightly calls a device for repudiating responsibility), lots of group vice-presidents in charge of different divisions
named after products (which is exactly the wrong concept), a habit of buying existing businesses instead of creating ideas
(oh dear). A second rescue story has been in Italian textiles, where one of that
country's evanescent governments devised the best possible industrial policy partly by mistake. Previous governments had
imposed bureaucratic controls on all companies, so this one said that any firm with fewer than 20 workers would be free from
these. Of the 15,000 textile factories in the main textile town of Tuscany, 13,000 have fewer than 10 employees. One minister
for industry who helped to spur this system was the professor who had translated my 1976 survey into Italian. The industry now has just about the highest textile wages in the world, and the frontier between the
boss and worker moves all the time, because if the small works of which you are main owner fails you turn into being a friend's
worker for a time. And this is not just one freak way of running an adaptive textile industry. In continually changing industries-which
in future may mean all industries-it is increasingly going to be the only way, although the relation to the small producing
unit of the big-firm-buyer doing the quality checking will vary. Instant
intrapreneurial Since most readers of this survey are not Italian ministers of industry, let us consider some
profitable intrapreneuralism which quite junior businessmen reading this could initiate with one memo now. Since the advent
of competitive air fares, there have been -five possible ways for a firm to run its executives' air travel, and most very
big companies still choose one of the two craziest. Take your pick: System A, contract travel arrangements out to a
travel agency which is paid on a percentage commission so that it gets most money when executives go by the most expensive
way. System B, set up some underemployed secretary as a profit centre to ferret for cheaper fares. You tell any executive
who has to travel on the firm's business whether his entitlement is economy-class fare or first-class fare. Then if he
arranges with the secretary who has turned herself into an expert on cheap fares to go a cheaper way, they split the saving-say,
one third to the company, one third to the traveler and one third to the secretary as profit centre. System C, let as
many secretaries or hall porters or whatever as want to play this game set themselves up as competing profit centres. Let
them either co-operate or compete with each other, as they please, but with the quite simple check the company accountant
pays the bucket-shop's air fare for £90, there is a note saying Mr. Smith's entitlement will usually be a fare
of £390, the company takes £100 of this £300 saving, and returns £200 for the other two to split among
themselves as they like-licences withdrawn if the travellers don't arrive on time. System D, give the money to the
executives, and let them buy their own fares-cheaply, if they wish. . System E, set up a central department, bullying
executives to go to Hongkong by standby Aeroflot flight 'via Iceland and Irkutsk. The least sensible systems are
A (the travel agency) and E (the central travel department), so most very big British companies use one of them. The disadvantage
of D ("give them the money") is that executives then travel too much and use the firm's time to hunt bargains.
The most competitive system is C (the co competing profit centres), but go via B (the single profit centre) first and try
to develop op into selling this service outside? Obviously I would like such business to develop through lots of groups
"secretaries intrapreneurial", trying sell lots of services outside including t use of capital equipment that in
many offices lies idle for 150 of the 168 hour week. For example, many firms have "infotech" (in America "rapifax":
facsimile transmission by telephone) devices connected with their branch offices abroad, sometimes into foreign countries
which don't have Saturday mail deliveries when you won't be using your infotech anyway. Test launching-an advertisement
saying contact a recorded message on your ansaphone detailing your services on offer?-could cost virtually nil. Behind
all these prospects lies the present advance of the computer in completely inefficient underuse. Data processing departments
are being given the incentive to do as little work possible, and top management over age 50 does not press them because it
hates revealing that it does not understand computers anyway. The computer age has therefore started without most big organisations
having a daily and imaginative productivity hunt to discover how the computer can best be used. This mess is worst in
the world's biggest information-handling industry, which is government. If you talk to a seminar of (eg) senior British
inland revenuemen you find that they are engaged in commissioning meaningless "feasibility studies" on how to computerise
pre-computer systems of operation without anybody thinking (let alone testing intrapreneurially) how changing the system to
fit the computer age could remove the need for two thirds of the unnecessary labour now being done. The road to efficiency
in all government offices could be paved by the simplest sort of intrapreneurialism. You divide people into groups of under
10; tell them that this is the work to be done by them, and that if (in association with the computer people etc.) they can
cut the time spent on it, then they can have the advantages of a "Typists Intrapreneurial" (the flexitime, the self-organisation,
the opportunities for outside income). Savings would eventually be huge. Buy-outs Doubters
say that all this is white-collar stuff, and how could intrapreneurial work in (eg) some heavily trade-unionised British business
going bust? Answer: in Britain, and many other countries buy-outs by employees of bust and heavily trade-unionised businesses
are now proceeding fast. When a big company closes a loss-making subsidiary, it often finds that redundancy costs etc.
make the net proceeds on liquidation derisory, so the opportunity arises for a small group of workers to buy the firm for
a knockdown price. Sometimes a big company will also sell subsidiaries that do not fit its "overall strategy". Since
any company which uses that phrase will have been managed absurdly, these can be better buys still. In 1977 an American company
sold a large British factory for £350,000 to two top employees who had only £12,000 capital between them. The
two borrowed £100,000 from two overseas distributors, plus another £100,000 from a bank; and persuaded the selling
company to accept the other £150,000 on deferred terms (and also to retain a 5% equity stake). Efficiency and profits
soared. As was clear from answers to a questionnaire in a recent do-it-yourself booklet on Management Buy-Outs by The
Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU Special 115, price £30 or US$60) most big British banks and near-banks are now
eager to handle this suddenly booming buy-out business. The recently renamed National Enterprise Board will be losing taxpayers'
money on it (it told the questionnaire that its object was to assist "companies in advanced technology and companies
in English Assisted Areas whose requirements cannot be met appropriately......", oh dear), but all the other banks fortunately
say they are zooming in to make profits. The EIU's sample suggests the failure rate in buy-outs is less than 10%, versus
30% in new start-ups, even though the start-ups are in the ventures deemed most profitable to start and the buy-outs in those
which big businesses want to shed. A familiar difficulty: buy-out teams should preferably be small (the EIU recommends
two to five) because more than six new entrepreneurs quarrel. That problem can sometimes be assuaged by halfway devolutions
to separate small groups. One example of such intrapreneurialisation under particularly unfavourable conditions in the 1970s
was a British film studio which ran one year into a huge loss, because its workers spent most of their days drawing large
overtime while waiting around. It was closed, and the workers were given redundancy money, but some were asked if they wished
to stay on to operate freelance in what became a film facility studio. A producer who made a film in the studio had thenceforth
to negotiate separately with the intrapreneurial cameramen (who were intrapreneurially doing outside jobs in shooting television
advertisements), with the plasterers, carpenter's shop, lighting and electrical men (who were also operating outside in
the normal neighbourhood ' For example, small teams at any two building trade), the former transport department (now running
a minicab service) etc. | Facebook Diary month to jan08
posted
a blog post.
discussed
Yunus: Dc, Austin, Houston, LA, Santa Barbera, SanFran,Seatle, Portland, Chicago,NY,Phili in the group The Green Children Foundation. . | | Ride out on the
rail End with the British nationalised industries, which were originally
created because it was assumed that large private monopolies in them would too easily make excessive profits, but are now
all great stranded whales. The railway engine drivers of Britain have some agreement, which no small firm could grant, so
cheaply so long ago. that an unnecessary two footplatemen should travel on most trains where there is work for only one to
do. A sensible minority sign on to draw their wages but do not actually go to these pointless journeys. They slope off to
increase the real national income by running their black-[economy minicab services etc. This winter saw a rolling strike because
British Rail was trying to introduce a "productive deal" through flexible rostering which-so long as it was accompanied
by promised of no redundancies-would achieve a net cut in the national income by obliging the men to close some moon-lighting
services down. If groups of train drivers were organised like Typists Intrapreneurial
they could vote whether to make most money for themselves by sacking their mates, whether to make least money for everybody
by retaining the present system, or whether to keep the mates outside the trainings to run more intrapreneurial services (eg,
minicabs geared to meeting trains). Similar possibilities for local authority dustmen (many of whom can complete their existing
jobs before ll am), turning coal pits into workers cooperatives, right across the state sector. The intrapreneurial improvements
in productivity would likely be very large, because the existing productivity of management and workers in this sector is
so unbelievably low. For example, small teams at any two or three partly unnecessary
British Rail suburban stations could then decide which stations to close and sell, how and when to run car parks or jitney
services at or to those kept open, what best uses to make of each square yard of British Rail's overabundant space (just
over a decade ago a survey showed that it owned 6% of the land area of the then borough of Camden). Only a giant organisation
could be losing so much money when it owns so much underutilised land bought so cheaply so long ago. Envoi In most large British workplaces there are no
direct incentives for ordinary workers to speed or improve production and no way in which ordinary folk can have the fun of
suggesting (and participating in) constant experiments to improve their group's efficiency. Except when they are frightened
lest bankruptcy may bring them the sack, it is therefore natural for most British workers to resist productivity drives that
disrupt their habits at no benefit to themselves. The conventional doctrine for running British industry is becoming the daft
one that a manager can best get higher productivity by running his firm constantly on the verge of bankruptcy, and that his
workforce's main enjoyment of the loveliest human excitement called group togetherness will be when going on strike. As most firms are less near to terminal illness than (eg) British- Rail, they could often find the
way forward to greater profitability and more participatory workplace fun by starting intrapreneurial ventures on a small
scale (which is the right scale on which to start them) and letting them spread. If these 1976 and 1982 surveys encourage
any pioneers down that road, they will be worth the aggravation that this sort of writing unhappily manages to cause. |
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We dont need a lot of maths to see that an exponential curve has a terrifying conseqeuence. It looks the same as linear until it isnt; after which you quickly tip over a precipice with very little time to intervene and get back to safety. There's an even more scary dynamic when several systems multiply each other's consequences; ie instead of several straight lines we are dealing with multiplication of exponential curves