Managing for Porosity and other Survival Tips

It has been twenty months now but I still keep coming back to a 30-page report by Andrew Curry entitled “The World In 2020,” a document prepared for business leaders but equally prescient for policy-makers.

It provides a window on business challenges that goes far beyond the next seven years, and its eight contours of “the map of how the world is likely to change” are as applicable to small organizations as to large.

Curry’s report synthesizes expert observations about lingering changes embedded in the worldwide crisis of 2008.  Quoting Ged Davis, a former petroleum executive and currently co-president of The Global Energy Assessment, who claims that “a trend is a trend until it bends,” Curry notes that trends do not continue unchecked:

“Eventually, they create a response, and it’s in the interplay between trends that new markets open up and new risks emerge.

There are some relative certainties embedded in the big trends which will shape the world over the next decade but there are also some uncertainties, where several trends collide and combine.”

The report identifies “hard constraints,” “soft opportunities” and “ambiguities.”  Rather than viewing these as dilemmas to be traded off as businesses often do, it distills business “dilemma theory” developed by Charles Hampden-Turner and Fons Trompenaar.

The report notes that business “dilemma theory”…“suggests that rather than ‘either/or’ trade-offs, ‘both/and’ outcomes reconcile differences and create more value, opening up spaces for innovation.”

The reports cites Umair Haque, the director of Havas Media Labs, who blogs for Harvard Business Review who claims that “the future belongs to ‘the meaning organization’ which sets out to build authentic prosperity.” 

“Companies are going to have to get lethally serious about having an enduring, meaningful, resonant, multiplying, positive, proliferating set of impacts—of all types, whether social, human, intellectual, spiritual, creative, or relational. An isolated notion of ‘profit’ is obsolete: it’s an arid industrial-age conception of a currency-focused construct that’s built to trivialize everything but what a firm owes its ‘owners’.”

Curry’s synthesis also suggests that “capitalism, perhaps, is no longer well served by capital” and that “one way of thinking about this new business landscape is to go back to some of the early ideas about economies, namely that an enterprise was obliged to combine resources of land, labor and capital” with an emphasis on stewardship.

No this isn’t the brittleness of today’s libertarianism or your father’s but it may be your grandfather’s.

In an ominous note, the report, while quoting Stein’s Law that “the future is never a simple extrapolation of the present, reminds us that “globalization has retreated in the past: by some measures, levels of economic interconnectness are lower today than at the outbreak of WWI.”  And we know how that turned out.

I found particularly enlightening the report’s discussion of a distinction made by Dr. Barbara Heinzen between “column” property rights which are framed only by economic rights and “mosaic” property rights “giving different groups overlapping rights of use and access to land.”  This distinction would help resolve the desecration of public roadsides by private billboard companies in favor of the public’s right to a scenic view-shed.

The report indicates that adoption of “full-cost” accounting models “which include the costs which businesses,” such as billboard companies, “currently dump on their neighbors and the environment.”

Curry notes that “one of the sharpest trends in the wake of the financial crisis has been the widespread emergence of arguments for new ways of measuring economic and business performance.”

Perhaps of particular interest to my former colleagues in community-destination marketing is a section of the report on the business of the future.  Instead of relying on descriptions such as relevant, “responsive, adaptive, flexible, agile” it details three characteristics under the headings of:

• Managing for resilience
• Managing for variety
• Managing for porousness

I’ve cited this report in previous blogs and judging by my continual re-reading, I will again.  Rarely, if ever, has so much useful insight been packed into thirty pages.

The Much Deeper Source of My Passion For Trees!

When I talk or write about trees, I often tend to use aesthetics and economics and research to make the case for conservation and reforestation, but my personal passion and reverence in this regard come from my spirituality and a biblical sense of stewardship.

My two major influences could not be more different in many ways.  My paternal grandfather had just turned 16 and was already homesteading the Idaho ranch, on which I spent my early years, when Father Thomas was born in Greensboro, North Carolina, about 60 miles west of where I have lived for nearly the last 2 1/2 decades.

Both were Christian, my grandfather just a generation removed from Mormon Christian pioneers who fled persecution for the safety of the Rockies and FatherThomas, a scholar and “geologian” as he liked to refer to himself, a member of the Passionist Order Catholic priesthood.

With only a second-grade education my rancher-grandfather learned his respect and reverence for conservation as a homesteader with a lifelong reliance on the earth and rivers and forests and animals. Father Thomas earned a PhD and was a prolific author and although he found his voice for conservation late in life it was born of a boyhood epiphany in a North Carolina meadow of his youth.

My grandfather had witnessed as he came of age at the end of an intense 60 years of desecration across the nation and the rise of a Republican president determined to steward the nation’s natural resources in the spirit of Thoreau and Muir, the art of Cole and Bierstadt and the work of Olmstead.

Father Thomas, whose epiphany occurred in the twilight of that President’s life, was just 56 years old when the nation formed an agency in the 1970s under another Republican president dedicated to safeguard the environment.  What must Father Thomas think, if he is looking down today, as that same party appears bent on disabling that progress?

My grandfather passed away just as I started to turn the age he was when he first homesteaded in the very northeast tip of the Yellowstone-Teton nook of Idaho, but it seems his spirit is always nearby even as I pass the age he was when he passed.

Father Thomas first caught my attention just as I was turning 40 and relocating to Durham, North Carolina when he wrote the book entitled The Dream Of The Earth, the classic that almost lyrically recasts “planetary well-being as the measure of all human activity.”

Just a few years after I arrived in North Carolina, Thomas Berry returned to this state and the place of his birth to live out his final years.  It is here, at the dawn of the century, that he wrote The Great Work- Our Way Into The Future which is my favorite of his books.

The measure of how much this book resonates for me is that I never seem to be able to hold onto my copy giving one away only to buy another as I did one recently only this time in digital format.  But it isn’t especially written for my generation.  As Father Thomas writes:

“While we have more scientific knowledge of the universe than any people ever had, it is not the type of knowledge that leads to an intimate presence within a meaningful universe… The world of human meaning is no longer coordinated with the meaning of our surroundings.

We have disengaged from the profound interaction with our environment that is inherent to our nature…

So completely are we at odds with the planet that brought us into being that we have become strange beings indeed. We dedicate enormous talent and knowledge and research in developing a human order disengaged from and even predatory on the very sources from whence we came and upon which we depend every moment of our existence.”

To those two men of professed faith who pushed legislation through the North Carolina legislature that sacrifices thousands of acres of publicly-owned roadside forests to amoral outdoor billboard companies under the guise of private property and without any requirement for payment or replanting and dismissing the result as just “cutting the grass,” Father Thomas reminds us that:

“We cannot own the earth…we own property in accord with the well-being of the property and for the benefit of the larger community as well as ourselves…

“The Great Work that is before (future generations) is moving the human project from its devastating exploitation to a benign presence…

“We are chosen by some power beyond ourselves for this historic task…The nobility of our lives, however, depends upon the manner in which we come to understand and fulfill our assigned role…

We cannot doubt that we too have been given the intellectual vision, the spiritual insight and even the physical resources we need for carrying out this transition…from the period when humans were a disruptive force on the planet earth to a period when humans become present to the planet in a manner that is mutually enhancing.”

I too have faith that the generations of my daughter, my two grandsons and their children and grandchildren will take up the challenge offered by Father Thomas and that the overreaching symbolized by the current giveaway to the outdoor billboard industry will ultimately backfire and lead to not only a repeal of that legislation, but in the end to a statewide ban of all outdoor billboards in North Carolina, such as is already in effect in other scenic states such as Alaska, Hawaii, Vermont and Maine.

I owe the fact that I have retained my sense of spirituality outside the bounds of any organized religion and that this same spirituality includes a reverence for nature to influences such as my grandfather and Father Thomas, who passed away in nearby Greensboro at age 94 in 2009.

I wish I had taken the opportunity while they were living to tell each of these very different people how much their influence has meant to me but I am dedicated in their memory to making sure their sense of reverence and commitment and respect for nature is passed along to my grandsons as it has been to my daughter.

It’s About Property Rights Alright - "OUR" Property Rights

A Mecklenburg lawmaker and co-sponsor of a bill that will unleash a torrent of digital billboards on North Carolina is quoted as seeing it as a property-rights issue, comparing swathing trees in front of outdoor billboards to cutting the grass in front of your house.

Even if there weren’t many reasons why his bill is disastrous for North Carolina, he’s focused on the wrong property rights.

While the billboard companies buy, rent or lease tiny pieces of property on which to plant poles and hang huge, blinking digital billboards, they are ripping off millions of other property owners without paying a dime:

• For the proven economic value of the “green” infrastructure they destroy,
• For the scenic tourism they destroy,
• For the unique-sense-of-place which draw residents and visitors to our cities and towns.
• For the blight they reveal and to which they contribute along roadsides by swathing trees from the public’s right-of-way in many areas and blocking out view-shed in others,
• For the clutter they create that can provide a screen for criminal behavior as noted in the “broken-windows theory” and Crime Prevention Through Environmental Design (CPTED)

These public property rights are priceless and far beyond any value an outdoor billboard can provide in return, even if these companies were actually required to pay for use of the property they mask and destroy.

North Carolina’s tree canopy is one of its most distinctive attributes and less than half remains. The trees are economic infrastructure because they clean the air and water and serve as the backdrop for the state’s $17 billion tourism sector.

It is time we started valuing trees and learn from states that are lopping off entire mountain tops, as nearly 500 have been to-date, typically taking less than a day and the return…a measly 6% of the coal deposit there.

If legislators want to put North Carolina’s scenic beauty and tree canopy up for sale and turn the state into a drive through the yellow pages, at least they should practice good business and charge what they are worth in return – priceless.

North Carolinians deserve full value!

For more information on the “billboard bills” click here.

To express your outrage, click on the links below:

Senate Transportation Committee

House Transportation Committee 1

House Transportation Committee 2