Are You A Pirate?

 

http://techcrunch.com/author/tcmarrington/

……………….When I talk to non entrepreneurs about the startup world I often use a pirate analogy. Not because I know that much about pirates, but the the general stereotypes work well as an analogy.

Why did some people way back in the 17th century, or whenever, become pirates? The likely payoff was abysmal, I imagine. There’s a very small chance you’d make a fortune from some prize, and a very large chance you’d drown, or be hung, or shot, or whatever. And living on a small ship with a hundred other guys must have sucked, even for the captain.

But in my fantasy pirate world these guys just had really screwed up risk aversion algorithms. Unlike most of the other people they actually lusted after that risk. The potential for riches was just an argument for the venture. But the real payoff was the pirate life itself.

Also, it was nearly impossible to be an entrepreneur back then………………

full article at http://techcrunch.com/2010/10/31/are-you-a-pirate/

Corporate Sustainability should start at Business School

 

Zachary Shahan October 30, 2010

 

 As far as one can see, corporations aren’t going away and will continue to play an extremely important role in society. That makes their relationship to the environment a critical issue.

Too often, environmentalists are reacting to what corporations do. Rather, we need to advance a more holistic school of social change in the business world.

That means we need to go to the roots of the corporate world and understand where businessmen and women are coming from. You heard me: Business schools.

The inspiration for this post comes first from a tremendous book that nails this topic— The Sustainable Business (available as a free download from the European Foundation for Management Development). The author, renowned scholar and businessman Jonathan T. Scott writes, “to understand sustainability it’s essential to begin by first comprehending the big picture…Rather than building up from particulars to generals (the empiricist method), one must begin with generals—an in-place, intuitive wisdom of the logic behind thinking in the long-term, what it entails, and why it’s important.”…………….

Full story at http://ht.ly/326LM

Britain’s energy consumption drops as people try to save money

We are now feeling the effects of following the Oil Curve rather than keeping ahead of it – the wrong way to balance the One Planet Equation

dd

29th October 2010

Over 50% of people are using less energy than they did a year ago in a bid to save money. That’s according to new research that shows as winter sets in and energy consumption is predicted to skyrocket, people are prepared to do whatever it takes to save power- with nearly three quarters of people citing financial hardship as the main reason.

And their efforts should be well rewarded as the research reveals each household could save £250 every year by making some simple energy saving changes.

But it’s not just the little things like installing energy efficient light bulbs and draft excluders that people are now doing, with many considering making big changes to their homes to save money and energy in the long run.

Over a third would now consider a home survey to see if renewable energy could be installed in their property while 40% would pay more to do up their home if it made it more energy-efficient.

Belt-tightening is also affecting what househunters are looking for when buying a house with energy efficiency now high on homeseekers’ wish lists…………………

full article at http://www.easier.com/79612-britain-s-energy-consumption-drops-as-people-try-to-save-money.html

Google is doing what the government can’t

Andrew Winston Environmental Strategist, The Huffington Post, October 28, 2010

…………….As many pundits have lamented, we seem to have completely lost our ability to consider, invest in, and complete big infrastructure projects. This does not bode well for our future.

But just when I was thoroughly discouraged, Google announced recently that it would invest heavily in a truly innovative energy infrastructure project. The tech giant and some other investors are proposing a $5 billion “transmission backbone” for offshore wind farms along the East Coast. This new 350-mile line would connect Virginia to, yes, New Jersey, and allow for much easier, cheaper development of offshore wind (it would also, as a side benefit, get some cheaper energy already produced in Virginia up to the northern states).

This is in no way the first time that Google has made noise about clean tech. A few years ago it announced its intention to invest a billion dollars to help make renewable energy cheaper than coal. The company has also put in place one of the largest corporate solar installations in the world.

But why would Google invest so much in these kinds of projects? It’s easy to dismiss it as the socially-minded whim of a cash-rich company. But that’s not giving the company much credit for being a smart operator. Given the resource-intensity of its giant data centers — there’s a persistent, believable rumor that Google is the largest energy user in the State of California — trying to bring the cost of renewables down is a great hedge strategy. What growing enterprise wouldn’t want to rely increasingly on energy with zero variable cost?…………………

full story at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/andrew-winston/google-is-doing-what-the-_b_775241.html?ir=Technology

Lean Enterprise Institute Webinar Library

LEI Webinar Library

 

LEI webinars are concise, convenient ways to bring you and your team members practical knowledge from leading lean experts. If you’ve got about an hour, an LEI webinar will give you real-life insights into solving the technical and human challenges of sustaining a lean transformation. Webinars include a presentation followed by audience questions.

http://www.lean.org/Events/WebinarHome.cfm

Leaders explore systems thinking

Academic, industry and government leaders explore systems thinking

More than 300 guests attended the two-day MIT SDM Conference on Systems Thinking for Contemporary Challenges to hear experts from MIT, industry and government discuss how they use systems thinking to solve some of the world’s most pressing and complex problems.

Sponsored by Global Project Design, Werfen Group/Instrumentation Laboratory, John Deere, Merck, MITRE and United Technologies Research Center (UTRC), the conference addressed Large Complex Systems; Sustainable Systems; Service Systems, and Health Care Systems.

Commissioner George Apostolakis of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) delivered the keynote presentation. He described how the NRC, charged with ensuring that nuclear use is as safe as possible, is implementing a synthesis of Defense in Depth with a Risk-Informed approach based on system thinking. The goal is a safety culture that takes into greater account the psychology of individual behavior.

Mark Jenks, a vice president in Boeing’s 787 program, described the complex process of how the 787 was brought to market; Kevin Otto, founder and president of Robust Systems and Strategy, a research and development consultancy, addressed issues affecting the construction of Net Zero Energy Buildings (NZEBs) that will reduce — rather than enlarge — the atmosphere’s already untenable carbon load………………

full story at http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2010/systems-thinking-conference.html

Presentations from the conference can be viewed at http://sdm.mit.edu/conf10.

Videos are scheduled to be made available on http://sdm.mit.edu by mid-November.

U.S. Military Plan: get off oil By 2040

By Bill Moore

In September, the Center for New American Security (CNAS) issued a 36-page study entitled Fueling the Future Force: Preparing the Department of Defense for a Post-Petroleum Era. Now if the title weren’t suggestive enough, the target date of 2040 — 30 years from now — should set off klaxons from Maine to Guam.

Prepared in close consultation with the Office of the Secretary of Defense, as well as the major branches of U.S. Armed Forces and other government agencies, the key authors — Christine Pathemore and John Nagl — conclude that the military has three decades to dramatically reduce its dependence on petroleum, the fuel that powers 77 percent of the America’s fighting machinery.

Why the urgency and why get off of oil? The map at the end of the commentary shows why. It has to do with who has the oil and how fast they are extracting it. The lighter the shades of blue, the shorter the time span until the process of extraction becomes economically unfeasible. Soberingly, CNAS analysts project the United States has just 11 years of reserve-to-production (R/P) capacity. Neighboring Canada, our largest external supplier, 28 years. Meanwhile, Venezuela, Iraq, Iran, the Emirates and Saudi Arabia all have 100 years of R/P capacity………………

full story at http://evworld.com/currents.cfm?jid=153

The Peak Oil Crisis: The Midterm elections

Friends and colleagues will know that I try to avoid direct discussion of Peak Oil, but every so often an article comes up that is worth dissemination. Such an article is The Peak Oil Crisis: The Midterm elections and it can be found at http://www.fcnp.com/commentary/national/7671-the-peak-oil-crisis-the-midterms.html .

It ends

“It seems almost certain now that we are actually going to drive ourselves over a great economic cliff with banners of “growth,” “jobs,” “return to the good old days,” and “no taxes” streaming in the wind. It is going to be one hell of a train wreck – unlike anything the American people have ever known.”

This is also directly applicable to the UK as a society; unless we recognise that we must direct, on a balance of probabilities, all our education and research effort to accord with the ‘First Law of Sustainability’ – that ‘in a resource constrained world, goods and services can only grow at the rate that their ‘Resource Intensity’ reduction exceeds that needed to balance the One Planet Equation

1 = P*C*RI’ https://trailblazerbusinessfutures.wordpress.com/the-one-planet-equation

Where is the information below in the UK news?

Alaska’s untapped oil reserves estimate lowered by about 90 percent http://www.cnn.com/2010/US/10/27/alaska.oil.reserves/index.html

(CNN, 27 Oct 2010) — The U.S. Geological Survey says a revised estimate for the amount of conventional, undiscovered oil in the National Petroleum Reserve in Alaska is a fraction of a previous estimate. The group estimates about 896 million barrels of such oil are in the reserve, about 90 percent less than a 2002 estimate of 10.6 billion barrels. (this represents around 10 days current global consumption, if it can all be brought to market at a useful Energy Return On Energy Invested, EROEI  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WeBtdwPpTQM&feature=player_embedded – my comment)

Derek

The Monster challenging us all

The Monster Challenging Us All

……………….Waiting For “Superman” describes that monster in some detail. It says it was created fifty-plus years ago, at a time when the majority of students were expected to become farmers or factory workers. In the world of the 1950’s, most people were expected to do essentially the same thing every day for the rest of their lives. Every worker was part of the great “economic engine” of the United States. If you didn’t wind up working in a factory or on a farm, you were assumed headed for some other “same thing every day” job in a field such as accounting.

The True Nature Of This Monster

That’s what the film says about the system. But what it doesn’t say is what the system doesn’t support: Students who want to be entrepreneurs… innovators… challengers of conventional thinking. Sorry, that wasn’t part of the equation. The system was designed in the 1950’s, when conformity was king.

After all, being an effective factory worker meant adopting a kind of “assembly line mentality.” You had to become a human “cog” in the giant machinery of the company for which you worked, which meant (a) doing what you’re told, (b) not asking questions, and (c) being afraid to make mistakes. The classic sign on the factory wall back then said “We pay you to work, not to think.”

That’s the kind of worker our educational system was designed to produce when it was first created, and that’s the kind of worker our system is designed to produce today. Unfortunately, this is the exact opposite of the creative, problem-solving, critical thinking workers — and citizens — America needs! But this point isn’t made in the film.

One thing Waiting For “Superman” does do is unintentionally confirm how “assembly line thinking” is the system’s intended result. It does this by animating the educational process so that it appears to consist of knowledge being poured into the heads of children and of children proceeding down different conveyor belts to either high or low quality classroom settings. This is what we knew how to do in the 1950’s: set up a mechanical system to produce workers who would fit into a mechanical employment reality. Today educational experts — those who put human development ahead of antiquated industrial policy needs — know that real education involves much more………………………

full article at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/steven-g-brant/waiting-for-superman-and_b_756804.html

Video Waiting For Superman | Davis Guggenheim http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOnAIdIMoeI&NR=1

http://www.waitingforsuperman.com/

“Systems Thinking” and the economic power of trash

“Systems Thinking” Guru Peter Senge on Starbucks, P&G, and the Economic Power of Trash

 

BY Anya Kamenetz Fri Oct 22, 2010

 

One of the world’s top management gurus is spending a lot of time these days thinking about trash. I spoke with author of The Fifth Discipline, Peter Senge, because of his work with Starbucks on their pledge to provide recycling in all their stores. But it turns out that his interest in the waste stream goes far beyond that. True to his reputation as the major popularizer of “systems thinking,” Senge sees the potential for a whole “underground economy” of great wealth that’s literally being tossed away under our noses. “Nobody likes to throw stuff away,” he told me. “It’s just antithetical to our sense of being a person. But we’re all habituated to that way of living today.”

On the Starbucks cup:

It’s an archetypal problem and I liked it right away. What more compelling icon of the craziness: On the one hand, the convenience that we can stroll down the street sipping our latte, but then, the craziness that we can toss over our shoulder and maybe you feel a little bit better if it lands in a bin instead of the ground, but it really doesn’t make a damn bit of difference. Let’s look at the whole system, all the way upstream and all the way downstream: Where does the cup come from? Who makes it? A tree or an oil well.”……………

full story at http://www.fastcompany.com/1696174/systems-thinking-guru-peter-senge-on-starbucks-pg-and-the-economic-power-of-trash