Sunday, November 23, 2014

Conservative Too Liberally Applied

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 If there's any oxymoron in the English language used with greater profligacy than the label "conservative" one would be hard pressed to find it.  From the wads of cash lining the pockets of religiously conservative Amish farmers buying land in Lancaster County Pennsylvania to the glass walled cloisters of capitalist opulence in fiscally conservative midtown Manhattan to the diatribe-laced vitriol spewed across politically conservative AM radio, the only thing that is certain about "conservatism" is that it's not.  And if you want to see a case study in why Wikipedia is not a reliable source of thorough and objective coverage on a topic, take a gander at the entry for "conservative" and you'll soon find out that the modern use of this 14th century French adaptation of the Latin conservare is anything but oriented towards conservation, observance, or adherence to explicated values. 

There's no small irony in the fact that most authors attribute the modern use of the term "conservative" to the writings and philosophy of an 18th century Irish Catholic heretic (a Catholic forced to deny the doctrine of transubstantiation so he could get his political and academic credentials, educated by Quakers, and, ready for this, a member of Parliament who argued against the inhumane treatment of homosexuals).  Edmund Burke actually opposed democracy in our present form stating that the general populace lacked the intelligence and command of subtleties required to govern.  He was concerned that demagogues could sway the frail minds of an ignorant population and this, he argued, could lead to tyranny over minorities who were out of favor with the powerful interests reinforced by the influential few.  If Burke read the Wikipedia article about the principles ascribed to him, I suspect he'd be enraged.  In fact, those who laud the values of "conservatism" fail to heed Burke's prophetic warning that:

"…yet if men gave themselves up to imitation entirely, and each followed the other, and so on in an eternal circle, it is easy to see that there never could be any improvement amongst them." (from A Philosophical Inquiry Into the Origin of Our Ideas of The Sublime and Beautiful, 1756)

So why is it that modern "conservative" thought celebrates so completely the antithesis of its acclaimed progenitor?  Why have we adopted political theorist Russell Kirk's canons of: 1) belief in a transcendent order based on divine revelation and natural law; 2) belief that societies require distinctions of classes; 3) belief that freedom is inextricably linked to property and enclosure rights; 4) belief in custom and convention; and, 5) belief that innovation must conform with existing traditions and customs?  Why have we fallen for Kirk's thoughtless assumption that culture must "arise from religion" and without religion, "culture must decline"?  Whether we subscribe to any fragments of Kirk's perspective or not, there's no question that his writing and thinking was predicated on racism, classism, bigotry, and arrogance.  It is this socially unquestioned euphemistic veneer that I believe makes his form of conservatism so popular today. 

I encountered the adjective form of "conservative" this week when I was in dialogue with a world-famous athlete who told me that his investment managers marketed his overweight fixed income portfolio as "conservative".  This investment manager lie - one that is foisted on financially literate and illiterate alike - amazes me.  With 8 years of returns that have failed to generate returns sufficient to cover bloated management fees, the audacity of calling cash and fixed income "conservative" is ludicrous.  From the tax-deferred pensioner to the depository saver, the justification for this version of "conservative" investing is the thinly veiled seduction to allow predatory institutions to leverage the public's capital without their full knowledge.  Whether it's a bank that takes deposits and, courtesy of fractional reserve banking, levers the money 6-10 times (or more) or the bond originator who manufacturers credit for the statutory consumption of fiduciary managers giving little to no thought to the savers whose money they're placing at risk, there's nothing "conservative" about placing faith and belief in a system that explicitly pays a paucity for its subsequent leverage exploitation. 

I also heard the management of a company describe their resistance to innovation as a byproduct of their "conservatism".  This company once had a market capitalization measured in the billions and now trades at a fraction thereof.  They were more than happy to have investment bankers bring M&A transactions to them - transactions that saddled their lucrative cash-flows with non-organic debt.  Why?  Because the stories told by MBAs with glossy presentations and cunning spreadsheets were consensus albeit entirely in error.  Seduced by the short-term benefit of quarterly "growth" through acquisition, this firm eviscerated its value destroying millions in shareholder value while enriching the bankers and advisors who were able to act with impunity.  When presented with a method to regain new product opportunity and significant cost-savings in current operations, they didn't know how to process that kind of input as it was "unconventional".  Their impulse to preserve the diminishing status quo: Conservatism. 

Now here's the puzzle.  I'm an orthodox kinda guy.  If someone wants to know what my values are, look at what they've been over the past 20 years and, lo and behold, they're pretty much the same.  I am a firm adherent to principles of equivalent access, the importance of a collaborative and interdependent private sector, and the primacy of transparency and accountability.  These are not conservative nor are they liberal values.  What I find offensive is the use of the term "conservative" when it really is a masquerade for political bigotry, preservation of willful social ignorance and, predatory asymmetry in financial appropriation and outright theft.  Until we're ready to be transparent about our genuine motivations, we're not fit to use this term to hide our real intentions.



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Sunday, November 16, 2014

Newton's Apple and The Next Big Thing

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John Maynard Keynes wrote of Sir Isaac Newton that he was not the "first in the age of reason:  He was the last of the magicians."  In his own frequently quoted letter to Robert Hooke in February of 1676, Newton humbly commented that, "What Descartes did was a good step…[to which Hooke] added much several ways, & especially in taking ye colours of thin plates into philosophical consideration.  If I have seen further it is by standing on ye shoulders of Giants."  Acknowledging Descartes, Newton placed his reason in the lineage of Augustine, Socrates, Euclid, Pythagoras - all celebrated for their influence on pivotal alterations in rationalizing the natural order using optics, magnetism, and societal lethargy fueled by religion.  Their collective insistence that they needed to include in their otherwise rational arguments a concession to the normative assumption of some form of mystical divinity Locked them into frameworks from which modern philosophers still Kant seem to escape!

I saw an advertisement on a billboard in Los Angeles this week announcing some form of smart phone number 6 as the "Next Big Thing" (aka, NBT).  According the Wired (Oct, 2014), the NBT is, drum roll please, video conferencing from Google!  Whoa!  According to Motorola CEO Dennis Woodside in 2013, the NBT is a smart phone that knows "when you take it out of your pocket."  WHAT????  And it knows when you're holding it in a position that is likely a picture-taking orientation!  Say it ain't so!  According to CNET, the NBT is, hold on, make sure your sitting down, a lower price for the same technology.  No way!  Where's the Nobel Committee?

When Apple CEO John Sculley developed the concept of the PDA or personal digital assistant - the forerunner of the smartphone - in 1987, he thought that he would "reinvent" personal computing.  Sculley was not standing on top of the shoulders of giants when he announced the Newton OS.  He was - with or without consciousness - indicting our generation with a moniker of the contempt we evidence for what would constitute true, radical, new thinking.  The Reduced Instruction Set Computing (RISC) processor that went into the Newton put in motion what has metastasized into our NBT cancer today - the appearance of doing more while repackaging less.  Now Apple (NASDAQ: APPL), AppliedMicro (NASDAQ: AMCC), Atmel (NASDAQ: ATML), Broadcom (NASDAQ: BRCM), Freescale (NYSE: FSL), Nvidia (NASDAQ: NVDA), NXP (NASDAQ: NXPI), Qualcomm (NASDAQ: QCOM), Samsung (KRX:005930), ST Microelectronics (NYSE: STM), and Texas Instruments (NASDAQ: TXN) work to provide the 6.1 billion RISC processors that power our mobile telephony addiction in a race towards ever expanding triviality for ever lower prices.

What's fascinating, when considered from the broader arc of human thought and societal evolution, is the fact that we've deluded ourselves into the belief that we're making innovative strides forward while we're standing on the hamster wheel of obsolescence.  We've done precious little to alter the human experience since 1987 and have reduced our vanity to standing in lines at Verizon and AT&T stores for the privilege of being on the morning news as one of the millions with nothing better to do than have the few pixel advantage over our cubicle colleagues for the five minutes of our diminutive aspiration into relevance oblivion. 

Would we know the NBT if it bit us in the butt?  Probably not.  And would the acclaim of Silicon Valley or Goldman Sachs be the oracle that would proclaim the arrival of the new, the innovative, the structurally significant, transformative disruption?  Certainly not.  Would the future be clad in the youthful hoodie?  The torn up jeans?  The black turtleneck?  Doubtful.

I watched the world see a 150% improvement in the state-of-the-art in circuit board technology on Thursday of this past week in Anaheim CA.  The family-owned Murrietta Circuits roll out eSurface technology - the first covalently deposited, light activated PCB and IC technological platform - and succeeded in producing the first 2 x 2 - boards which will fundamentally alter not only board and circuit design but will transform the way in which we harness power to animate our technologies.  There was no fanfare.  There was no hype.  But in one short week, this little company rolled out a technology based on magnetism and light - the ingredients used by Newton and the greats - to change the world of electronics, manufacturing, security, and energy.  Like the popes and bishops in centuries past, the incumbent orthodoxy wasn't there to proclaim its arrival as it was asleep in its bloated monotony. 

This week the world will witness the emergence of an investment platform which will, for the first time, launch an African American founded institution beyond "equal opportunity" into a position that can transcend majority owned financial institutions.  Playbook Investors Network - the out-growth of a vision stewarded by Rodney Woods and Tracy McGrady Jr. will create a mechanism where the era of racial concessions can end and diverse greatness can be unconstrained.  And this vision won't be limited to minority supplier allocations alone but will introduce technologies which can dislocate multi-billion dollar incumbencies.  No fanfare.  Just getting the job done.

Here's the trouble with the NBT hype.  By convincing ourselves that we're making progress when we're actually allowing illusions to pass by on the green screen of virtual reality, we set ourselves and our systems up for massive, single point systemic shocks and failures.  We're not the sum of our social media and marketing spend - today's version of incumbent religions in centuries past.  We're more than this.  And when we start from the basics - fundamental first principles like light and magnetism - and consider where their deeper understanding can inform our present challenges, we run the risk of true greatness built on the shoulders of giants.  Here's to the next Newtons: the Wissmans, Murriettas, Woods, and McGradys.  You're lighting the path to the Next Big Thing and I'm glad I've been around to witness your dawning!  Let the magic begin… again!



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Sunday, November 9, 2014

Kristallnacht and The Wall

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 On June 12, 1987 standing at the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin U.S. President Ronald Reagan taunted Mikhail Gorbachev to, "Tear down this wall."  Just over two years later and 25 years ago this night - on the anniversary of the Nazi Kristallnacht in 1938 - East Germany ended the travel restrictions across the arbitrary ideological barrier and Germans invaded Germany in a jubilant celebration aided with sledge hammers, cables and ropes.  Few of us remember 25 years ago.  Far fewer of us remember 76 years ago.  And on this night, it is important to reflect on both of these events and the implications that their forgetting portends.

Nazi Party Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels' anti-Semitic pogrom was designed to unleash "spontaneous" violence against Jewish communities throughout Germany and Austria in purported retribution for the assassination of Ernst vom Rath, a German embassy official stationed in Paris.  vom Rath was shot by Hershel Grynszpan - a Polish Jew - two days earlier after Grynszpan received the news that his family were being expelled from Germany.  An estimated 91 Jews perished on this night 76 years ago with untold scores reportedly raped and abused.  Around 260 synagogues across Germany and Austria were desecrated, burned or razed and nearly 7,500 Jewish businesses were pillaged. 

So on this silver anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall and on the well-past diamond anniversary of Kristallnacht we find ourselves with relatively similar actors perpetrating relatively similar atrocities setting in motion relatively similar consequences.  Ideology pushes Russia and China ever closer as they reinforce their interdependence with a natural gas deal valued at over $400 billion signaling an eastward shift of allegiance as the West continues to pressure Putin in the wake of Ukraine and Middle Eastern conflicts.  Linking energy and currency dependency, Russia and China are building a micro-economic dynamic that renders Reagan's boisterous challenge a faint echo on the collapsed wall.  When announcing the deal, President Putin told General Secretary Xi that this cooperation would, "keep the world within the limits of international law, to make it more stable, more predictable."

The economics of ideological separation - be they derivatives of religious or political orthodoxy - are equally flawed.  They lead to inefficiency, inhumanity, and ultimately, the animation of tyranny.

The following is a transcript of a speech I gave at the University of Notre Dame in February of 2007.  Read it carefully and think about the fact that this was written for a speech entitled Ten Years Hence:

So then what?
The Silk Road is coming back.  For over two thousand years, stretching from the Eastern Mediterranean to the Sea of Japan, southward through the Indian Ocean, the Silk Road was the nexus for the emergence of knowledge transfer and international trade networks which rival, in diversity and value, modern conventions.  While the U.S. and Western Europe prosecute military campaigns in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Silk Road is emerging as a literal and figurative power reminiscent of its earlier glory.  It was after all, on this network, that one of the most compelling technology transfers was facilitated.  Between C.E. 300 and 1168, Chinese and Muslims developed and applied the core technology for potassium nitrate, arguably one of the most explosive technologies that has shaped two millennia of human endeavors. 

To set the context, it is helpful to picture the Silk Road Economic Block in the following way.  Starting in Alexandria, Egypt and terminating in Beijing, China, draw your latitude line angling from N30° to N40°.  Then look south of that line to the Equator.  This region holds close to ½ of the world’s population; is home to most of the world’s religious and cultural progenitors; enjoys unprecedented GDP growth forecast to represent over 20% of the world’s GDP in the next ten years; and, is actively building cross-border economic cooperation at the corporate and national level.  The strength of the Silk Road Economic Block poses a number of compelling arguments for a global shift in power within 10 years hence.

First, the U.S. dollar.  In 2006, 47% of the U.S. Treasury securities were held by foreign interests while the U.S. Monetary Authority retained 17.8%.  The Federal Reserve estimates that two thirds of U.S. currency is held outside the country amounting to over $700 billion.  While the U.S. dollar represents 47% of the world’s official foreign exchange reserves, it is helpful to consider that with that exposure comes certain risks.  In June 2005, the Bank for International Settlements warned that countries would need to act “together” to deal with the burgeoning U.S. trade deficit and went so far as to suggest that the U.S. should consider cutting expenditures and raising taxes.  Failure to address this issue could lead, they suggested, to disorderly decline of the dollar and trigger significant global market perturbations.  As we all know, the appetite for this medicine has not yet created the impetus for change. 

As we see our country slip in its influence on the foreign policy front, we cannot ignore a maelstrom of our own creation.  While we’ve leveraged our nation in our pursuit of energy consumption, insatiable material acquisition, and protection of our way of living, we’ve actually mortgaged our economic fulcrum in shaping global policy.  When China elects to build energy alliances with Iran, paid for in U.S. dollars and financed on U.S. Treasuries, precisely what leverage have we retained.  Given the fact that U.S. consumption has provided vast wealth to those in the Middle East and Asia who now are cast as “emerging threats” to our national security and “sponsors” of terror, what incentive have we provided to engage in constructive dialogue?

Increasingly, innovations of global consequence are emerging from the Silk Road Economic Block.  In Singapore, Malaysia and China, biofuel technology is being funded and deployed.  In China, near-zero emission transportation and municipal systems are being developed.  In Iran, low-fire glass ceramics are being developed to safely dispose of highly radioactive nuclear waste.  In India and Iran, transgenic tomato plants are being developed to produce vaccines for biological warfare agents.  In Singapore, a global surprise anticipation center is being built to fundamentally change national and international policy from reactionary to proactive and anticipatory.  In Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates, novel energy and water municipal systems are years, if not decades, more advanced than the municipal systems in much of the U.S. and Europe.  Islamic financial products – based on fundamental ethical requirements for transparency and risk-sharing – are attracting capital market participation for funds that have never been liquid in the global economy.  National treasuries are adopting policies for foreign direct investment within the Block realizing that economic gain is inextricably linked to domestic and regional security.  In short, the region is emerging the “Fusion Economy”. 

Why Fusion?  First, because it accurately describes at the physical sciences level the imperative driving the emerging reality.  In the fusion reaction, the application of an external nuclear force overcomes the naked repulsive electrostatic force that keeps nuclei repelled.  When one nucleon is added to a nucleus, it attracts others and, by doing so, adds mass while emitting energy.  What’s coming?  The Fusion Economy.

Highly divergent, one could argue polar, forces exist in the cultures of the Silk Road Economic Block.  Nowhere are the divides between wealth and poverty; progress vs. preservation; theism and modernism more brightly illuminated.  Nowhere is there a more concentrated aggregation of wealth denominated in U.S. dollars.  Nowhere are markets so entirely dependent on the consumption of energy, goods, and services demanded by, but out-sourced from, the West.  However, in spite of these conditions, a single catalyzing event (triggered by war on an economic or corporeal level) could serve to unite those who appear so woefully segregated.  Who would have imagined that Chinese restaurants would become commonplace in Tehran?  Who could imagine that China could evolve an intellectual property regime that would actually begin successfully invalidating presumptive monopolies that other nations feared to challenge?  Could it be possible that ½ the world could create a self-sustaining resiliency that would be denominated on a non-U.S. treasury / currency platform?  Could a new paradigm integrating compulsory, ethical innovation licensing be paid for in “virtual value units” that entitle the bearer to water or energy rather than a call option on a Central Bank?  Is it possible that we’ve actually placed in motion sufficient antipathy to forge Atheist, Buddhist, Hindu, Muslim alliances that embrace more common values than the Anglo-Saxon values we seek to purvey? 

Ten years hence, Chinese won’t be buying IBM computer businesses – they will be engineering nanotechnology autonomous appliances.  While we debate how to deal with global warming in the U.S., New Delhi and Cairo may very well fund emission free public transport.  While our aging population finds itself under increasing financial burden to pay for medicine, Abu Dhabi Organics may be feeding the Gulf States medicament plants engineered at that National Research Center for Genetics and Bioengineering.  And, yes, my dear friends in the Kashmir may finally have the traditional herb compound that grows back my hair.

Today, we can choose the path that allows us to participate with those for whom we’ve had exclusionary practices for years.  We can begin to unwind the pejorative archetypes defining those like us as developed and those unlike us as aspirants.   We can participate in the financial accountability of ethical investing.  We can enter into dialogue with those we’re sure seek to do us harm.  Can we sit and objectively listen to former President Khatami quote the great Persian poet Sa’di’s words, “With devotion I will take that poison as the cure has been created by the Almighty,” and understand that this riddle contains not only the key to understanding those we find so foreign but a gentle echo of the admonition from the very Bank for International Settlements with whom no Silk Road voice conferred?  We have before us the paradox left by our Greek progenitors – to choose an Odyessian or Orphean destiny for the sirens are singing.  I choose the sweeter sound.



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Monday, November 3, 2014

Foundations of Greatness Architected to Persist

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A 20 Year Anniversary Reflection on Built to Last

In their 1994 business best-seller Built to Last: Successful Habits of Visionary Companies, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras divined attributes of "success" that were precipitated out of surveys of over 1,000 firms deemed to be "visionary".  Companies like 3M, American Express, Boeing, Motorola, Citigroup, Disney, Ford, Sony and GE were described as exemplars of "leadership" and "innovation" compared to their rivals.  For the period from 1926 to 1990, the greats outperformed their peers anywhere from 2 - 15 times their cohort or the broader market.  Attributes associated with success included: great ideas (Big Hairy Audacious Goals or BHAGs); visionary leaders; focus on profit maximization; focus on beating competition; and formation of cult-like cultures.

Twenty years ago, no airport terminal bookstore (next to which I'm now writing this blog) could keep this book on the shelf as myriads of aspirants snatched their copy to glean from its pages some morsel of insight that would solidify their business acumen.  And on this week - the 20th anniversary of the BTL release - it's helpful to critique the book for what it represents, and more importantly, the field effect of its dissemination.  And, before launching into this analysis, I have to applaud Collins and Porras for one undeniable fact - they hit a chord that reverberated across the world and influenced a generation. 

It would be hard to imagine any other way to get so many organizations to decide that defining a mission statement was worth focus groups, facilitated workshops, and millions of employee hours to put together some pithy statement like, "Our mission is to provide our employees and customers (insert superlative) (insert goods or services) with (insert integrity, accountability, or some other ill-defined ethical aspiration shown to market test well)."  HP - the company that cannot figure out whether it's business is mass-produced mediocre office supplies or a bad version of Geek Squad - went as far as simplifying its mission to the one thing that it failed to execute more completely than anything imaginable - "Invent".  Disney did an amazing job of insuring that all of its employees knew that they should stay in character at all costs while the firm danced between media suitors and spectacular box office flights of fancy.  Motorola just rolled over and played dead.  Missing from impulse to articulate mission statements was an awareness that what animated the "visionary" leader was not a cute slogan but a complex, indescribable appetite to relentlessly persist despite the efforts of those around them to "simplify" the message.  In fact, what BTL described was the make-it-simple pathogen that took down the same visionary firms it sought to describe.  Ask the architects of the Cathedral of Notre Dame -  Bishop Maurice de Sully and Jean de Chelles - to succinctly describe what made the cathedral great and they would have likely launched you or themselves into the Seine in exasperation.  Missions are measured by the evidence of their progress, not by their slogans.

Focus on maximizing what?  Twenty years ago, the cult of Jack Welch was alive and well and profit maximization ala a Roman emperor was celebrated in the coliseum of enterprise.  This fueled a denigration of labor to a productive tolerance dynamic rather than encouraging ecosystem optimization and engagement.  Survival in situ led to systematic distrust of colleagues across business units such that the consolidating corporate moniker engendered less patriotism than the federated alliance of survivors bent on their self-preservation.  To this day, BTL orthodoxy remains a primary wedge between intra-institutional collaboration where open innovation and collaboration is frequently more likely between sympathetic competitors than within the corporate monolith.  Not surprisingly, landing a better position in another firm is as much a priority of a mid- to upper level manager as is the quarterly or annual performance of the employer.

"Cult-like" is good if you trade on belief and magic.  Suspending critical thinking and 360 degree feedback throughout organizational relationships is a near certain way to create plastic failure instead of elastic adaptation.  In an era when computational traders with their quantitative factors extracted unimaginable wealth from the equity markets, cult-like thinking gave rise to an erroneous assumption that all knowables worth knowing were known.  To this day, the number of people in business who can be confronted with explicit evidence of knowledge deficiency based arbitrage which actually harms them and choose to elect blindness over perspective expansion is mind-boggling.  Twenty years later, we have more cultist shamans and divination, not analytical inquisitive intrepid leadership. 

In short, we've trained, published, recited, chanted, work-shopped, focus-grouped, and bludgeoned our intellectual curiosity into submission around an ethnographic study of celebrity - not longevity.  BTL did not provide insight into core principles about how one builds for lasting effect.  It did what any good mass-appeal book would seek to do - tell a story that feels good created largely on plausible fiction.  And, as is the case with great fiction, writing so closely to the margin of truth as to be indistinguishable therefrom has always been an effective way to start a belief system regardless of the harm that it may unleash.

This past week I had the privilege of sitting in upper floor Manhattan offices with a few of the most iconic names in investment and business execution.  These gentlemen exuded a strict adherence to enablement of their subordinates and protégés; relentless and vocal commitment to integrity, ethics and the practice of sobriety; and, fostered an environment in which the best strategy and tactics included entirely new perspectives unfamiliar just hours or days earlier.  Best-selling books will likely assiduously avoid profiling these individuals.  After all, their success was measured by the eco-system that they enabled which reciprocated benefit to themselves and others.  Yes, they made their billions.  But unlike BTL, their story wasn't about a singular congregation of minions bustling to do the bidding of an overlord.  Rather it was and is about great character that happened to reinvest in others of great character.  In so doing, these individuals and their institutions are known by the breadth of their influence and not by the tyranny of their zealous adherence to an identity illusion.  And that, in the final analysis, is what persists: the legacy of greatness that begets transcendent mastery not born of survival but rather born on the shoulders of greatness.


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