Remixing the Generation M Manifesto

July 11, 2009

David Eaves did something awesome. I didn’t clue into this possibility when I blogged about Umair Haque’s Generation M Manifesto. He literally remixed and edited it.

I was inspired to start editing it myself but found I wanted to change too much — not that I disagreed with the spirit of the thing (which I agree with almost too-passionately) but because I have my own perspective, with my own specialized vocabulary, which I use to address the issues that I’m in the best position to understand and affect. Accordingly, I’m inclined to frame it in rather different terms.

But the last thing I’d want to do is oppose or contradict what Haque and Eaves or the rest of the best are saying.

It shouldn’t be a tug-of-war over terminology and semantics. That’s the old way of doing things — what Generation M is supposed to overcome.

But, nor can we merely “agree to disagree.” We have to keep the dialog open and alive.

What these conversations and debates do, which we need to ensure they continue doing, is generate familiarity & orientation, adaptation & integration.

The notion of Familiarity replaces the notion of categorization. Instead of silos we have networks of relations. Instead of neatly arranging everything (and everybody) into discrete slots, we need to appreciate things for the various traits they share with this-and that — and, ultimately, their individual character.

Orientation replaces the overconfident notion that we actually know where everything is and where we’re going. We can’t plan everything. We will go off the road from time to time (maybe because the road gets washed-out or collapsed, maybe because we see better opportunities in previously untravelled & unexplored areas), so it’s better to have the ability to re-orient ourselves in changing environments.

I’ll leave Adaptation and Integration with you… and there are a lot more notions to explore…

What it comes down to is that this is really an anti-manifesto kind of movement. It’s about the process — whether it’s the process of remixing or sharing or debating… — not anything that could be laid out comprehensively in absolute terms.

Put simply, it isn’t about the document, it’s about the dialog.

At the same time, we need documents and draft manifestos as platforms or frameworks and references for dialog. Discussing things like this is the best way to exercise our minds, voices, and vocabularies; to generate familiarity and rapport with others; to understand their ideas and appreciate their perspectives.

… as long as they keep our conversations and adventures alive.

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Burying the Best and the Brightest

July 9, 2009

I’ve been thinking about the pernicious effects of our overachievement society again, this time by way of Philip Delves Broughton (via NYTimes Opinionator), in a post called The McNamara Syndrome.

The following is actually from the author’s book, Ahead of the Curve:

One of the most famous alumni of Harvard’s MBA program is Robert McNamara, the U.S. Secretary of Defense during the Vietnam War, and member of the class of 1939. In his book InRetrospect reflecting on the war, he wrote that while at Harvard he had developed “an approach to organizing human activities.” There were three steps: “Define a clear objective…develop a plan to achieve that objective, and systematically monitor progress against the plan.” This was still the essence of the HBS method. Strategy, planning and measurement. Of course, McNamara’s methods came to seem macabre when he applied it to counting bodies in Vietnam.

[If you haven't seen The Fog of War yet, you should.]

Broughton goes on in his post to suggest “the McNamara Syndrome persists at Harvard Business School and more widely among business and economic leaders. It consists of three very dangerous elements”:

1)       Excessive faith in systems, long-established networks, language, thinking and a set of assumptions which change more quickly than you do…

2)       An over-justified confidence in one’s methods, instilled by schools and prior success…

3)       Brilliant people often end up working and thinking inside a bubble. Inhabitants of this bubble reinforce each other’s behavior, assuming it to be all equally brilliant…

Any of this seem familiar?

In today’s economy, the goal of increased home ownership, fine, became the mortgage meltdown and the creation of far too many credit derivatives.

What really caught my attention was

In McNamara’s case, he assumed that what worked at HBS, Stanford and Ford would work at the DoD. This is the subject of Halberstam’s brilliant and tragic book The Best and the Brightest, about McNamara and the other men around JFK. The financial collapse is The Best and the Brightest replayed in the economic sphere, though stripped of the public service ethic in Kennedy’s generation.

That highlighted part (my emphasis) represents one of my most persistent complaints.

“The best and the brightest” in our society owe their success to a rigorous sort of disposition that is reinforced from a very early age. In turn, they continue to refine our institutions and conventions towards those values.

Our whole system of education and career advancement is set up to promote people who thrive within established frameworks, where there are “right and wrong answers,” competing to win zero-sum games in closed, rule-directed systems, with clear “winners and losers.”

The lessons learned along the way — from classroom to sandlot, continuing on through graduate school, carrying over to the negotiating table, board room, golf course, etc — aren’t easily unlearned when people find themselves facing big, ambiguous, complex challenges that require the reticence to dwell in uncertainty, adaptiveness, humility to give up on goals and plans that turn out to be misdirected, and the creativeness to develop new frameworks.

Instead, the best and the brightest — so used to winning and being right (not to mention being recognized and rewarded for it) — have interpreted the open and dynamic systems they face at the highest levels in the real world as being like the simpler challenges, in closed systems, they had dominated all their lives.

The more I think and write about it, the more I believe that much of the past century was an experiment — an attempt by mankind to control everything with machines, mathematics, and rigid management regimes — which eventually failed.

According to current assumptions about success (i.e. our need for certainty and confirmation), that’s supposed to be bad news.

But if we start to bury those arrogant ideals and look at the world more openly, as we ought to — as an inherently uncertain process, beyond our ability to control completely — then the realization that the 20th century was an experiment, is, in fact invigorating…

Our response to the ongoing collapse of the old models should be, “Look at how much we’ve learned!”

And look at all of the opportunity…

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“Dear Old People Who Run the World”

July 9, 2009

Umair Haque at Harvard Business Blogs has written a Generation M Manifesto, which begins:

Dear Old People Who Run the World,

My generation would like to break up with you.

Everyday, I see a widening gap in how you and we understand the world — and what we want from it. I think we have irreconcilable differences.

I understand that previous generations have made similar complaints in the past, when they were young. I’m inclined to think that the big difference between today’s radical sentiments vs, say, the 1960′s, is how much of a technical advantage we have. Not only do we know how to program DVD players and tweak security settings on Facebook, but we are also using that technical advantage to advance our theoretical knowledge.

So it isn’t like we simply have a different perspective. Some of us can make pretty serious, objective cases when we argue [as Haque goes on]:

You turned politics into a dirty word. We want authentic, deep democracy — everywhere.

You wanted financial fundamentalism. We want an economics that makes sense for people — not just banks.

You wanted shareholder value — built by tough-guy CEOs. We want real value, built by people with character, dignity, and courage.

You wanted an invisible hand — it became a digital hand. Today’s markets are those where the majority of trades are done literally robotically. We want a visible handshake: to trust and to be trusted.

You wanted growth — faster. We want to slow down — so we can become better.

You didn’t care which communities were capsized, or which lives were sunk. We want a rising tide that lifts all boats.

You wanted to biggie size life: McMansions, Hummers, and McFood. We want to humanize life.

You wanted exurbs, sprawl, and gated anti-communities. We want a society built on authentic community.

You wanted more money, credit and leverage — to consume ravenously. We want to be great at doing stuff that matters.

You sacrificed the meaningful for the material: you sold out the very things that made us great for trivial gewgaws, trinkets, and gadgets. We’re not for sale: we’re learning to once again do what is meaningful.

There’s a tectonic shift rocking the social, political, and economic landscape. The last two points above are what express it most concisely. I hate labels, but I’m going to employ a flawed, imperfect one: Generation “M.”

And no, this isn’t just a reactionary youth movement. We’ve already got a stacked roster of role models who have either carved a niche or dynamited their presence into the heart of the old landscape:

Gen M is about passion, responsibility, authenticity, and challenging yesterday’s way of everything. Everywhere I look, I see an explosion of Gen M businesses, NGOs, open-source communities, local initiatives, government. Who’s Gen M? Obama, kind of. Larry and Sergey. The Threadless, Etsy, and Flickr guys. Ev, Biz and the Twitter crew. Tehran 2.0. The folks at Kiva, Talking Points Memo, and FindtheFarmer. Shigeru Miyamoto, Steve Jobs, Muhammad Yunus, and Jeff Sachs are like the grandpas of Gen M. There are tons where these innovators came from. [...]

Anyone — young or old — can answer it. Generation M is more about what you do and who you are than when you were born. So the question is this: do you still belong to the 20th century - or the 21st?

I find myself starting to get a more radical edge.

This is not comfortable for me. In the past I’ve been fairly conservative by nature, but these points just seem increasingly obvious to me. Where does this lead?

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Print Impulses

July 8, 2009

Won’t lie.

When you package seminal books in a design-conscious concept, I turn into a total sucker.

capote in cold bloodmailer the fighthershey hiroshimachaikin a man on the moontosches hell firethompson hells angels

The latest set to catch my eye is the Penguin Magnum Collection (just a UK & Australia thing?), featuring six narrative non-fiction classics updated with iconic cover photos. [via CR via BMD]

 

A couple of them are on my to-read radar (not exactly on my to-read list). If I saw these seven or eight years ago I might’ve given into the craving to buy; I’d have those barcoded spines planted on my bookshelf, looking at me every day, reminding me of my transaction.

I’m glad I’ve outgrown that impulse.

But now I have a new impulse: making this stuff…

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Survival of the Fittest Ideas

July 7, 2009

There’s some good insight to be gleaned from this throwaway quote by Marc Andreessen (at Wired: Epicenter):

“Twitter was timed right: Two years earlier, or later, and it would have been a failure,” he says. “This is what our problem was 15 years ago (with Netscape).”

It’s a good following to the last post, about success not being exclusively a matter of personal (or group) characteristics, nor exclusively a matter of the environment, but a result of how those different factors interact.

It’s the same with ideas, behaviours, beliefs, business models, etc…

We all say we understand that “there’s a time and a place for everything,” but we also have a tendency to get into habits of assuming that a) such-and-such an idea failed in the past, we learned our lesson — “it’s wrong” –  or b) such-and-such an idea worked in the past so it is right, it’s been proven — “it’s right.”

It isn’t enough to know that something is right or wrong, we need to try to understand how and why as well; so when circumstances change we can adapt our ideas accordingly.

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