ShaulaBlog - clear-eyed capitalism

The future is YOU…tube

About a year ago I had a bizarre experience where someone I was hoping to connect with in finance finally admitted they were avoiding me because several other folks at a conference had warned this person that I was “a blogger”. I was stunned: I have never slammed anyone or revealed confidential information and it seemed it was the mere fact of me having a blog that made this crowd suspicious and wary. That experience resulted in my post explaining why I have a blog. Last night my spouse and I watched a video that once again leaves me feeling intrigued, amazed, increasingly left behind and thinking that if people can’t deal with me having a blog, well….you’d better watch this: An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube. It’s 55 minutes and worth every second.

It’s a really thoughtful study of why people vlog (video blog, essentially) a history of major social events in the development of YouTube, and itself a pretty impressive remix by the author/presenter. I literally felt chills watching a video section of internet lawyer Larry Lessig talking about how everything people do on YouTube is at some level illegal due to copyright law (yes there’s fair use, but media companies have gotten the act of acquiring material itself by “ripping” DVDs made illegal). Larry’s voice is speaking, his key words are appearing on the screen as digital text, and this is overlaid onto dramatic music and an artistic video made from copyrighted movie content that has been beautifully re-rendered. We looked for the source and it seems Professor Wesch and his research group (as participant anthropologists) blended two videos themselves: one is a Larry Lessig’s talk, I think it’s the TED talk on how “the law is strangling creativity” .
The other is a video called “Us” by a user called “blimvisible”. On YouTube this user actually has her (Professor Wesch also excerpted some online dialog that suggested blimvisible is female) own “channel” and you can find the video there as well as see a channel view of YouTube. This video itself is a remix of lots of copyrighted movie clips placed to a copyrighted and not-re-recorded song with a chorus about how we are all living “in a den of thieves”.

Professor Wesch talks about the YouTube “community” and the dialogs that happen there, but I wonder if those communities are a little threatening for folks on the fringe. With all these “communities” if you don’t stay in the conversation, it gets away from you. Perhaps for some the thought that a conversation could be occurring about themselves or issues important to them in a forum that is overwhelming for them to monitor, is itself overwhelming. I seem to have some resignation to it, possibly because I’ve been in tech for a while. Perhaps here’s where I benefit from growing up reading the Washington Post, where the lesson I drew from its coverage of federal politics is that there are no secrets and you bet somebody is going to publicly skewer you with yours sooner or later. As a kid always wanting to minimize closed doors, I ended up a bit of a goody two-shoes. Little did most of us know we’d all be public, in this disconcerting and difficult-to-manage way where the distance between obscurity and global scrutiny can be a matter of hours and a few seconds of video.

There are tools to help. I asked Darrin what he uses to keep abreast of Picnik news and he has used blogsearch.google.com, Google alerts and Technorati over time, though now Picnik gets sufficient mainstream coverage and the company has enough employees internally sharing news that he doesn’t use those so much anymore. He also mentioned search.twitter.com, where I can see that people have “twittered” about Picnik: 44 minutes ago, an hour ago and 17 hours ago (to which Darrin responds “wow, that’s a dry spell!”, but it is also Sunday morning). Comparatively, the most recent “tweet”s about ‘Socially Responsible Investing’ were 1 day ago, 3 days ago and 11 days ago.

While there’s value in figuring out which info streams are the ones for you (Professor Wesch says that most videos are seen by 100 or fewer people) and how to stay up to date, my best suggestion comes from Pema Chodron: clear seeing, calm abiding and letting go.

Technology in my life

Having spent 10 years in tech and married a fellow programmer, my life is still pretty embedded. For the hubbie’s birthday, I bought him Rockband (http://www.rockband.com/ - and this link is NOT quiet!) for the Xbox 360 and we have been playing for the last several weeks. After some experimentation with vocals, I have ended up on drums as hubbie has focused on guitar. I have never been much of a drummer, but I’m learning fast. The interface is really amazing, I hope they’re working on making it a teaching tool, because I can’t help but learn quickly about downbeat and offbeat. I can choose my difficulty level: so far I’ve explored easy and medium. The key difference is that Easy allows me to play only one beat at a time, vs making me keep quarter-beat times with one hand and throwing in other hand and foot doing some coordinated beat on Medium, where I am playing now. It was the Pixies “Wave of Mutilation” which drove me into practice mode where you can slow the song to as much as 40% of maximum (which I mostly find more confusing to vary the speed a bunch. Hazard of not being a real musician I guess). There I discovered that there’s a little section where the drumbeats fall just ahead of the beat, I think of it like pulling punches. I was able to play just the section which troubled me over and over again until I got 100% of the beats, and then go back to the real song.

There are many clever aspects that make this really fun. First, as long as I play my assigned beats, which are clearly a subset of the real song, all the drumming plays and so the resulting sound is the full song which is enjoyable to listen to. It’s the same with the guitar and bass. They do seem to have especially recorded these songs for Rockband – we found a music book at Barnes & Noble that had the “Rockband arrangements”. Second, there’s a meter that tracks how you’re doing as a band when you play tours, and there are crowd noises. I rarely can tear my eyes off my note-track to look at the meter, but I can totally hear when the crowd is restless and booing, vs when the crowd starts cheering, or on slower songs singing along. It actually gives me chills. On some of the songs with beats that are complicated (for me) I start to feel like I’m a real drummer! It totally creates Csikszentmihalyi’s flow: challenging enough to keep me focused, but not so challenging that I’m overwhelmed (usually!). It really is amazing.

As a fun bonus, a friend forwarded this video of the famous band Rush playing one of their own songs on the videogame. What really strikes me is the look of absorption on their faces. However, playing a music videogame is not the same as playing the real music - most especially for the guitar which has 5 buttons instead of 5 strings, and the show staff started them out on “expert”, so whaddya expect?

This morning Darrin blew my mind by grabbing his iPhone and holding it up to the radio which was playing some obscure song. A new program, Shazam , recorded a 10 second sample of what happened to be playing and shortly reported back the title and artist. Dang! To be able to fingerprint an arbitrary 10 seconds of song, and match it against who knows what kind of database successfully is simply amazing to me. This wasn’t a top 40 hit. Now the fact that recorded music can be reproduced identically helps, vs a birdcall recognizer I once saw that had a pretty impressive hit rate given the challenges. Somehow the speed at which it can do the lookup, and the amount of data it must be indexing against, well, makes me lose my chuckling confidence that of course the government isn’t filtering all our email. Because if there’s the data and processing power to do this song matching stuff for free, I’m not sure I can imagine what can be done with serious dollars and determination.

The Ranger, the Author and the Business Consultant

We spent our 2007 wedding anniversary at Yosemite National Park, viewing giant sequoias and fabulous stone vistas. We had the good fortune of a tour courtesy of a park ranger which included a discussion of how Sequoias reproduce. Each tree produces hundreds of pinecones, and each pinecone produces hundreds of seeds, but over the life of the Sequoia maybe one or two will actually grow into another tree. Our friend the ranger pointed out that such wide seed distribution was very non-capitalist – a huge investment for a small result. At the same time, that investment supports an entire ecosystem – squirrels who eat pinecones, birds who eat seeds.

In our Creativity in Business class for BGI, we did some reading around how to create an atmosphere that supports innovation, and one aspect of an innovative company is that its budgeting process is “leaky” – there are opportunities for motivated individuals to cobble together resources within the company to run small demonstration projects prior to getting official approval needed for those projects to officially be part of the budget.

In March of this year I heard Phillip Palaveev of Moss Adams talk to the CFA society about the growth of the Advisory Firm industry. He noted that while there’s been growth overall, some firms have grown significantly more than others. He made the point that for a firm to be positioned for growth, people can’t be working at 95+% productivity because when opportunity knocks at their door, they’re too busy to answer it. If you want to position yourself for opportunity and growth, you have to have slack in the system.

My conclusion: Inefficiency Is Good!

Land, Capital & Gentrification

I’m back to reading a book called Manhattan For Rent, 1785-1850, by Elizabeth Blackmar. I overheard intellectual greats Peter Kinder and Joy Anderson discussing their favorite books at a conference a year ago and made notes. This book helps shed important light on gentrification. “Far from fulfilling the egalitarian potential of abundant land distributed to independent proprietors, the neutral market had carried a new class dynamic into the process of residential neighborhood formation, and it persisted throughout the rest of the century. This dynamic rested on three conditions: the artificial scarcity created by concentrated ownership of vast stretches of vacant land; the structure of the competitive housing market and particularly the purchasing power that permitted elite New Yorkers to claim particular blocks for their exclusive use; and the diminishing power of mechanic families to acquire property –in other words, the power of property to reduce the value of labor.” … “Propertied New Yorkers’ control of the land supply and ability to determine effective demand raised the price of proprietary independence for the city’s artisans.” like us still today, they “seldom directly confronted the question of what these housing issues had to do with the larger structures of social power.” And instead, over time, we’ve made poverty synonymous with immorality and thus conveniently and circularly deserved.

This first section really got me thinking about land and capital. I really don’t believe in classic supply and demand and “fair” pricing – there’s just too much friction. The first concrete example I found prior to this book was apartment pricing – when the market is overbuilt, rents don’t go down in clean response to the market, because it turns out the rent pricing is built into the financing when the building is built. Instead, owners offer “concessions” like free services or discounted move in costs. With both land and capital, there’s not the same supplier pressure to negotiate as there is with a product that can lose value like technology, fashion, food or events, all of which have a time-value. People talk about the “time value of money” and certainly inflation creates some pressure, but once you have an excess of capital (or land) beyond that which you need to live, you have a negotiating power that can alter the market rather than merely participate in it. That’s what was happening on Manhattan in around 1800, that landowners who controlled vast stretches of usable land, sat on it while prices drove up on what land was available in the marketplace, and then parceled it out at high prices. I also see a dynamic of a dysfunctional market because of capital that doesn’t “need to work” in angel investing.

I got busy with school, but I picked the book back up again recently, and hit the phrase where she refers to the shift of land being allowed to circulate as capital. It seems like this is a key to gentrification – that government became funded by property taxes and thus property owners gained greater say in government, and then amenities like water, sewer & parks became funded via property taxes, so they would only be put in if a corresponding increase in property values justified their cost. The book talks about a period of park establishment, and how landowners in low-rent neighborhoods resisted creation of a park because it would have required taking some of their property, and they didn’t think they could raise rents enough to justify it. Where they could raise rents, the poor were left with nowhere to go.

It makes me think about Hernando De Soto and his book (The Mystery of Capital) on how lack of clear land titling prevents folks in Latin America from building fortunes because they can’t effectively use land as capital. He advocates for fixing that, and many people (both right & left) think he’s a genius. But it suddenly strikes me as the perfect example of how a few will gain significantly financially – those who establish clear titles and take control, at the expense of the current proprietors & residents (who will be recategorized as squatters or forced to pay new rents). I wonder if there’s a “homelessness” problem in Peru – one of the countries Hernando De Soto talks about. Contrast that lack of clear title and people setting up shops & homes where they can, with privatized public space like 2200 Westlake (not that I have a particular issue with them, but it was recently built and is close to me). I suppose there would be (and have been) homes and small businesses in odd lots in Seattle if we were not now doing regular shakedowns of this clearly titled property in the name of its owner “The Public”.

In the first paragraph where I quote from the book, there was one more point that I’ve been chewing on, and that is the point that property owners could keep renting proprietors from making the leap to being owners themselves by keeping rents sufficiently high. Sometimes there’s market pressure to compete on rents, but the overall goal to maximize return leads most property owners to effectively work together because keeping the property market tight benefits both eventual sellers and current landlords. So as long as there’s no pressure to make land be economically productive, very wealthy owners can continue to hoard it as a resource, benefiting property owners as a class at the expense of non-property owners as a class. My next thought, is that market pressure to compete comes from a hungry rising class, which is disappearing in our hourglass economy and thus making it easier for the wealthy segments to use capital as negotiating power and not need to compete.

Participatory Democracy

The Next Form of Democracy: How Expert Rule Is Giving Way to Shared Governance — and Why Politics Will Never Be the Same by Matt Leighninger (Author)

I attended a lecture at Portland city hall, basically book tour for this book, Wed April 30th 6pm. It was great!

Matt is the executive director of the Deliberative Democracy Consortium and has been a consultant to the CDC, the Study Circles Resource Center, the National League of Cities. He also wrote: The Seven Deadly Citizens: Moving From Civic Stereotypes to Well-Rounded Citizenship
The Good Society - Volume 13, Number 2, 2004, pp. 33-38

Matt started with the quote: “an expert = someone from out of town”. He started out working for a foundation on community engagement issues, began working across communities and sharing lessons across communities. He sees the same problems over and over again. One of those problems is the relationship between citizens and their government.

• Past to current: there’s a parent-child relationship (attitude?) between government and citizens
• Future: citizens want an adult-adult relationship

He sees that government representatives experience citizens as either absent or angry. Officials want to be respected & trusted, and citizens want to be heard. Citizens are also seeking social connection. Non-profits often work to fill the gap, but are many single-issue/focus groups competing for community involvement and attention, resulting in a very fragmented effort which is overwhelming to citizens. His phrase: we need “mixed-use public involvement” (like mixed-use land development). How he sees engagement happen now:

• Temporary projects - last 6-12 months, people get engaged and then disband.
• Permanant structures - neighborhood councils etc, but these can fail to provide true recruitment/engagement [enrollment is the word I'd use - SM]

Matt believes we need to combine the two.

He identifies 4 key principles for success:

• 1) recruitment [enrollment] - reach out and engage people where they are and through what they’re already involved in.
• 2) combine small-group (dialog, action planning, real work) with large-group (inspiration, amplification, reinforcement of collaboration) work.
• 3) build relationships: folks need time to compare values & experiences, and then need to consider a range of views & options for solutions to identified issues.
• 4) combine different levels of change - immediate volunteer participation, organizational change, policy change.

He then reviewed a few Mini Cases
problem: land use - people are looking for control over their surroundings, issues are contentious and difficult
solution: “neighbors building neighborhoods” in Rochester, NY.
NBN uses NeighborLink Online to let neighbors see benchmarks & current measurements, GRUB - greater rochester urban bounty is a urban farm project. Is it successful? rochester keeps losing tax base to neighboring areas and has had to cut funding so maybe not?

problem: race & segregation
solution: “Lee County Pulling Together”
Started from a church having community dialogues. Ended up identifying a need for more services in a low income neighborhood and getting a shopping center built. Key Lesson: sharing the responsibility of governance means sharing our differences.

problem: citizens becoming anti-vaccine and not trusting government
solution: “what to do about the flu?”
study circles of citizens examine vaccination challenges in pandemic situations and make recommendations to local government for emergency planning. gets people educated about the issues.

solution: “community chat” became “village foundation”
Neighbors coming together to talk about shared issues eventually began developing ways to meet those needs from within the neighborhood: neighborhood watch, got a neighborhood school established.

The Future
-We need to update legal frameworks, open meeting laws and advisory requirements have become barriers to meaningful commmunity involvement though their goals were open-ness and transparency. In the LA area in particular things have gotten problematic
-Engagement needs to combine the social and cultural with the political to be meaningful for people.
-Need to follow the 4 key principles

the goal: community engagement that is equitable, egalitarian, efficient, deliberate and decisive

There were a number of Q&As, most specific to Portland, but one answer he gave particularly caught my attention as matching a feeling I’ve had:
Q- youth engagement?
A - Sometimes youth projects have a flavor of passing the buck: “We can’t solve racism in our generation so let’s get the next generation to do it”. Cross-generational projects are great, but you’ve got to have youth leadership if you want to have youth engagement.

I also found this answer intriguing:

Q - what about government & race issues?
A - there’s an unintended legacy of the “I have a Dream” speech which is the idea that questions of difference can be resolved and there’s a promised land where we no longer have issues and we just all live happily together. The reality is that differences are always going to be there as both an opportunity and challenge; the role of government needs to be that of continually facilitating constructive engagement around differences and helping us move forward.

and these are all very sensible advice

Q - facilitation & meeting planning
A - definitely facilitation is a needed skill, people need training. the Rochester project has a training academy that trains citizens & civic servants together, so they build relationships as well as skills. Robert’s Rules are a pain, Robert can get lost. What matters: ground rules, safe space, experience & story sharing, ranges of options to choose from.

Q- how to engage the working class?
A - you need to reach out to them, be flexible on times & locations (church basements, hair salons). emphasize content that is meaningful and relevant, ensure their participation is genuine and not token, make sure they’re heard. Shorter meetings aren’t the answer, everyone is busy, it’s about making it worthwhile, so longer might be better.

Q - Donna Beagle, local expert on poverty, says to emphasize relational connections and avoid being place-based because populations are too mobile. how to deal?
A - Focus on what people belong to, what networks or groups. Have meeting structure but don’t be rigid - facilitate & follow what they want.

Q - meeting structure advice?
A - tie back again to “must include social & cultural with political”. Meet at local schools where people can see the kids school projects hung up, catch up with their neighbors and eat. Mix up the content, so have working monthly meetings but every 6 months its a big celebration with minor report-out, to have broader appeal. attach to a social event like the weekly football tailgate party - have 30 minutes of neighborhood meeting beforehand. Small group work, large group punctuation

Q - running government as a business
A - Runs government into the ground. simply can’t make everything into a fee-for-service. need to confer legitimacy on citizen participation. this is where open meeting laws get tricky, citizens don’t feel valued, but personal process isn’t super open & transparent. Challenge!

I definately recommend his book, there’s more there. He has an interesting chapter where he talks about Saul Alinsky and how classic community organizing focuses on building a power base outside of government and holding negotiations, very much a “government is them” approach as opposed to the participatory approach he believes we are capable of today, particularly supported by technology. It’s easy to dismiss that as unfair because of a “digital divide”, but I’ve seen interesting programs for serving the disadvantaged that used technology as infrastructure to support local human beings who provided the ultimate interface, and that struck me as a smart way to combine technology and touch.

too many cool things

Here’s my problem. I need to be “working”, but unfortunately a wide swath of topics fall under my current definition of “work”. I’ve got my school project which is trying to focus on community economic development that makes enough money to be self-sustaining. I’ve got a grant-making agenda that’s shifting towards community economic development but not wanting to lose social justice advocacy. I’m working on socially responsible investing and trying to make sense (and a fund!) out of that messy blur between investing and philanthropy. So “working” all too easily turns into web surfing, but I have days like this one where I learn about so many amazing things I feel like my head will explode. I know my challenge is in narrowing focus and that time is coming: I’ve got my eye on an executive coach and a pair of superstar organizers and sooner or later I’ll rope enough of you into some kind of cohesive group with a unifying goal. I also have a couple projects that will actually end and free up some time by mid-summer.

Onto the coolness! First, many fascinating sites about community economic development. My goal for class is to write some slides on our Social Return On Investment and I’m leaning towards health and safety measurements – improving community ties reduces social isolation, improving activity reduces crime. I dug up some studies that support that, but really, successful community engagement means letting the community set goals and meet them, so measuring success is less about the health and safety and more about how people feel. I went to a great talk in Portland (I should post those notes!) and the speaker, Matt Leighninger, commented that most impact research measures community satisfaction. So I’m mostly finding community assessment toolboxes, which we really don’t need for this level of our business plan and we have a bunch. But a couple of the resources were irresistible, including this one:

http://www.enterweb.org/communty.htm a site of many annotated links

That site had a number of great pages with annotated bookmarks on financial topics, and wandering around there I found two fascinating orgs focused on social investment, from more of a banking perspective:
The Institute for Social Banking, which is hosting its 2nd biennial summer session, which seems to be a week of talking about all the top issues in social finance:

Main Themes of the International Summer School 2008 are:
• “Global Challenges & Social Banking”
Social, ecological and developmental challenges of the 21st century and their intersection with the banking and finance sector.
• “Clients´ Initiatives and Needs for Social Banking”
Innovative projects that offer answers to the challenges, but depend on socially oriented financing sources, for this purpose.
• “Established Social Banking Products & Services”
Proven services, such as microfinance in developing countries, ethical and ecological investments, or the support of integrated housing projects.
• “New Social Banking Products & Services”
Novel services, such as microfinance in developed countries and “green“ credit cards, but also more disputed topics such as emission trading.
• “Organisational and Individual Challenges & Changes in Social Banking”
Requirements towards the competences of socially oriented financial service provider and “social bankers”.
• “Developments & Prospects in Social Banking”
Future trends and scenarios in the socially oriented banking and financial sector.
• Optional Session: “Presentation of Social Banks and Qualifications for/in Social Banking”
Presentation by various European, socially oriented banks, as well as by the Institute for Social Banking on offers for education and training in Social Banking.

Anybody want to go to Denmark for a week this summer? Ooo I so want to go, and I’m so tempted, but it ends August 1st and I’m supposed to be in DC for my 20-year HS reunion on August 2nd. There’s probably a direct flight… at least I didn’t grow up in Middleburg PA or something.

I also found these folks:
International Association of Investors in the Social Economy
They connect to a working group of the World Social Forum and it all begins to tie together – many of the social justice folks in the community my foundation grants to have been connecting to the World Social Forums.

I also had a phone call today with one Elliott Brown, who after time in workforce development frustrated with his own job helping people get work that didn’t always work for them, decided to start his own model of working with employers to help employees become engaged managers of their own futures, and surprise, they become engaged employees as well! His organization is Springboard Forward and they have a dedication to metrics that satisfies the most business minded among us. He suggested that if I’m such a fan, I might also want to look at The Tipping Point, a bay-area philanthropy organization focused on effective organizations working on poverty and economic self sufficiency.

And, day-end, I’ve filtered my email, I’ve added more amazing things I don’t fully know how to process into my knowledge base, and I still don’t have a clear metric for my economic development project. Need to figure out how to stop being a generalist and get back to being a specialist.

A visit to Uncle Tom’s Cabin

For Christmas my Mother gave me an interesting book of women’s literary criticism. I flipped through somewhat at random and found fascinating reading about the lives and writings of both Margaret Mitchell (author of Gone with the Wind, published in 1936) and Zora Neale Hurston (who wrote Their Eyes were Watching God, published in 1937.) Both critiques referenced Uncle Tom’s Cabin, by Harriet Beecher Stowe. From those, I discovered that Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the bestselling book of the 19th Century after the Bible. And yet, as I finish my 2nd graduate degree, I have never read it, it has never been on any suggested reading list of mine, but I certainly have heard many references to it, and I am of course acquainted with the use of the phrase “Uncle Tom” as an insult. It seemed time to fill this gap in my education.

The Seattle Public Library has The Annotated Uncle Tom’s Cabin, annotations by Henry Louis Gates, Jr, and Hollis Robbins. At times, the annotations get a little tedious, for example when they note that such and such behavior or phrase would “be racist to any modern reader.” Yes, thank you, I can see that it is, I’m sorry you were worried I might not. Sometimes the annotations are unwelcome foreshadowing when they say things like “this is the first indication that character such-and-such is going to die.” What? It wasn’t obvious to me! I didn’t want to know that! But overall the annotations are very valuable, particularly for those of us not well versed in quoting scripture. Many of the characters, particularly Tom himself, quote scripture, and the annotations help the reader along in knowing what the next, unquoted but clearly implied, line of scripture would be, or illuminating the larger biblical story that is being referenced for its parallels to the current situation.

The book was written to incite abolitionist passion in the heart of every legally white American, particularly women who comprised the bulk of the novel-reading public. Prior to writing for the anti-slavery National Era newspaper (where Uncle Tom’s Cabin was originally published as a serial), Stowe wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book. The book is alternately gripping, melodramatic, and a bit preachy, as one might expect from a novel with a political aim. During one particularly long character monologue I found myself briefly reminded of Robert Heinlein. Supposedly when Abraham Lincoln welcomed Harriet Stowe to the White House for a visit in 1862 he said “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war”!

Published in 1852 Uncle Tom’s Cabin sold 300,000 copies in the US in its first year, 2 million world-wide in its first two years and was translated into 37 languages. In more than one debate between characters, Stowe draws parallels between capitalists/laborers and slaveholders & slaves. This perhaps led to the book’s popularity in countries like Russia, where even Tolstoy read it. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom is a Christian martyr – hardworking, positive attitude and obedient – until ordered to do something more actively immoral than simply make the best of his role in the system of slavery, at which point he is clear that while his human master may own his body & its labors, God owns his soul and is to whom he is ultimately accountable. After two such occasions, he is whipped near to death, at which point he forgives his tormentors, has his wounds washed by caring supporters and at last he rests in a shed for two days and dies on the 3rd. Even I can recognize that biblical reference to the death of Christ. Tom of the book is no “Uncle Tom”.

So how did this character’s name become synonymous with sellout? It seems worth some pondering to me that Uncle Tom seems to have “sold out” by being co-opted. My first clue was a picture caption explaining that “By the turn of the twentieth century, Uncle Tom had become such an icon that he even appeared on whiskey bottles, like this one from the United Distilling Company of Cincinnati.” Seeking validation that this was the source of the sell-out, I did a little websurfing and discovered The Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia.

The “why” of the museum is long, involved, and worth reading, and I will pull this excerpt: “The mission of the Jim Crow Museum is straightforward: use items of intolerance to teach tolerance. We examine the historical patterns of race relations and the origins and consequences of racist depictions. The aim is to engage visitors in open and honest dialogues about this country’s racial history. We are not afraid to talk about race and racism; we are afraid not to.” It is Dr. David Pilgrim’s thorough writing on The Tom Caricature that explains that the many derivative works, significantly stage performances and later film, quickly degraded Uncle Tom into variations of weak, old, passive, happy, childlike servants. These are the Uncle Toms that made it to the sixties and became the source of intra-racial taunts. Dr. Pilgrim breaks down some of the usage and documents examples. He also has some interesting analysis of “Tom” roles in films over the decades and their evolution.

The book still fresh in my mind, I went to see The Waters of Babylon at the Seattle Repertory Theatre. At one point the Cuban character, Arturo, tells the legend of the death of Chief Hatuey, leader of the indigenous peoples of Cuba. To my astonishment, it nearly mirrors the story of Prue from Uncle Tom’s Cabin. There’s a version of Chief Hatuey’s death here. Another webpage traces the story to the “History of the Indies” written by Father Bartolomé de las Casas. Researching him leads me to the following :

“Historia apologética de las Indias”, for instance, has been only partly printed in the “Documentos para la Historia de España” (Madrid, 1876). The “Historia de las Indias”, the manuscript of which he completed in 1561, appeared in the same collection (1875 and 1876). His best-known work is the “Brevísima Relacion de la Destruycion de las Indias” (Seville, 1552). There are at least five Spanish editions of it. It circulated very quickly outside of Spain and in a number of European languages.

Fascinating. It makes sense to me that American abolitionists would have familiarized themselves with prior writings on the subject. So did Harriet Beecher Stowe copy the story from Father Bartolomé’s 1552 publication, or did the 1875 editors use Prue’s story from Uncle Tom to embellish the story of Chief Hatuey? Only going to the source will tell, but either way, anti-oppression movements have deep global roots.

Start as you mean to go on…

…but savor what you have today. I recently checked out the website for a new local company, Julep Nail Parlor, and followed along to the blog by its entrepreneur founder, Jane Park. She had recently written a post about about the tensions between working to put good process in place from the beginning, but also wanting to personalize and enjoy things while they’re small. Someting about that value she was seeking to hold resonated for me.

Interestingly, the phrase of my own that first came to mind was: don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good. For me that touchphrase is a reminder that one can analyze forever, but to accomplish something you need to get out and do it well enough. On the face, that’s seems the opposite of what she is talking about – she’s out there doing it, and hanging onto some perfect even when she knows she’ll have to relinquish it eventually for good. So why do those two mantras connect for me? After some feeling about it, I think it’s because both are ultimately saying it’s about the journey, not about the end. That concept for me has been a big shift that BGI is helping me internalize rather than merely intellectualize. Who We Are and How We Work Together is more important that what we actually do.

In entrepreneurship we’re now reading Built To Last, and that seems to be what they’re saying as well. They talk about being clock-builders rather than time-tellers: To build a truly great company, your product goal has to be the company itself more than any particular product. The company can then stand on its own, independent of the founders.

Collins and Porras also talk about core values vs practices. In the ParlorGames blog, Jane mentions a friend questioning her commitment to handwritten notes when it’s something she won’t be able to continue. It’s not consistent with “start as you mean to go on”. When talking with Darrin that catches his attention – he particularly dislikes when people justify a decision primarily on consistency. Consistency, perhaps, is a practice, not a value. And so for Julep, “start as you mean to go on” may be a practice they work to follow,but the core value seems to be something deeper.

“Begin as you intend to go on” (what it evolved to in my brain) also reminds me of another cherished guide-phrase: “Every step you take towards justice must have justice in it.”, I can still remember the visiting interim director of the Highlander Center saying it, with a smile. There is an end, but how we get there matters. “Be the change you want to see in the world.” And now I have Colins and Porras, saying we should be clock-builders, not time-tellers.

Additional Info on Board conflicts of interest…

I was forwarded a paper (thanks Jorji!) on how more diverse boards tend also to do a better job with basic board responsbilities. This paper has an excellent section on board conflicts of interest (a topic just a few posts ago) that covers the topic better than I did, so I’m including it wholesale.

from Nonprofit Governance in the United States by Francie Ostrower for The Urban Institute.

Financial Transactions between Nonprofits and Board Members Under the law, board members owe the nonprofit a duty of loyalty, which requires them to act in the nonprofit’s best interest rather than in their own or anyone else’s interest (Brody 2006). The IRS Good Governance guidelines caution that “in particular, the duty of loyalty requires a director to avoid conflicts of interest that are detrimental to the charity.” 10 Against this background, the purchase of goods or services by nonprofits from board members or their companies raise special concerns about who such transactions really benefit. In a guide for board members, one state attorney general’s office warns that “caution should be exercised in entering into any business relationship between the organization and a board member, and should be avoided entirely unless the board determines
that the transaction is clearly in the charity’s best interest.”11
In 2004, a proposal to restrict nonprofits’ ability to engage in these transactions was included in the Senate Finance Committee’s draft white paper but met with considerable opposition from some nonprofit representatives. The president and CEO of Independent Sector, for instance, warned that prohibiting economic transactions “could be extremely detrimental to a number of charities. . . . Public charities, particularly smaller charities, frequently receive from board members and other disqualified parties goods, services, or the use of property at substantially below market rates.” A similar objection was voiced by the executive director of the National Council of Nonprofit Associations, which is composed primarily of smaller and mid-size nonprofits.12 There has also been concern over the impact on nonprofits in rural and smaller communities, where a trustee’s law firm or bank may be the only one in the area.13 Regardless of disagreement over whether public charities should be allowed to engage in financial transactions with board members, there is agreement on the fact that any such transactions should be transparent to the board, and that policies are in place to ensure that such transactions are in the nonprofit’s best interest. Recent IRS draft guidelines are emphatic on this point. They call on boards to require members to disclose annually any financial interest that they or a family member has in a business that transacts with the charity, and to “adopt and regularly evaluate an effective conflict of interest policy” that, among other things, includes “written procedures for determining whether a relationship, financial interest, or business affiliation results in a conflict of interest” and Nonprofit Governance in the United States 7 specifies what is to be done when it does.14 Furthermore, as noted earlier, the IRS has instituted a question on the Form 990 asking nonprofits whether they have a conflict of
interest policy in place.

Corporate Hypocrisy… or Marketing?

In the last several years I’ve begun shopping at my local natural food co-op, because I want someone to navigate the increasingly shoal-infested waters of understanding food chemicals and what might or might not be good for me. The PCC Natural Markets is wonderfully informative and activist on issues relating to packaging, genetically modified foods, organics and dairy methods among many other issues. In the last year they’ve taken on High Fructose Corn Syrup (HCFS) - an ingredient more and more correlated with, though perhaps not yet proven to be causing of, poor nutritional health. About two years ago I myself decided to use this ingredient as an indicator of food I didn’t want to be eating and have nearly eliminated it (and therefore many surprisingly ordinary products, like ketchup) from my diet. Over the last year PCC worked with many of their suppliers to eliminate the ingredient from their stores. Some suppliers reformulated, some products were dropped.

In the January 2008 newsletter the PCC appropriately trumpets this accomplishment, but notes that one challenge is that some companies have simply switched from listing HFCS in their ingredient labels to instead calling it “glucose fructose syrup”. I have noticed previously that Gatorade is one such product, and I confess I was a bit suspicious when I saw it. A quick websurf reveals that “glucose fructose syurp” is what the UK calls HFCS. This is interesting to me. Clearly, the message has gotten through that customers don’t like to see HFCS on product labels because at least Gatorade, owned by PepsiCo since 2001, has made an effort to disguise it. That kind of deliberate deception is simply nauseating to me. If they know customers don’t like it, they should formulate away from it. To meet the market’s taste and cost considerations but dissemble about how (because customers might actually use that in their purchasing decisions, even if you disagree about their reasoning) is evil.

This reminds me of something that has long irritated me about business advertising. Look at any corporate TV advertising for business systems: Microsoft, HP, you name it. You’ll see a racial rainbow of shiny workers in whatever office they’re gleefully employing the product in. Obviously at least the marketing department has figured out that diversity and equity are values that mean something to their target audience. Human Resources probably knows it too, but damned if corporate leadership does because those TV ads are nothing like reality.

In B-school it was interesting to take marketing as someone who has always been outside the field – they almost convinced me that marketing really is the core of business. Unfortunately these examples show where marketing gets its bad reputation: the marketers seem to know what’s right - but apparently all they can do is talk about it. It’s a problem that they do, even though they can’t seem to make it happen.