"Capital Moves" Shows Why Labor Must Unite Globally to Counterbalance Multinational Capital

Labor historian Jefferson Cowie follows RCA's radio and television manufacturing operations from Camden, New Jersey to Bloomington, Indiana to Memphis, Tennessee and finally to a maquiladora industrial park in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico. RCA's quest for a cheap, docile and sexually stratified workforce fails to ensure its survival as an independent company, but vividly illustrates the flight of capital to havens of cheap labor and lax regulation. Cowie's work is at once scholarly, compassionate and balanced as it considers both the benefits and detriments of manufacturing as it waxes in one community but wanes in another. Over a decade old, this book's message rings truer than ever: If labor and its policymaking allies are to counterbalance multinational corporations, they must integrate their efforts worldwide.

Growing Up in an Experimental Village: Two Views of City Life

The sleek glistening Concorde SST jet, its dropped needle nose angled like a pterodactyl's beak, slid through the cloudless blue sky, high above the Manhattan skyline. I saw this from the balcony of the top-floor apartment where I grew up in New York City's Rochdale Village just north of Kennedy Airport, which the SST was approaching.

My father selected the spacious apartment, with three bedrooms and wood parquet floors, mainly for the view.   My family arrived in 1964 when I was two and Rochdale was still under construction.  I grew up watching the Manhattan skyline about fifteen miles to the West. I saw the World Trade Center being built, with self-erecting cranes atop rising towers that glowed a fiery orange at sunrise. I marveled when the lights atop the Empire State Building were tinted for various occasions: red, white and blue for the fourth of July, orange for Halloween, blue and white in honor of the New York Mets.   I had an unobstructed view of fall foliage, train movements, fires, storms, fireworks displays, and blackouts.


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Rochdale Village was established as a cooperative and named after the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers, a group of British skilled workers who, in 1844, banded together to form the first consumers' cooperative to sell items they could not otherwise afford.  Rochdale Village was developed by the United Housing Foundation, a real estate investment trust with roots in the labor union movement. It received crucial support from urban planner and builder Robert Moses and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller, along with $86 million in financing from New York State agencies.  Rochdale was experimental in that it was one of the first large urban developments -- twenty fourteen-story, three-section buildings holding nearly six thousand families -- intended to be racially integrated. It was also designed to retain the middle and working classes in New York City instead of losing them to the suburbs.

Rochdale was planned as a walkable and self-contained residential community, with two elementary schools, a middle school, two shopping centers, a medical center, a community center, generous parking, access to public transportation and even its own plant for generating electricity. It was laid out with broad green lawns, a network of walking paths and many playing fields and playgrounds.

The early years of Rochdale seemed to fulfill the its promise. Low housing costs, community amenities and the prospect of living in an integrated community attracted a diverse group of middle and working class people. A multiracial and multicultural community flourished with many racially mixed organizations. My mother taught in one of the elementary schools, and was well-loved in the community. During those early years, we had many friends and I could always find children to play with. 

But Rochdale was not insulated from the crime and racial and class tensions rampant in New York City during the 1960's and 1970's. It was built on the site of the former Jamaica Racetrack in a historically African-American area with solid neighborhoods of private homes as well as low-income housing projects and pockets of extreme poverty.   However, its initial racial composition was 80% Caucasian.  As I grew up, I became less and less comfortable walking around. I got lots of sneers and taunts from many of the kids who used our parks, malls and schools but lived in the surrounding neighborhoods, or who had recently moved to Rochdale from tougher neighborhoods.   By the time we moved out in 1981, all of our Caucasian friends and many of our African-American friends had fled Rochdale for the suburbs or other New York City neighborhoods.

I have not kept in touch with anyone in Rochdale Village, but the community website and demographic data suggest a thriving, overwhelmingly African-American community, and crime statistics show very significant reductions over the last twenty years.

I grew up with two views of city life: the skyline and the experimental community.   I learned that cities are fascinating, complex and organic--always full of possibility but often beyond our control.

For this article, I referred to Rochdale Village and the rise and fall of integrated housing in New York City by historian and former resident Peter Eisenstadt, whose forthcoming book Rochdale Village: Robert Moses, 6,000 Families, and New York City's Great Experiment in Integrated Housingcan now be ordered in advance.

"Happiness at Work" Offers a Playbook for Personal Fulfillment.

In The Fifth Discipline, which I reviewed on July 11, personal mastery is the first of five disciplines in which learning organizations must engage.   The central fifth discipline is systems thinking, which in author Peter Senge's approach, integrates and aligns the disciplines of personal mastery, mental models, team learning and shared vision.  "Happiness at Work:  Be Resilient, Motivated, and Successful--No Matter What"  by business scholar and teacher Srikumar S. Rao complements Senge's work on organizational development with a guide to personal mastery.  The book contains thirty-five short chapters, each with a mixture of philosophical arguments, pragmatic advice, parables and exercises--all designed to shift the reader's personal perspective and consequent actions. 

Rao's basic premise is that we create our own reality, not in some magical sense, but through a continuous stream of thoughts and reactions that we incorporate into perpetual internal narratives.  Like Senge, Rao asserts that we are captives of mental models of which we  are unaware, and that there is much freedom to be gained by becoming conscious of our mental strictures.   As the creators and managers of our own mental states, we can perceive new opportunities and gain new energy to pursue them.  Also like Senge, Rao urges us to focus on what we share with those around us and to seek meaningful rather than competitive interactions.  For both Senge and Rao, the value of a vision is the work it inspires us to do, not in whether the end state is realized.  While not explicitly advocating systems thinking, Rao enjoins us to see ourselves as part of a greater whole, and look for opportunities to serve the common good rather than just our own direct interests.  

There is, certainly, a fine line between systematically striving for personal fulfillment and self-interested, Machiavellian conduct.  In a chapter entitled "Standing on Slippery Rocks", Rao instructs readers to progressively sharpen their consciousness of the impacts of their actions.  Rao also asks us to trust that the world is a fundamentally benevolent place that is gradually making moral progress, even in the face of contemporary setbacks.

"Happiness at Work" is largely an artful repackaging of ideas from Zen Buddhism and elsewhere.  Many of the ideas will be familiar to those exposed to the human potential movement.   But understanding is not the same as disciplined practice, so the true value of the book arises from doing the exercises and applying the results.   In return, Rao promises a changed life, replete with energy, anticipation, commitment, fulfillment and joy--although this life may not be what the reader has planned.   

Can this work?  I read the book cover-to-cover this weekend, and did abbreviated versions of a few of the exercises.  Even though I have been exposed to much of the material before, I do feel clearer and more excited about what is ahead of me, and I think I am communicating more effectively about some difficult issues.    I plan to go through the book again, and do all of the exercises.  Stay tuned...       

"The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of the Learning Organization" Guides Leaders of all Stripes

We expect organizations to be corrupt and dysfunctional, requiring watchdogs to keep them on track. We expect their leaders to be venal and short-sighted, on the verge of being uncovered by investigators. Peter Senge, however, in the 2006 revision of this 1990 management classic, provides a convincing and inspiring guide for building successful organizations that adapt to change while nurturing their members.  Learning organizations see their members, operations and surroundings as a connected whole, and use each of their members to continually sense, interpret and adapt to change. A learning organization must continually engage in five disciplines:

1. Personal Mastery,  in which individuals develop personal visions while seeing the world exactly as it is.    They harness the resulting "creative tension" to focus their efforts on realizing these visions.
2. Mental Models, which are ways of consciously and unconsciously perceiving the world.  All models are simplifications and therefore limiting.  Many are useful, but often we are not conscious of the models we embrace and the limits they impose.  Therefore we can achieve new levels of success by becoming conscious of these models and deliberately evolving them.  

"Inventing Niagara" Tells Unique History of Cultural Icon

My parents honeymooned at Niagara Falls in 1955.  I visited once in the early 1980s.  I've always thought of it as a natural attraction surrounded by lots of tourist traps in a region struggling with its post-industrial economic fate.   Ginger Strand's "Inventing Niagara:  Beauty, Power and Lies"  gave me a comprehensive tour, including the seventeenth-century discovery of the falls by LaSalle and Hennepin, treaties and conflict with Native Americans, early landownership, tourist development, hydro-power development, massive industrial contamination, and contemporary economic renewal efforts.

Today, Niagara Falls, while still beautiful and popular, is at the beck and call of hydro-power operators.  Half to three-quarters of the Niagara River is diverted for electrical power generation, but the falls have been rebuilt so that they still appear vigorous and full.  They are actually turned up each morning during the peak tourist season and turned down each night to capture more water to generate electricity.

"Deep Dive" Provides a Whirlwind Tour and Toolkit for Business Strategists

The book uses the pearl diver as a metaphor for the
strategist

Deep Dive: The Proven Method for Building Strategy, Focusing Your Resources, and Taking Smart Action is an engagingly written,  well-organized and shamelessly self-promoting  business strategy guide by consultant and speaker Rich Horwath.  The book, which also references scholarly publications extensively, is a quick, inexpensive and worthwhile business read.  It explains exactly what strategy is and how to develop and evaluate it.  While it is directed primarily at senior business leaders, it is also valuable for entrepreneurs, department and team leaders, as well as anyone developing their own career strategy.  

Horwath defines business strategy as "the intelligent allocation of limited resources through a unique system of activities to outperform the competition in serving customers."   Competition occurs within  industries, but also within organizations and between individuals.  Even within well-established enterprises, departments and individuals compete for responsibilities, influence and resources.

The book is replete with lists of definitions accompanied by supporting examples and diagrams.  For example, there are two "lenses" of strategy:  Performing activities that are different from those of the competition, and performing similar activities in a different way.   Doing the same thing in the same way, just better, does not yield competitive advantage.  In fact, Horwath uses a biological metaphor to advance a "Principle of Competitive Exclusion", that no two functionally identical competitors can co-exist.

Horwath identifies three disciplines of strategic thinking:

• Acumen: development of insights through careful research, analysis and thinking
• Allocation: making the trade-offs necessary to focus limited resources
• Action:  executing strategy to achieve goals

The book is full of graphical and tabular tools for strategy development and evaluation.  In fact, I purchased the book because it gave clear instructions for developing an activity system map, which is a high-level representation of business strategy.

While the book has an upbeat and engaging tone, it does not minimize the challenge of successful strategy development and implementation.  Not only does it require a lot of disciplined and collaborative work, but it is fraught with pitfalls such as group-think, confirmation bias and the desire to justify sunk costs.

At the end of "Deep Dive", there is, not surprisingly, a mini-chapter on how Horwath stands ready to help further, but this does little to diminish the overall value of the book, which could serve as a prelude to deeper engagement for business leaders and other strategists.

"The Ghost Map" Portrays a Triumph of Science over Stubborn Ignorance

 A variant of Dr. Snow's map, showing 1854 cholera cases in London
clustered around the Broad Street pump (click to enlarge)

Steven Johnson's 2006 book, selected for Portland's Everybody Reads 2010 program, is a gripping and rigorous work of historical nonfiction and interdisciplinary analysis.  It shares many urban concepts with Jeb Brugmann's Welcome to the Urban Revolution and David Owen's Green Metropolis, but approaches them differently.  "The Ghost Map: The Story of London's Most Terrifying Epidemic--and How It Changed Science, Cities, and the Modern World"chronicles the 1854 cholera epidemic that struck London, a vast city  overwhelmed by accumulations of human waste.  City leaders and physicians, deeply convinced of the notion that miasmas, or foul smells, cause cholera despite clear evidence to the contrary,  were ineffective and often counterproductive in combating the disease.   "The Ghost Map" tells the story of physician John Snow and cleric Henry Whitehead, who traced the source of disease to a neighborhood pump contaminated by seepage from an adjacent cesspool.    

"Welcome to the Urban Revolution" Navigates the Essentials of Successful Cities

By 2050, 70% of the world’s people will reside in cities, and the world’s population will likely peak at over 9 billion.    While people have been migrating to cities since the advent of agriculture the final phase of this migration will occur in the coming decades.  During this final phase, the world is organizing into networks of increasingly interconnected cities that are challenging nation-states for world influence.  By the middle of this century,  Jeb Brugmann envisions an interconnected Global City, which he explains in "Welcome to the Urban Revolution: How Cities are Changing the World".  

What makes cities successful and migration from rural to urban areas so inevitable?   Brugmann identifies four urban advantages that attract migrants and drive prosperity:  density, scale, association and extension.  Urban enterprises that involve large numbers of people or goods in close proximity benefit from cities' density and scale.    Similarly, urbanites migrants have the opportunity to associate with a greater volume and variety of people relative to their rural counterparts.   The final urban advantage, extension, hinges on the superior urban communications and transportation infrastructure, along with familial and communal  relationships that persist through diasporas.  

City residents can combine the four urban advantages very powerfully through the organic or intentional practice of urbanism.   The citysystems that result are tightly coupled value networks that nurture and exploit the economic, social and cultural assets of urban residents.   Brugmann describes the migration of rural cattle herders to Dharavi, a suburb of Mumbai.   Urban migrants and their descendants use their familial and communal connections  to procure hides from the countryside. Dharavi leather industry workers produce high-quality goods in the dense, multipurpose neighborhoods in which they live and work, often in mixed use structures.  Their finished leather  goods find markets in the upscale stores of Mumbai, but are also distributed globally through Mumbai’s port facilities.  While this example of urbanism is organic, or unplanned, Brugmann sees intentional urbanism as critical to sustainable urban futures, and his book serves as a primer to aspiring urbanists.

Citysystems are robust, durable and adaptable, since they are owned, nurtured and governed by their residents.  But if the local establishment denies its communities

Robots Are Gradually Taking Over Many Human Tasks

In the previous post, the "Prometeus" video imagines the future of the Internet as an all-encompassing repository of information and experiences.  But will virtual reality completely supplant the physical world?  I don't think so.  Computers and networks need power, cooling, physical security and ongoing management.   Besides, we'll still be around, with our physical needs and desires.  On the other hand, as Internet media absorb and generate more and more of our information, robots are taking over many physical tasks.   But what is a robot, anyway?  Here are the relevant wiktionary definitions:

1.  A mechanical or virtual, artificial agent
2. An electro-mechanical system, which, by its appearance or movements, conveys a sense that it has intent or agency of its own
3. A machine which is anthropomorphic or zoomorphic in shape or scope of function

As William Saletan writes in his New York Times book review of Michael Belfiore's "The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs",  the US Defense Advanced Research Products Agency (DARPA) is driving the creation of robots with human capabilities  In 2004-2007, DARPA sponsored a series of three Grand Challenge races for driverless trucks, resulting in the substantially improved performance in the second and third races, surpassing human performance in areas such as reaction time.

Robots are not only emulating our bodies, but are beginning to heal and complete them. DARPA is currently working on a surgical robot that could help wounded soldiers survive until they can reach a hospital, while some amputees are using experimental prosthetic limbs controlled by the signals of surgically re-routed nerves

Accelerating developments in artificial intelligence, upon which robotics depends for cognitive capabilities,  have caused some to consider the singularity, which is the technological creation of superhuman intelligence. The annual RoboCup robotic soccer seeks to transcend human capabilities with the following goal:

By mid-21st century, a team of fully autonomous humanoid robot soccer players shall win the soccer game, complying with the official rule of the FIFA, against the winner of the most recent World Cup

The video shows selections from the 2009 RoboCup competition.  The humanoid finals at the end remind me of my days as an assistant Microsoccer coach when my daughter was in kindergarten.  Enjoy!

"The New World of Wireless": Mobile Communication Everywhere, All the Time

What will the world be like when almost everyone -- and everything -- can interact over a wireless web? The New World of Wireless: How to Compete in the 4G Revolution by Scott Snyder helps business planners ask the right questions and choose the right answers. Snyder portrays a world in which all of us and many of our possessions join a "Digital Swarm" of people and devices that interact continuously and richly.

"The Box" and "The Colombo Bay" Offer Complementary Perspectives on Containerized Shipping

Among the many life-changing twentieth-century inventions, one of the simplest is often overlooked: the shipment of freight in metal containers with standard dimensions and attachment mechanisms. Before trucking entrepreneur Malcom McLean conceived of containerized shipping, it had certainly been tried in different forms.  McLean's innovation, however, was an intermodal system of ships, trains and trucks, all of which could handle containers that remained intact for their entire journey.  In 1955, McLean sold his trucking company and used the proceeds to purchase a steamship line and a terminal company in order to establish the first containerized shipping service.  On April 26, 1956, a converted World War II tanker sailed from Newark, NJ for Houston carrying 58 containers along with its standard liquid cargo.  

"Green Metropolis" Provides Reality Check on Planetary Sustainability

Aren't cars that get better gas mileage or run on electricity good for our planet?  What could be better than a glittering new corporate campus designed and built from the ground up with the latest environmental certifications, with half of the formerly pastoral site left as permanent open space?  David Owen's Green Metropolis: Why Living Smaller, Living Closer, and Driving Less are the Keys to Sustainability eviscerates conventional wisdom by demonstrating that many "sustainable" technologies and practices have the effect of accelerating consumption of natural resources by reducing costs, removing obstructions to consumption, allowing us to spread out further and, of course, making us feel better about what we are doing. 

For example, automotive technology that gives us more miles to the gallon is the economic equivalent of reduced gas prices, making it easier to drive more.  Additional highway lanes that reduce congestion make it easier for us to commute longer distances from employment centers in return for bigger houses and yards.  Too large an open space in the middle of a walkable area can drive people into their cars.  Even the extension of a commuter rail line to the periphery of a metropolitan area can lure families from the city center to a lifestyle much richer in resource consumption. 

Owen's answer is density.  The Green Metropolis is none other than New York City, of which the borough of Manhattan is the epicenter of the sustainable lifestyle.  In New York, much of what appears unnatural or unpleasant is actually good for the earth.  The congested streets and expensive parking make cars less popular.  Outrageously expensive housing and land makes people do without a lot of stuff fashioned from petrochemicals, and makes thirsty private lawns a rarity. Population density makes delivery of virtually all services more efficient, including food distribution; heating, ventilation and air conditioning; transportation, health care, education and the like. 

American cities of the nineteenth century and earlier were sources of pollution and communicable illness, as are many cities in developing countries today. But New York, like all modern cities, has made substantial progress in sanitation and environmental stewardship.  So a hundred-year-old New York City skyscraper is much more resource-efficient than a new suburban tract development or corporate campus.

This is a difficult message to deliver.  Most families dream of a house of their own, with private space for their children to play.   Even the author moved with his wife from the city to semi-rural northwest Connecticut after seven years of marriage, spreading out into a house, multiple cars, and a garage filled with unused goods past their prime. 

So what is to be done?  Owen advocates steps that would make dense living more attractive, such as better schools, public safety and public transportation in our cities, and the judicious application of resource-efficient technologies.  For example, highly efficient mini-cars may be part of the solution in rural areas where people are already spread out, but they shouldn't be advanced as an alternative to urban mass transportation.  Alternative energy technologies such as wind and solar only make (unsubsidized) sense in certain parts of our country, so a national scheme that includes substantial investment in transmission facilities makes a great deal of sense as well. 

Owens casts excessive resource consumption as a market failure requiring government leadership, citing historical examples like the Easter Island civilization.  Certainly, if developed countries like the US cannot provide convincing leadership, climate change and resource scarcity will be exacerbated by the giant economies of rapidly developing nations, most notably China and Russia.  The book ends on a sobering note, with a vignette that demonstrates the difficulty of changing American culture.

Owen delivers his message with color, wit, and personal honesty, making for an engaging read.  But what do you think?  What is the best way to get world society to live more efficiently? 

Field Guide to the Unnatural Captivates and Educates

Ever look at a construction site, a chemical plant, a railroad yard or a quarry and wonder how everything worked?  Or does someone in your household peer at the cables and boxes on utility poles, wondering what each one is for?   If so, here is a book for you. Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape by Brian Hayes adopts the point of view of a naturalist observing and explaining an unnatural landscape.

The book is full of revealing--and often beautiful--photographs of ubiquitous but often mysterious features of our industrial landscape.   The text provides thorough, readable explanations about how natural resources become products and services that we rely on daily; how our wastes are processed; how roads and buildings are constructed; and how railroads operate.  Each chapter stands on its own, so readers can pick the topics that interest them most.  There are lists of references for both children and adult infrastructure enthusiasts.

This is a book about infrastructure, not sustainability.  It evokes a sense of wonder about the technologies that underpin our civilization, but does not talk much about the problems that they can cause when unsustainably managed.  However, this book provides a solid introduction for those interested in evaluating or improving the sustainability of our critical industries.

"Trucking Country" Navigates a Web of Cheap Food, Low Wages, and Agribusiness

It is a frequent contention of political liberals that working-class people that support unbridled "free market" competition have somehow been duped into voting against their own economic interests. But Shane Hamilton paints a darker picture in Trucking Country: the road to America's Wal-Mart economy: an alliance between big business, consumers and their political patrons that leaves the working class devoid of powerful allies. What's more, the University of Georgia history professor from a Wisconsin farming family traces some of the cause to the organized actions of the workers themselves.

The story begins with the "farm problem": How do we maintain a steady supply of food coupled with low prices for workers. One approach pursued by the US government has been to encourage farms to be larger and more efficient agribusinesses. This policy, along with generations of struggling farmers selling out to their neighbors, has led to larger, specialized farms. As farms got bigger, the remaining farmers had to focus on running them, rather than taking their increasing volume of produce to market. So, beginning in the 1920s, former farmers and others looking for work in rural areas went into trucking.

In 1935, Congress regulated interstate trucking, but exempted haulers of unprocessed and some minimally processed food products. The trucking industry as a whole was regulated by the Interstate Commerce Commission, which put up regulatory barriers that stabilized freight prices and fostered the ascendancy of large, unionized trucking firms. These firms along with the membership of the Teamsters Union benefited from government investment in the trucking industry and infrastructure such as the Interstate Highway System.

Over time, government-subsidized agribusiness got even larger and more powerful, and the power of the Teamsters union peaked and began to erode. At the same time, individual owner operators and owners of smaller trucking firms grew increasingly resentful about the regulatory barriers that prevented them from competing in much of the trucking marketplace. The 1973-74 OPEC oil embargo intensified independent truckers' dissatisfaction, and radicalized elments of a rebellious, freedom-loving trucking culture. Finally, the a confluence of political forces--neopopulist truckers, free-market advocates from across the political spectrum, neoconservatives, and even Ralph Nader--led to the passage of the Motor Carrier Act of 1980, which deregulated the trucking industry.

While deregulation provided more opportunities for truckers and fostered some entrepreneurial successes, it ultimately led to consolidation of large, low-cost transportation providers; massive, rural factory farms and slaughterhouses served by low-cost trucking; lower prices for consumers; and lower wages and poorer conditions for all workers in the food supply chain. But truckers agitated for deregulation. Were they hoodwinked into advocating against their own economic interests? Hamilton contends that they were not, arguing that deregulation was the best deal that they could get in a world shaped by powerful business interests and their political patrons.

This is an absorbing and sobering book. It nicely complements the work of Michael Pollan, who has focused on the ecological, health and social consequences of industrial food production.