"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.

DOs and DON'Ts for Technology Salespeople

As an IT enterprise architect, I often meet with salespeople from among the best-known and most reputable technology companies, as well as from younger companies staffed with industry veterans.   I am often flabbergasted by the mistakes they make as they try to sell complex solutions.  But I also depend on these salespeople to help me make the right recommendations and build internal support for my efforts, so I often work with them to refine their approach.   Here is a sampling of the advice I give:

• If you are selling something, say so.  I have gotten email from a company requesting my help in doing "research",  when they were in fact trying to sell sophisticated software. 
• Do your homework.  I have written extensive requests for information and proposals, and spent hours explaining what we needed, only to receive generic presentation and sales materials in return.      
• Don't rely exclusively on simple associations to construct your sales agenda.    Salespeople have spent many hours preparing and presenting materials that are only tangentially related to my employer's situation, or that cite customers with vastly different circumstances.
• Don't sell things that customers are not ready for.    Recently, after briefing a sales team extensively, I was rewarded by an hour-long presentation on an advanced capability that my employer could not possibly use in the next several years.   Some foundational IT-enabled business capabilities can take years to mature, due to the need to re-engineer business processes, develop organizational culture and capabilities, and perform complex integrations with critical older systems. 
• Don't assume that a close working relationship can easily be extended.  I have seen salespeople casually introduce themselves and start selling complex solutions to people whose names they have just learned from their their regular contacts.  
• Don't try to undermine the IT-business partner relationship.  I have seen salespeople directly confront business managers with specific proposals without the support of IT.  IT organizations rely on close working relationships that pool technical and business expertise to make commitments that shape the organization for many years. 
• Get the team right.  After extensive pre-meeting preparation, I have often spent hours meeting with pre-sales consultants who did not fully understand the problem at hand.
• Keep your word.   I have made detailed plans with salespeople for joint investigations or technology demonstrations that could have laid the groundwork for new business deals, only to have the plans fall through because the sales team did not do their agreed-upon part.   

This advice may seem obvious, but I find that the few salespeople that follow these rules consistently stand out from the crowd and are a joy to work with.

"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.  

"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.

"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

Where We're Headed

I have been blogging for about five months now, and my typical end-of-year vacation has given me some time to think about where this blog is headed.  I've decided to focus on helping readers understand and exploit economic, social, environmental and technological developments for the sake of their careers, organizations and communities.

The "Urban Age" is upon us, with more than half of us, since 2008, living in cities or towns (first video). By 2050 nearly 70% of the world's 9 billion people will live in urban areas. Nearly all growth from now until then will occur in poorer countries. By 2050, 90% of the world's 1.2 billion youth (aged 15 to 24) will live in developing countries, and over 80% will live in Africa or Asia. Even these statistics presume increased adoption of family planning in developing countries.

Nine billion of us will have to face the effects of climate change.  It is very likely that increasing levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere resulting largely from human activity will contribute to increased average temperatures and rising sea levels.  These conditions could displace hundreds of millions of  people from their homes and are leading to conflicts as ethnic, religious, and political divisions are exacerbated by contention for agricultural land and water.

On the other hand, computing and communications technologies and the media that exploit them may be able to provide some relief.  For those with access, the Internet of the future will enable virtual experiences, as well as information sharing and recombination (mashups) that we can barely imagine today  (second video).  Increasingly, we are exchanging information remotely in order to operate global value networks that reduce risk and increase efficiency.  Even warfighting is becoming virtual, with drone pilots at a US base flying missions in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"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.  

Portland Competes with SunBelt for Net Newcomers While Employment Stagnates

An analysis by Joel Kotkin on newgeography.com cites Portland-Vancouver-Beaverton, Oregon as 4th of the 29 largest US metro areas in 2006-2008 at 8.2 per thousand total population.  This ranking places Portland in the midst of cities known for their rapid growth, such as Phoenix, San Antonio, Dallas, Denver and Houston.

The 2000-2008 version of these figures put the area 8th at 6.2 per thousand.   Metro area employment, however, shrunk by 0.2% in a similar period, Q3 2000-Q3 2009.  Figures are from the US Census and Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) .  Image © BrokenSphere / Wikimedia Commons.

Also according to the BLS, the Portland metro area's seasonally adjusted unemployment rate was 10.9% in September, 2009.  What do you think can or should be done about this imbalance of newcomers and job creation?

Clean Tech Courses Offer Unusual Opportunity to Local Professionals

I have been volunteering with the Clean Tech Advisory Group sponsored by Worksystems, Inc. and the Oregon Training Network. In order to empower professionals who live or work in Multnomah or Washington counties, we have designed a series of world-class local courses at bargain prices thanks to federal subsidies. The theme is sustainability: best practices for improving the financial, social and environmental results of your organization.   Explore the courses that interest you, and be sure to sign up right away!

Integrating Sustainability Into Your Business Practices  November 18-19.  Learn how and why organizations embrace sustainability, and how it benefits them.  Develop a sustainability plan for an aspect of your own organization.  This course is led by business consultant Phil Berry who, as director of footwear sustainability at Nike, was one of the leaders that built the best corporate environmental program in the United States" according to Business Ethics Magazine (2006).  Register Now


Managing Virtual Teams December 1-2.  Learn how to establish, lead and manage teams that cannot regularly work face-to-face.  Develop plans for improving your organization's virtual work environment. Instructor Mark Molau has held senior management positions at Hewlett-Packard, Price Waterhouse and Microsoft, and has  developed and led a variety of multinational organizations and strategies.  Register Now

Taking Advantage Of Externally Hosted Platforms And Applications  December 7-8.   Learn to evaluate IT solution hosting options from dedicated hardware to cloud computing and optimize your organization's hosting investment.  Among their myriad IT leadership experiences, instructors Manoj Garg and Jackie Baretta are former CIOs of WebEx Communications and Con-way respectively.   Register Now

Understanding Energy Management and Measurement for Your Company  December 14-15.    Learn how to measure and reduce your organization's energy consumption.   By the end of this course, you will develop an opportunity to enhance one of your organization's product or services by reducing energy consumption.    Instructor Phil Berry was chosen by Vice President Al Gore as one of 1,000 people trained to deliver his climate change presentation.  Register Now

Photo Essay on the South Waterfront: New Urbanism meets the Great Recession

Portland's South Waterfront community along the Willamette River just south of downtown is served by an aerial tram to the Marquam Hill campus of Oregon Health and Science University and a streetcar line that loops through the city.  It is full of gleaming new buildings with a riverfront trail and attractively planted public spaces, and offers housing for a variety of income levels.  However, its promoters have been unable to attract sufficient luxury condominium buyers, leading to an auction on September 20 where condos were sold at steep discounts.  At the end of August, I explored the South Waterfront and and posted a photo essay to Facebook.

"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.

Does IT Matter? Depends on How You Define IT

After naming this blog based on a chapter in Nicholas Carr's "The Big Switch", and reading his controversial Harvard Business Review article "IT Doesn't Matter", I felt compelled to read his 2004 book "Does IT Matter? Information Technology and the Corrosion of Competitive Advantage", which expands upon the article and addresses the debate that it triggered. Carr's argument is basically that obtaining a sustainable competitive advantage through IT is unlikely, since your competitors will be able to duplicate that advantage, and that it is often difficult to deliver the logically anticipated business benefits of IT projects.

Over last sixty years, IT has progressed from a complex, risky and expensive investment to a ubiquitous and increasingly shared "infrastructural technology". To make matters worse, IT has become "The Universal Strategy Solvent", providing all companies with the same set of powerful tools to globally source, market, and distribute their products. In this environment, competitive advantages with are difficult to sustain. Therefore, they must be leverageable for the creation of new advantages. This idea reminds me of Amazon.com, which started out as an online bookseller, branched out into myriad merchandise categories, added an online public marketplace, and became a provider of cloud infrastructure.

To manage the IT "Money Pit", Carr recommends spending less, following in the footsteps of other organizations that work the kinks out of new technologies, having business partners take on innovation risk, and managing IT defensively by preventing catastrophes before searching for breakthroughs.

Carr ends by debunking the notion that computers have, or will magically transform our society. Certainly, we have many of the same dominant institutions and challenges, with some complex new ones, like the shifting of skilled jobs to low-cost economies.

But, does IT matter to business seeking to get ahead? Certainly, early moves by already-strong players, like American Airlines' Sabre System, and American Hospital Supply's purchasing and fulfillment system for its customers, yielded long-lasting competitive advantage, but these occured at the early stages of IT's ascendancy. But Carr's detractors point to counterexamples of IT making a difference, and there are many successful businesses that depend on creative and effective uses of IT.

I have found that, if we define IT as the application of technology to business requirements as taken from those outside of IT, then there is there is little chance of achieving competitive advantage or even much of a return on investment. However, if the practice of IT includes the application of systems thinking and modeling to collaboratively define and rapidly implement new ways of doing business, then there is the possibility for significant and leverageable sucess. At the heart of all of today's IT success stories, there is a cross-disciplinary conception of how the business could operate differently.

I encourage all of my IT colleagues, as well as any one who cares about the success of IT investments, to read this book. It is now five years old, but still holds important ideas.

Historical Novel and Vivid History Offer Two Views of the Era of Electrification

I just finished reading Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electrify the World by Jill Jonnes, which navigates the development of electricity from a curiosity to a ubiquitous enabler of contemporary life. It begins with an 1882 encounter between Thomas Alva Edison and his patron J.P. Morgan and then flashes back to the foundational work of Luigi Galvani, Alessandro Volta, Benjamin Franklin, Michael Faraday, and others, building a solid conceptual foundation for the non-technical reader. The book then focuses on the life and work of three men, the inventors Thomas Alva Edison and Nikola Tesla, and the entrepreneur George Westinghouse. It covers the development of incandescent lighting, the often bitter competition between advocates of AC and DC systems of power generation, the advent of electrically drives for manufacturing machinery, and plenty of Gilded Age social, cultural and business vignettes.

"Empires of Light" culminates with the large-scale development of hydroelectric power at Niagara Falls, New York. The adoption of AC power generation machines developed by Tesla marked the final victory of AC power generation and distribution, with which a central power generation station could server a much wide area than with DC. Empires is a vivid, gripping read, providing insight into the technical, economic, and social aspects of electrification, while also illuminating the lives of its pioneers.

A few years ago, I read City of Light by Lauren Belfer, a historical novel set in Buffalo and Niagara Falls, New York during the construction of the Niagara power station. The narrator is Louisa Barrett, an unmarried headmistress of a private school for girls who, by suppressing her desires and sorrows and applying her keen intuition, is able to operate within the world of men. The whirlwind of events includes environmental protests, concealment of a teenage pregnancy resulting from child abuse, a murder mystery, attempts at racial integration, an industrial accident at the Niagara construction site. All this and more transpires amid vivid scenes of Buffalo in its economic and cultural ascendancy.

While much of Louisa's life seems inviting, she is always on guard. She shrewdly courts the industrialists who fund the to which they send their daughters, while educating and developing her students so that they may make the most of the limited opportunities available to women a century ago. Underneath it all, she holds a heartbreaking secret, which she gradually reveals as the book unfolds.

Together, these two books paint a picture of a time of great progress and promise, but one in which women, African-Americans, and the working class were both excluded from opportunity and put at great personal risk. The books demonstrate capitalism--often aided by government--yields many innovations with broad benefits. However, left unchecked, it concentrates wealth and power to the detriment of the public good. Considering them together gave me a renewed appreciation of the importance of the legal protections that have since been enacted for women, workers and minority groups.

Your thoughts?

Short- and Long-Term Complexities for Equity Investors

The Matrix, but with money: The world of high-speed trading by John Stokes on Ars Technica is an interesting look at how global equity markets are dominated by computerized high-frequency trading, or HFT. According to the article, 60 to 75 percent of all trading may be done by computers, while only three percent of all trading is "open outcry", i.e. traders yelling and gesturing on the floor of an exchange. The rest of the trades are routed through electronic communication networks, or ECNs.

HFT involves executing rapid-fire trades in order to earn small profits on each one, and multiplying those profits with high volumes. Experts estimate that HFT generated $20 billion in profit for the financial sector last year, with Goldman Sachs responsible for 20% of the volume. Some investment funds use HFT exclusively. Stokes provides some examples of HFT approaches, including "iceberging", "predatory algos". "statistical arbitrage", and "dark pools". He also discusses the importance of superior relative system performance through optimized software and the latest hardware. Some of these techniques are controversial, with their advocates claiming that they ensure liquidity, but their detractors claiming that they amount to manipulation.

On the other hand, some researchers assert that Now the Long Run Looks Riskier, Too. Mark Hulbert's March article in the New York Times says that while the returns on equities have been superior to other asset classes and remarkably consistent over the past two centuries, projecting those returns forward over future decades could be quite risky due to factors without precedent, such as global warming and the potential occurrences and outcomes of future wars.

How do you view short-term versus long-term equity market volatility? How do your views affect your behavior as an investor?

"Big Rig" Shows Need for Sustainable National Logistics

I recently happened on the DVD "Big Rig", a 2007 documentary by Doug Pray on the transportation shelves of my local library. And I'm glad I did. The film spans the US with interviews with truckers and those who serve them. It is beautifully and movingly filmed, with panoramas of cities, mountains, and plains providing a visual counterpoint to many interviews within the confines of a moving cab. The soundtrack is an unusually catchy mix of eclectic hip-hop-, blues-, and country-influenced songs by Buck 65, with a smattering of old country trucker ballads thrown in.

Certainly, as many other reviewers have said, "Big Rig" vividly and convincingly portrays the courage, perseverance, dedication, camaraderie, and faith of those that drive trailer trucks across our country, carrying rivers of consumer goods and raw materials that are critical to our economy and lifestyles. But it also portrays the destructive and tragic side of long-haul trucking. The scenes of smoggy cities girdled with truck-clogged freeways make a clear case for policies that encourage intermodal transport, consumption of local products, and less consumption overall.

The toll on truckers is apparent also. The majority appear haggard and unhealthy, and talk of failed marriages and other casualties of spending most of their lives on the road. Many of the interviewees have achieved financial stability along with a sense of autonomy and self-worth through trucking, and enjoy their work. But some have also become reactionary and resentful, railing against a federal government that suppressed Native Americans and built railways, irrigation projects, and highways so the entire country could be traversed, settled and farmed. The same government uses its treasure, influence, and military might to secure much of the oil necessary to fuel the trucks they drive and power.

This film tells us that sustainable logistics could help heal not only our planet, but also the fabric of individuals and communities that comprise our nation.

Could encouraging telework discourage mobile phone use while driving?

Driving while texting or talking on mobile phones is a major safety hazard that many people dismiss. It turns out that the US National Highway Traffic Safety administration studied the risks in 2002-2003, but saw them as too insignificant to justify regulation, and did not release their internal reports.

I have taken many direct or conference calls over the years where one of the participants, often someone in sales or consulting has been driving. In addition, I have used a mobile phone while driving in the past, but have gradually weaned myself from the practice.

At the beginning of next year, handheld cellphone usage--but not other forms, which experts say are equally hazardous--will likely be against the law in Oregon. Some experts advocate a blanket ban on all mobile phone usage while driving, since the safety impacts of this practice have been shown to be as serious as drunk driving.

What's really happening here is that people are teleworking while they are driving. Phasing in such a ban while encouraging employers to support telework could have a number of positive effects.

• Productivity. Workers who need to make a lot of phone calls could begin and end their workdays at home, where they could use a PC at the same time, and either commute more efficiently between rush hours, or just work at home a few days a week.
• High-tech business growth. Unified communications and team collaboration technology makes it easier to find and connect with people wherever they are, and PC desktop sharing and videoconferencing is becoming a reality for many people. A ban on mobile phone use while driving would make these technologies more attractive.
• Work-life integration. With wider acceptance of work-anywhere practices and tools, people with a variety of obligations and interests outside of work could support themselves while living true to their values.
• Reduced environmental impact. Less commuting, or just less commuting during peak hours could reduce carbon emissions and transportation-related consumption.

In fact, legislation is not the only solution. Prohibitions could be phased through the policies of socially responsible employers or the guidelines of industry groups, since many behind-the-wheel conversations take place on phones paid for by employers.

Do you text or talk on the phone while driving? What could get you to stop? Do you think that legislators or employers should prohibit this practice? If you need some inspiration before posting a comment, check out this widely circulated video of a bus driver texting and then crashing.

Just What Is a Digital Millwright?

The name of this blog is a play on the title of a chapter in The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google called "Digital Millworks". Author Nicholas Carr draws an analogy between the complex mechanisms that directed the power of rushing rivers to early factories, and the complex datacenters many companies maintain specifically for their own operations. The book, which I highly recommend for all IT professionals and business IT users, draws a historical analogy between the transition from local electrical plants to the public utilities and the coming transition from corporate data centers to computing utilities. Carr discusses the nature and workings of these emerging utilities and then transitions to the social impacts of "One Worldwide Computer".

As an IT professional for the last 25 years that has both developed software products for complex corporate datacenters and helped companies choose, customize and integrate these products, I think of

myself as a digital millwright.

Do any other IT users or professionals feel a kinship with an earlier or more mechanical profession?