The Ingenesist Project

The Next Economic Paradigm

Tag: Work

Plenty of Work But Where Is The Knowledge?

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On October 21, 2011

In General Information

Millions of people are looking for Jobs.  Meanwhile, employers complain of a chronic “skills mismatch” that prevents them from hiring people or initiating new innovations.

When an engineer is laid off from an airplane manufacturer, a company like Starbucks has no idea what that person knows even though aircraft and milk steamers have a great deal in common from the perspective of the Engineer (both are pressure vessels subject to extreme environmental conditions).

The same is true for a marine engineer, and HVAC engineer, or an electrostatic coating machinery engineer.  Each of these disciplines has far more in common than they have differences.  However, if you compare the descriptions for any of these jobs, they sound like they all happen on different planets.

God forbid you are not an expert on MS Excel, which only takes a few hours for almost anyone to learn – yet not tagging that radio button can negate 20 years of experience that only 1% of people have the desire, discipline, and intellect to achieve.

The same holds true for many talents and professions. There are serious problems with the way that we discern the supply and demand for knowledge assets.

What is needed is an intermediate knowledge inventory in the commons that everyone can index to.  So when an engineer tags “pressure vessels” the term registers into the resident ontology of all observers.

Why is this better?

Of course companies are trying to eliminate variance and risk by hiring a person who has been trained by someone else – preferable a direct competitor.  On the other hand, the mantra of modern business is to innovate.  Innovation does not happen by duplicating yesterday’s ideas. Mixing diverse combinations of knowledge assets, and not all common knowledge assets, accelerates the process of Innovation.  Think of all the music that is yet to be created for lack of musicians to play the different instruments.

An intermediate knowledge inventory solves both problems by allowing companies to introduce diverse knowledge assets without introducing irrelevant knowledge assets.  It also gives people far more mobility to pursue specialties that they are most talented and interested in.  As such, the allocation of knowledge assets would improve to match supply of knowledge with the demand for knowledge in an innovation economy.

There is not a shortage or work, only a shortage of knowledge about knowledge.  

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Buddhist Economics

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On June 2, 2009

In General Information

Back atcha!

Everything is Connected:

The economic models and theories that prevailed through the 20th century are rapidly falling apart. Economists scramble to offer explanations and solutions. However, much of what has gone wrong was anticipated years ago by E. F. Schumacher (1911-1977), an Oxford economist and protégé of John Maynard Keynes who proposed a theory of “Buddhist Economics” following his interest and studies in Asian philosophies.

Schumacher was among the first to argue that economic production was too wasteful of the environment and non-renewable resources. But even more than that, he saw decades ago that ever-increasing production and consumption — the foundation of the modern economy — is unsustainable.

Never see what has been done; only see what remains to be done.

Schumacher wrote that western economics measures “standard of living” by “consumption” and assumes a person who consumes more is better off than one who consumes less. He also discusses the fact that employers consider their workers to be an “expense” to be reduced as much as possible.  He questioned the theory that some amount of unemployment might be better “for the economy.”

What we think, we become.

Schumacher argued that an economy should exist to serve the needs of people. But in a “materialist” economy, people exist to serve the economy.  Notably, he argued that labor should be about more than production because a person’s work has psychological and spiritual value that must be respected.

Instead we consider goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, “from the human to the subhuman.”  We have outsourced our soul.

Three things cannot be long hidden: the sun, the moon, and the truth.

Today, many enterprises – some entire industries – are failing and they cannot understand why.  Over time, they have crossed that philosophical line and now serve advertisers, not their customers.

Traditional media and journalism are an example; they scare people, feed on their anxieties, promote insecurities, and stoke desire.  Demographers trespass into people’s homes, collect statistics, run numbers, and design messages that steal the things people love about their self and sell it back for the price of the product.

We end up with no end of entertaining consumer products that soon end up in landfills, but we fail to provide for some basic human needs, like health care for everyone.

A jug fills drop by drop:

Top News in Business Week Print Edition v. Growth Rate for print media:

•    Pending Home Sales Rise for Third Straight Month
•    GM: A View from the Back Seat
•    U.S. Corporations Size Up Their Carbon Footprints
•    Move Over, Amazon? Google Aims to Sell e-Books

Top News in Business Week Exchange – Reader Chosen Topics vs. Growth rate.

•    Social Networking

•    Global Economy
•    US Economy
•    Green Energy

The Editor selected topics in the top chart are aligned with corporations, consumption, and large bailout efforts.  Meanwhile, the reader selected topics in the second category screams: “Hey, where are we and where are we going?”

It would seem that mainstream media should be asking the same question.

(ed note: special thanks Barbara O’Brian at about.com)

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Out of Cache; Will Work For Bandwidth

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On December 31, 2008

In General Information

We can measure the time in minutes, we can measure distance in miles, and we can measure mass in grams – so how do we measure Innovation?  Am I missing something or is this possibly the most stunning omission in the history of civilization?  Who is keeping score? Where’s the referee? This is serious business, folks – the fact, factors, and factories of innovation should be in laser sharp focus to everyone right now, here is why:

The total US liability is estimated at 53 trillion dollars. Every US citizen must become more productive by $175,000 each to cover the invisible mortgage.   Government and corporations are not going to fix this problem – they will leave it to the kids to figure out how to make, mix, and measure innovation.

Natural Resources of Bandwidth

It is official; the United States has run out of bandwidth and we need to create more. The only way to accomplish this is an extraordinary expansion in the breadth, depth, and scale of innovation. This is a situation that cannot be rationalized by any conventional school of thought – starting with our definition for innovation.

The accepted definition for innovation is “something novel and useful”. I hope that I am not insulting any B-school professors or innovation guru’s but “something novel and useful” is already bankrupt as a definition for the only thing that can pull us out of this flaming tailspin of debt economics.

So let’s try something that the kids can do well (because they get to pick up the tab):

Innovation = Bandwidth Created / Bandwidth Expended

So there it is: a simple, clean, and effective:  If the number is greater than 1 we have a creation of wealth. If the number is equal to 1 we have a transfer of wealth, if the number is less than 1 we have the creation of more debt.

It should not matter how one defines bandwidth as long as the top number and the bottom number are measured the same way. If the kids can increase the top number, or lower the bottom number for anything anywhere by using their social, creative, or intellectual ability, alone or in groups, then they can become successful innovators.

Business case

There is a clear and rational business case for bandwidth – people will pay for it at a price relative to their own available bandwidth. Let’s give the kids a game they can win.  Let’s give them a score that they can keep. Let’s show them how entrepreneurs work, think, and play.

For the same amount of bandwidth expended, they can create more bandwidth for 10 rich people or more bandwidth for 1000 poor people. Let the kids decide. If they give some people more bandwidth at the expense of the bandwidth of others, they lose.  If they find synergies that act as a bandwidth multiplier, they win. Let the kids figure it out.

All we need to do is help develop standards to measure bandwidth.

It’s the least that our old people can do and a much simpler problem for our feeble minds to solve.  The Ingenesist Project specifies 3 web applications which if deployed to social media will allow social capital, creative capital, and intellectual capital to become tangible outside the construct of the traditional corporation – we believe that this may do the trick.  There may be others working on the problem too, we don’t care – at the end of the day, we all work for bandwidth.

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