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Amongst the things making news today (other than the obvious) is the hook-up between Italian carmaker Fiat, and struggling, if not near-dead, American icon, Chrysler. The deal, if approved, would give the Italian auto maker a 35 per cent stake in Chrysler. Given that some believe that Chrysler has a book value near zero, one might question how much that stake is actually worth.
But the actual deal between the two is less about cash then it is about technology exchange and access to their respective dealerships. Fiat, for example, is keen to bring its line of compact cars to the US, and is willing to trade access to its successful small-car platforms and fuel-efficient technologies to do so. Seems like a high price to pay for real estate, non?
Which brings us to the magic of US car dealerships: Continue reading…
Last month I wrote about the impact of recession on youth, and in particular, the impact of a severe recession on youth participation in the labour market. Will they get crowded out in the short-term as older workers choose to stay in the workforce longer?
But such immediate questions aside, growing youth unemployment, or underemployment, may have far deeper societal repercussions.
The recent events in Greece where mobs of angry youths rioted in the streets is perhaps a telling example. Triggered by the shooting of a 15-year-old boy, an estimated 8,000 Greek youths joined what soon became an all-out attack against their role in the Greek state. As Nikos Mouzelis, emeritus professor of sociology at London School of Economics, noted: “The death of this young boy was a catalyst that brought out all the problems of society and of youth that have been piling up all these years and left to one side with no solutions. Every day, the youth of this country experiences further marginalisation.”
Or as others noted: “The death of the young boy may just be an excuse for the overqualified, so-called ‘700-euro-generation’, to rage at society. They have a hopeless future, since their degrees do not correspond to the needs of the market…. What a pity it is to see the energy of youngsters lost just because society doesn’t take care of their culture and education, doesn’t encourage them to explore their dreams and at the same time introduce and prepare them for real life.”
So could this mix of economic, political and social marginalisation yield the same violent results in other parts of the world?
Us Now is a documentary film project about the power of mass collaboration, government and the Internet. Right up our alley! The movie, recently premiered in the UK, highlights the impact of online networks on our notions of leadership, communication, hierarchy, and ultimately government and governance.
The documentary hosts a series of the world’s leading experts on communication, management and governance - notables includes Clay Shirky, Saul Albert, Ed Miliband, and our very own Don Tapscott (watch below) - in a broad discussion on what the explosion of online networks and grassroots community action means for governments from the local to trans-national levels.
And here’s one of my favourites - Tom Steinberg, director of mySociety.org, on the limits of representative democracy:
SITRA, the Finnish Innovation agency, is a Helsinki-based partner organization of ours that thinks about how new innovations, investment choices and models of governance can help promote the welfare of Finnish society and Finnish competitiveness.
They recently hosted nGenera Chairman Don Tapscott and Cambridge economist Ha-Joon Chang(both of whom I’ve had the pleasure of working with) for a conversation about the Future of the Public Sector. You can view all the videos from this event, and many others, here. Unfortunately I haven’t figured out how to embed these particular presentations so you’ll actually have to go to Sitra’s site to view.
Nonetheless, here’s the lowdown: Don argues that the Net Generation and the Web 2.0 are ushering in a series of fundamental changes to the way governments operate; how they provide services and create policy; how they structure the workplace; and how they increasingly look to citizens to play a role in all of those areas.
Dr. Chang on the other hand takes a more cautious approach noting that the most visible and seemingly revolutionary ideas aren’t always the real change agents. Continue reading…
Following up on Anthony’s post about last week’s City of Toronto Web 2.0/Gov 2.0 Summit I thought I’d share this fantastic presentation by Mark Surman, executive director of the Mozilla Foundation, on how the City of Toronto “might think like the web.” In it he outlines how the structure and principles of participation that underpin Mozilla might be mimicked to create an open, transparent and participative municipal goverment.
He ends his presentation with three simple challenges to City Hall:
“1. Open our data. transit. library catalogues. community centre schedules. maps. 311. expose it all so the people of Toronto can use it to make a better city. do it now.
2. Crowdsource info gathering that helps the city. somebody would have FixMyStreet.to up and running in a week if the Mayor promised to listen. encourage it.
3. Ask for help creating a city that thinks like the web. copy Washington, DC’s contest strategy. launch it at BarCamp.”
The Mayor committed publicly to making many of these happen, which is great, but action will also need to come from the public… So who’s setting up Toronto’s version of FixMyStreet?
Would you be willing to have your colleagues decide on how much you make and what value you bring to the organization?
This type of radical transparency is bound to make a lot of people uncomfortable but it’s exactly the type of visibility that employees at Semco, a Brazilian industrial manufacturing company, have into the operations of the company.
Employees set their own wages, productivity targets, schedules and even choose their managers. Moreover, for important strategic decisions Semco each of the company’s 3000 employees votes - whether’s it’s about a merger, an acquisition, or plant relocations. For other less strategic discussions employees have two open seats on the Borad of Directors that anybody can occupy on a first-come first serve basis. And finally in order to stimulate new ideas, the company holds a monthly “idea meeting” to put creative employees in touch with those with budgetary control - an internal VC club.
Key to enabling this culture of openness has been SEMCO CEO Ricardo Semler’s firm commitment to doing things differently (he fired 60% of the company’s top management when he took over).
This video clip highlights some of the company’s unique HR practices:
Given the company’s success in the two-decades of its anarchic-management practice (its revenues have grown from $4 million to over $250million), is this type of transparency and workplace democracy indicative of an HR strategy the rest of us have missed the boat on?
Why does it work at SEMCO?
Why wouldn’t it work at your organization?
What type of industry/market is best suited to such structures?
Is this type of radical self-organization the future of the workplace?
It seems as if everything has a 2.0 equivalent these days… perhaps to the point of excess. As one commentator noted, “Using “2.0” to denote applying new social technology to a noun has become practically ubiquitous.”
I, for example, work on Government 2.0, a term that is now applied half-hazardly to any government activity associated with social media, wikis, or participative tools - no matter whether the result is closer to the 2.0 than the 1.0 on the scale.
We’re all familiar with the concrept of reputation and how in a world of social networks, voting and rank, it’s becoming increasingly important.
That’s not, however, to say that it’s a new concept. Information asymmetry in commerce is a centuries old problem. Solving it through reputation is equally ancient. We may associate eBay with our modern definition of online reputation but the concept is perhaps earliest associated by archival records of trading between Maghribi merchants in the 11the century. Research on these early economic transactions show that the key to curtailing “opportunistic behaviour and promoting trust between agents” in an environment of high information asymmetry was a system of reputations that was developed and shared between the agents within a trading coalition or network.
“The swooning economy has also poured a cold shower on many Generation Yers, who grew up coddled, courted and figuring they’d have an easy career ride.”
There’s no doubt that the short-term job market prospects for anyone looking for a career change have been disrupted by the last six months of economic upheaval. We’ve gone from touting the war for talent to focusing on the impacts of delayed retirement and decimated pension funds on the workplace.
As a recent McKinsey report notes, “Eighty-five percent of the boomers we surveyed said that it was at least somewhat likely that they would continue to work beyond the traditional retirement age. Nearly 40 percent said that it was extremely likely, and of those, two-thirds emphasized financial reasons.”
Their decisions to either stay in, or re-enter, the workforce may push less-experienced grads and Net Geners further down the HR queue and mark a temporary end to the concept of the much-sought-after Net Gener. Economic growth from 2000 forward had kept job markets buoyant and left new grads feeling as if they were in the drivers seat. A deep recession however may smash that perceived leverage. As one commentator noted, “So it’s the Yers, mostly in their 20s, doted on and over-protected by parents, and aggressively courted by employers, who, will be most psychologically affected by this softening of opportunities. Like boomers, they thought they were special.” Continue reading…
If you’re a baseball fan than you’re likely mourning the end of the season and likely familiar with the concepts of “moneyball” and “sabermetrics” and the use of statistics to infer trends, future performance and player investment or drafting strategies. It counters the traditional methods of judging future performance on the basis of personal observation and informed opinion. The concept is most closely associated with Billy Beane, general manager of the Oakland Athletics, and (in theory) explains why small-market teams such as Oakland are able to compete with large-market teams whose budgets dwarf the latter.
This concept of statistic-driven outcomes has its equivalent in healthcare: evidence-based medicine. Yet despite its theoretical value, it’s still rarely used and tough to access. As Billy Beane, Newt Gingrich and John Kerry note in a recent New York Time op-ed, “a doctor today can get more data on the starting third baseman on his fantasy baseball team than on the effectiveness of life-and-death medical procedures.”
All this despite the fact that the US spends more than twice per capita on healthcare than any other country in the world, ranks amongst the worst industrialized countries on health quality, and sees nearly 100,000 Americans killed every year by preventable medical erros. You’d think a moneyball/evidence-based medicine approach to healthcare would gain more traction. Continue reading…
