from the editors of the Journal of Innovative Management
2008 Archives
- The Power of Collaborative Innovation: From the World Economic Forum
- When Information is Not Communication
- Having less power impairs the mind and ability to stay focused
- Choosing Your Trend: Creating Improved Quality of Life or Reduced Quality of Life
- State Legislative Roundup: Sour Economy Limits Options in '08
- Second U.S. Healthcare Scorecard Finds No Improvement Overall, Steep Decline in Access
- The Growing Importance of "Architecture" in Leadership
- Will Farmed Fish Feed the World?
- Largest Physician Group Practices Most Likely to Adopt Medical Home Model
-What Are We Doing With Our Lives?
The World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2008 closed in Davos, Switzerland, on January 27 with a call by business, government and civil society leaders for a new brand of collaborative and innovative leadership, rather than greater competition, to address the challenges of globalization.
Former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, a board member of the World Economic Forum and a co-chair of the annual meeting said: “Globalization is forcing changes in how people collaborate in a fundamental way. If we are interconnected and the world is interconnected, the only way for the world to work is to have a set of common values. We have no option but to work together.”
Another co-chair, Indra K. Nooyi, Chairman and CEO of PepsiCo, said that companies today have to be engaged in society, particularly on environmental issues. It is critical to running a business: “You cannot hold on to your employees emotionally unless you have good environmental programmes.”
Other panellists asserted that the biggest challenge for the world is to determine the values that underpin globalization. “Globalization is not going to go away. The question is what kind of globalization do we have,” said Daniel Yergin, Chairman of Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA).
Fellow annual meeting co-chair Wang Jianzhou, Chairman and CEO of China Mobile Communications Corporation, called on participants to embrace the ideals expressed by the motto of the 2008 Olympic Games to be held in Beijing: “One world, one dream.” Said Wang: “All countries, industries and companies should contribute to a peaceful and harmonious world.”
Among the key announcements and achievements that emerged from the Annual Meeting 2008 are the following:
http://www.weforum.org/en/index.htm
Why is the lament sometimes heard, “There’s just no communication around here,” whether it’s a start-up business or a multinational corporation? The leaders may believe they are communicating well with their customers. Bosses may insist they are giving explicit instructions to their employees. Coworkers think they are sharing all the information they have with their colleagues.
“Not so,” says author Dianna Booher, a pioneer in increasing productivity through effective communication. The lack of straightforward, clear conversation is to blame. In her 2007 book, The Voice of Authority: 10 Communications Strategies Every Leader Needs to Know, Booher tackles the issues of when to communicate, how to do it, and what to say to coworkers, employees, managers, and the public. She argues that leaders delude themselves by thinking that the dissemination of information – whether on the Internet, through teleconferences, or in meetings – is the same as substantive communication.
Booher emphasizes, “Information is not communication.”
Based on her own work with, and observations of, hundreds of businesses, Dianna Booher analyzes what is effective – stressing that honesty, clarity, consistency, and transparency are the keys to effective communication. Strategies she reveals in The Voice of Authority include:
“Communication is the most vital skill in job-interviewing success. The most frequent complaint employees cite as their reason for leaving an organization. The biggest challenge leaders experience in times of change and upheaval. The most critical component of great customer service,” says Booher. “It’s all about communication. And success in business is all about how well you communicate – to your coworkers and customers.”
About the author
Dianna Booher is the founder of Booher Consultants (http://www.booher.com), a communication training firm. Her clients include IBM, Lyondell Chemical, PepsiCo, Frito-Lay, Lockheed Martin, and JP Morgan Chase. The author of more than forty books and a frequent guest on television and radio programs around the country, she is an award-winning professional speaker and has been inducted into the CPAE Speaker Hall of Fame. Booher Consultants is based in the Dallas/Ft. Worth Metroplex.
[I]n recent decades the subject of managing for quality has moved to center stage. Achievement of quality has always been one of the goals of human effort, but seldom did it occupy the attention of the leadership.
—Joseph M. Juran, in A History of Managing for Quality, 1995.
A capacity of emotionally and spiritually mature leaders is the power to be—with compassion—responsible and accountable for the quality of life in and around their organizations. The current trend toward performance excellence in organizations is essentially about how to become continuously more mature about what the community does, how they do it, and to be collectively responsible and accountable in a compassionate manner for the results. That, in a nutshell, is what quality leadership and management is all about.
At least one nation-wide learning community has been evolving in this regard during the past two decades, and a new milestone in this effort was reached this year. On April 24, 2008, a historic event took place in Washington, DC, and I had the pleasure to witness it. The City of Coral Springs, Florida, became the first municipality in the United States to strive for and receive a Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award. This was especially significant to me as I recalled a conversation I had a number of years ago with the Mayor of Madison, Wisconsin, a pioneer in municipal quality management, who said that quality was good government but not yet good politics. The good news for today is that quality has, because of good leadership, become good government and good politics in Coral Springs, to the mutual benefit of its citizens, businesses, and employees. In addition to the national quality award program, forty states have their own quality programs and maintain a cooperative relationship with Baldrige.
National and State Quality Models
Evanston, Ill. (May 15, 2008) -- New research appearing in the May issue of Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, suggests that being put in a low-power role may impair a person’s basic cognitive functioning and thus, their ability to get ahead.
In their article, Pamela Smith of Radboud University Nijmegen, and colleagues Nils B. Jostmann of VU University Amsterdam, Adam Galinsky of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, and Wilco W. van Dijk of VU University Amsterdam, focus on a set of cognitive processes called executive functions. Executive functions help people maintain and pursue their goals in difficult, distracting situations. The researchers found that lacking power impaired people’s ability to keep track of ever-changing information, to parse out irrelevant information, and to successfully plan ahead to achieve their goals.
In one experiment, the participants completed a Stroop task, a common psychological test designed to exercise executive functions. Participants who had earlier been randomly assigned to a low-power group made more errors in the Stroop task than those who had been assigned to a high-power group. Smith and colleagues also found that these results were not due to low-power people being less motivated or putting in less effort. Instead, those lacking in power had difficulty maintaining a focus on their current goal.
In another experiment, participants were asked to move an arrangement of disks from a start position to a final position in as few moves as possible, known to researchers as the Tower-of-Hanoi task. This task tests the more complex ability of planning. In some trials there was a catch: participants had to move the first disk in a direction that was opposite to its final position. Low power participants made more errors and required more moves on these trials, demonstrating poor planning.
Smith and colleagues believe their results have “direct implications for management and organizations.” In high-risk industries such as health care, a single employee error can have fatal consequences. Empowering these employees could reduce the likelihood of such errors. Additionally, their work illustrates how hierarchies perpetuate themselves. By randomly assigning individuals to high and low-power conditions, they demonstrate that simply lacking power can automatically lead to performance that reinforces one’s low standing, sending the powerless towards a destiny of dispossession.
Psychological Science is ranked among the top 10 general psychology journals for impact by the Institute for Scientific Information. For a copy of the article “Lacking Power Impairs Executive Functions” and access to other Psychological Science research findings, please contact Catherine West at (202) 293-9300 x131 or cwest@psychologicalscience.org.
###
Paul Worstell is president of PRO TEC Coating, a small business located in Leipsic, Ohio, and a recent award winner. Worstell noted that PRO TEC is a small company, in a small community, where the spirit of their people, and their commitment to excellence, fills them with a large sense of gratitude and pride. “We began our Baldrige journey seven years ago” Worstell said, “long before we knew how to ‘deploy, align, and integrate.’ Through Baldrige we have learned that there are no destinations on the journey—only more opportunities for improvement. What a remarkable method to move an organization forward.”
Worstell said they were grateful to their customers, the automakers, who have challenged their company to be an innovative leader in coated steel, and their suppliers, who have been valuable partners in this venture. He said they are grateful for their parent companies, U.S. Steel and Kobe Steel for giving them the freedom to be different—the freedom, support, and encouragement to use a different business model and create a culture that is unique.”
Javon R. Bea, President and CEO of Mercy Health System, Janesville, Wisconsin, said that receiving a Baldrige Award was a milestone that will live forever in the memories of their 4,000 employees and physician partners. It was the culmination of almost twenty years of hard work.
“In 1989, Mercy was a struggling stand-alone hospital serving one community,” Bea said. “Today, Mercy is a top-ranked integrated health system with a full range of services offered through sixty-four medical facilities serving twenty-four communities in southern Wisconsin and northern Illinois. With our growth comes great responsibility—to meet and exceed the needs of over one million patients who depend on us for some of the most intimate and lifesaving services that modern medicine has to offer. To meet this challenge, the Mercy Health System developed a systematic and sophisticated approach to quality and organizational excellence that supports our entire integrated System.” Bea explained that the Health System’s success represents vision, passion, determination, drive, and results founded on a servant-leadership model and supported by Four Pillars of Excellence: Quality, Service, Partnering, and Cost.
Bea wants other healthcare organizations to join with them in improving health care in the nation: “It is my hope that more healthcare organizations will embark on the Baldrige journey of excellence. We will use this opportunity to reach out to others in the healthcare industry and share our knowledge.”
Michael Murphy, CEO of Sharp HealthCare, San Diego, California, acknowledged the 14,000 team members, 2,600 affiliated physicians, 2,000 volunteers, and 150 board members who are Sharp HealthCare. Speaking about their systemic focus on how to run their healthcare organization better, Murphy said: “Six years ago we recommitted to the purpose and worth of our work, and set forth on a journey to transform the health care experience for our staff, our physicians, and our patients and their families—we call this journey ‘The Sharp Experience.’ I am often asked to share the secret of our success—and my answer never wavers. I proudly state that it is the very special people of Sharp that make the difference. Their passion and commitment to make every aspect of the health care experience the best that it can be is what drives our success and ongoing quest for excellence. Clearly the Criteria, discipline, and focus that underlie the Baldrige process have been key contributors to our daily improvements. The feedback we received from examiner site visits has been instrumental in providing a clear road map for the journey. But in the end it is the people of Sharp HealthCare—and their commitment to make health care better—that make the difference.
“We are obviously very proud to be a Baldrige Award recipient,” Murphy added, “but let me assure you that we also recognize that our journey continues. We still have much to learn and much to accomplish as we aim to make health care better everywhere.”
Michael Levinson, City Manager, City of Coral Springs, Florida, said it takes a continuously disciplined learning community to run a city well: “Fourteen years ago, we had a dream to one day stand toe-to-toe, shoulder-to-shoulder with the best-run corporations in America. The receipt of the Baldrige Award announces our arrival.”
Levinson accepted the award on behalf of Coral Springs “Community of Excellence,” including its residents, businesses, employees, and volunteers. “We do so because our community has played an active role in our quest to reinvent government and because our community is the true beneficiary of our accomplishments. Reaching this level of performance excellence proves that government can meet the needs of its customers in the most responsive and fiscally responsible way. When people ask: ‘Why Baldrige,’ the answer is simple,” Levinson said:
Levinson added: “We do this using a state-of-the-art-business model based on the Baldrige Criteria; a focus on the customer; and a well-trained, highly accountable and accessible workforce. Notably absent from Coral Springs are layers of bureaucracy.”
Dr. Joseph A. Lannon is director of the U. S. Army Armament Research, Development and Engineering Center (also known as ARDEC), Picatinny Arsenal, New Jersey.
Lannon said that ARDEC leaders decided to utilize the Baldrige process "in order to become the best organization we can possibly be and provide the best products and support we can to the U.S. warfighter. I believe that we are doing that exceedingly well, and this award helps to affirm that belief. But make no mistake about it. We can and will do even better as we travel the road of continuous improvement."
Four basic components—coupled with hard work, tenacity, and vision—have shaped ARDEC into the organization it is today:
Lannon emphasized, “Our workforce is the cornerstone of our success. Additionally, our partners, suppliers, and collaborators in industry, academia, and other Army laboratories and military services deserve recognition and credit for working with us in a spirit of cooperation and dedication to a common set of goals in support of the warfighter.”
More information: http://www.quality.nist.gov
###
Evolution is taking place before our eyes. We may not see it because we’ve been trained to think of evolution as a slow process, taking thousands or millions of years, invisible in an individual lifetime. But we are experiencing accelerated evolution today, which is causing daily fear and turmoil by its powerful and sudden impact on our lives and economies. This is the evolution of human creativity. It shows up daily as stark contrasts of constructive and destructive outcomes from the activities of over six billion people interacting with each other and the earth in pursuit of their own interests. It is a vast system dangerously out of control and equilibrium.
One way to gain some control over this evolution is to train our consciousness to see three activities simultaneously, as in viewing and managing a three-ring circus. The current mindset is to see only one ring—a focused intent on innovating continuously more quickly to compete with others and achieve greater economic success. I call this innovation with a small “i”.
By concentrating on that one need alone, leaders fail to see the second ring in the system. The second ring is what’s happening with everything else on a daily basis—what everyone is doing and not doing every day, and what the impact is in one’s organization and in the world.
The third ring in the system is paying attention to the larger sense of innovation — Innovation with a capital “I”. That’s breakthrough innovation, the kind of innovation that includes new directions and new systems for the improvement of lives, organizations, and communities. It’s the innovation that creates better quality of life in the world.
Good leadership pays attention to all three rings. It’s the kind of organization leadership that some companies were doing in the 1980s. These leaders looked at their organizations in terms of attending to daily management, and also including a focus on breakthrough strategy, planning, and direction; and targeting innovation efforts on better products, services, and cooperative systems. This would happen in something like an 80/20 split, with 80% of the organization’s efforts devoted to daily management and continuous improvement and 20% to Innovation and breakthrough planning. That’s a trend worth sticking to.
It is also growing trend. In a new Strategy+Business Magazine article, “The Next Industrial Imperative,” Peter Senge, Bryan Smith, and Nina Kruschwitz write about this kind of trend in business and industry today.
Over the past few years, as the implications of global climate change have become clearer, a new wave of basic innovation has begun. Much of it is occurring in household-name companies. DuPont, one of the oldest and largest companies in the United States, is shifting the materials in much of its product line from petroleum-based to bio-based feedstocks; its leaders see opportunity in the creation of new products (such as soy-based polymers and thermoplastics made from corn sugar) that could reduce dependency on conventional oil and gas. Coca-Cola formed a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund in 2007, with the goal, according to Coca-Cola Chairman Neville Isdell, of replacing “every drop of water we use in our beverages and their production,” that is, not removing more water from a watershed than the company can replenish. Nike has reduced its carbon footprint by more than 75 percent since 1988. “To do this,” noted Darcy Winslow, when she was general manager of the Nike women’s fitness division (she has since moved on to the Nike Foundation), “we are having to completely rethink how we design, produce, and distribute our products and how we recover them at the end of their lifetime.”
It may be tempting to see all of these efforts as isolated cases, but in truth they are all related. They are responses to the same shift of context, in which the prospect of global climate change, in particular, and of growing waste and toxicity and diminishing key resources, in general, has catalyzed a new way of thinking. In this shift, the entire industrial age can now be seen as a kind of extended bubble, showing some of the same dynamics as a financial bubble and being equally unsustainable in the long run. The stories of the Swedish BioFuel Region, and of DuPont, Coca-Cola, Nike, and many other companies, provide clues to what will happen in the new era when the bubble and the ways of thinking embedded in it no longer hold sway.
If you want to see the whole article, "The Next Industrial Imperative," here’s the location: http://www.strategy-business.com/press/freearticle/08205
Stateline.org staff writer Daniel Vock reports that for many states, 2008 will be remembered for record numbers of home foreclosures, $4-a-gallon gasoline and the beginning of a slide into new fiscal trouble after two years of overflowing coffers.
Stateline.org's annual state-by-state look at legislative accomplishments, covering 36 states so far, finds lawmakers uneasy over finances and largely shying away from major expansions of public health-insurance programs or free preschool classes.
A basket of new worries emerged: homeowners sucked into mortgage scams, the threat of expanding Medicaid rolls as unemployment rises, a looming shortfall in states' main source of highway funding and predictions of even worse financial woes ahead.
Seeking new ways to replenish its treasury, New York in 2008 became the first state to target billions in internet sales by requiring out-of-state retailers to start collecting sales taxes on state residents' purchases, though Amazon.com is challenging the law in court. Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D) solicited a $12.8 billion bid from a private company to lease the state's turnpike for 75 years, a proposal still under debate.
While tax increases are usually a last resort for lawmakers, especially in an election year, Minnesota legislators overrode a veto by Governor Tim Pawlenty (R) to hike the state's gasoline tax by 8.5 cents a gallon to raise road and bridge funds in the wake of last year's deadly Minneapolis bridge collapse. Maryland adopted a new tax on millionaires, and New York upped its tax on cigarettes from $1.50 a pack to $2.75 a pack -- highest in the country.
With the race for the White House in full swing, states began waiting out the Bush administration to see whether they'll fare better with a new president in a host of disagreements with the federal government. Numerous states are pushing for changes in federal policies on immigration enforcement, secure driver's licenses, global warming, children's health insurance and the No Child Left Behind education law.
Among this year's most common legislative moves were efforts to boost energy efficiency and reduce greenhouse gases, along with measures to curb smoking, promote gym class in schools and tighten restrictions on teen drivers.
Stateline.org has compiled state-by-state summaries of 36 legislatures that have adjourned or passed budgets so far. New summaries will be added as other legislatures finish their work, along with updates on the trends and precedent-setting policies to emerge from state capitols. See a state by state summary here: http://www.stateline.org/live/details/story?contentId=322840
###
In its first national scorecard released two years ago, The Commonwealth Fund Commission on a High Performance Health System found that the United States fell far short of benchmarks for access, quality, efficiency, and other key measures of healthcare delivery performance. The 2008 edition of the scorecard, available today at www.commonwealthfund.org, paints a picture of a non-system that represents an urgent need to stop tinkering and decide how to formulate a high-quality systems approach for the delivery of health care locally and nationally.
As discussed in the report, Why Not The Best? Results from the National Scorecard on U.S. Health System Performance, 2008, the U.S. scored an average of 65 out of a possible 100 across 37 indicators of health outcomes, quality, access, efficiency, and equity--slightly below the overall score in the 2006 report. The scores compare U.S. average performance to rates achieved by top performers within the U.S. or internationally.
Even more troubling is that the health system is on the wrong track when it comes to access and affordability: As of 2007, 42 percent of all working age adults were either uninsured or underinsured, up from 35 percent since 2003.
Despite spending more on health care than any other nation, the U.S. continues to fall far short on key indicators of health outcomes and quality, with particularly low scores on efficiency.
The U.S. has also failed to keep pace with improvements made in other countries, falling from 15th to last among 19 industrialized nations on premature deaths that are potentially preventable with timely access to effective health care.
"It's apparent that, overall, the health care system is performing unevenly and well below its potential," said James J. Mongan, M.D., who chairs the 19-member commission and is CEO of Partners HealthCare in Boston. "While there are pockets of improvement and excellence, it is clear that we need strong leadership and concerted public and private efforts to achieve and raise standards of performance nationwide and ensure that significant progress occurs in the future."
###
by Laurence R. Smith, CKO, GOAL/QPC
A concept that the world is lately paying more attention to, in all of its manifestations, is architecture. I think that’s because people who embrace architecture tend to exhibit attitudes and thought processes that are innovative, holistic, aesthetic, functional, and practical at the same time. But how, you might wonder, can architectural thinking apply to organization leadership and management beyond designing buildings and other physical structures? The answer lies in thinking more broadly about applications of structural design in business, industry, and society.
Reed Kroloff, for example, describes architecture as the built forms of our cultural ambitions. Thom Mayne thinks of architecture as a new way to connect the world. When leaders begin to think in terms of these contexts, it’s easy to shift our minds toward applying architectural thinking to the design of our organizational structures, creating more beautiful and functional organizations; designing and building great places for work and life.
You can see and hear architects Reed Kroloff and Thom Mayne show some of their recent work and explain their thinking, on the World Wide Web. Both have 20-minute video-presentations available on the informative web site:
TED: Ideas Worth Spreading (http://www.ted.com/index.php/).
I imagine you’ll find there some other presentations that are enjoyable and worth spending some time with, too. When you go there, you can search for Reed Kroloff’s and Thom Mayne’s presentations, along with seeing what else may interest you.
###
Washington, D.C.—Nearly half of the seafood we eat today is farmed. And while aquaculture is often equated with pollution, habitat degradation, and health risks, this growth in fish farming may in fact be the most hopeful trend in the world’s increasingly troubled food system, according to a new report by Worldwatch Institute.
InFarming Fish for the Future, Senior Researcher Brian Halweil illustrates how, if properly guided, fish farming can not only help feed an expanding global population, but also play a role in healing marine ecosystems battered by overfishing.
“In a world where fresh water and grain supplies are increasingly scarce, raising seafood like oysters, clams, catfish, and tilapia is many times more efficient than factory-farmed chicken or beef,” says Halweil. “Farmed fish can be a critical way to add to the global diet to hedge against potential crop losses or shortages in the supply of meat.”
“But not all fish farming is created equal,” Halweil notes. Carnivorous species like salmon and shrimp, while increasingly popular, consume several times their weight in fish feed—derived from other, typically smaller, fish—as they provide in edible seafood. “It generally requires 20 kilograms of feed to produce just 1 kilogram of tuna,” Halweil says. “So even as we depend more on farmed fish, a growing scarcity of fish feed may jeopardize future expansion of the industry.”
Poorly run fish farms can generate coastal pollution in the form of excess feed and manure, and escaped fish and disease originating on farms can devastate wild fisheries. For example, a fish farm with 200,000 salmon releases nutrients and fecal matter roughly equivalent to the raw sewage generated by 20,000 to 60,000 people. Scotland’s salmon aquaculture industry is estimated to produce the same amount of nitrogen waste as the untreated sewage of 3.2 million people—just over half the country’s population.
Cramped facilities can also create ill health for fish, costing producers millions of dollars in disease prevention and foregone revenues. In recent years, shrimp farmers in China have lost $120 million to bacterial fish diseases and $420 million to shrimp diseases.
Fish farming has expanded to meet the soaring global demand for seafood. On average, each person on the planet is eating four times as much seafood as was consumed in 1950. The average per-capita consumption of farmed seafood has increased nearly 1,000 percent since 1970, in contrast to per-capita meat consumption, which grew just 60 percent.
In 2006, fish farmers raised nearly 70 million tons of seafood worth more than $80 billion—nearly double the volume of a decade earlier. Experts predict that farmed seafood will grow an additional 70 percent by 2030.
The need for more sustainable fish farming is critical, according to the report. Farmed seafood provides 42 percent of the world’s seafood supply, and is on target to exceed half in the next decade, yet there are no widely accepted standards for what constitutes “good” fish farming. By comparison, the organic food industry has strong international and national standards, even though it constitutes just 3 to 5 percent of the world’s food supply.
Ecological Aquaculture
Ecological aquaculture, or “integrated multitrophic aquaculture,” involves designing farms to function more like healthy aquatic ecosystems. Generally, fish farms produce waste and pollute surrounding waters because of the high concentration and limited mobility of the fish. These factors also leave the fish more susceptible to disease.
However, farms that integrate complementary species can greatly reduce pollution and disease levels. Cooke Aquaculture’s salmon farm in Back Bay, Canada, takes advantage of a natural ecosystem cleansing service provided by blue mussels and kelp. The shellfish filter excess waste from the fish cages, while the seaweed thrives on dissolved nutrients in the water.
Farming in the Warehouse
At the Center for Marine Biotechnology in Baltimore, Maryland, researchers are using city-supplied water and a complex filtration system to raise a few hundred fish completely indoors. Raising fish in a closed pen, either in a warehouse or floating on the ocean, avoids the common pitfalls of modern fish farming: net pens pollute coastal environments with waste and antibiotics, fish escapes threaten the diversity of wild populations, and diseases can spread easily. The Center’s operation is the first indoor marine aquaculture system that can re-circulate nearly all of its water and expel zero waste.
Cleaning Wastewater
If managed correctly, fish farms can go beyond addressing the problems caused by the industry itself and provide a net positive impact on the environment. Traditional ponds outside of Calcutta, India, calledbheris, produce some 13,000 tons of fish a year for the city’s 12 million inhabitants, and serve as critical bird habitat. But the bigger environmental service they provide is that the fish feed on the 600 million liters of raw sewage that spews from Calcutta daily, turning a health risk into a key urban crop.
Restoring Habitats
Fish farming can help to restore degraded coral reefs and wetlands. The metal cages that hold farmed shellfish often function as artificial reefs around which striped bass, shad, and other marine species congregate. In the Caribbean, the Caicos Conch Farm raises King conch not just to sell to restaurants around the world, but to help re-seed coral reefs with this keystone species.
Eating Local Seafood
People who eat from their local waters have a natural reason to be concerned about what goes into them. The Southold Program in Aquaculture Training (SPAT) on Long Island, New York, helps volunteers raise baby shellfish in floating cages to restore the local scallop economy. Participants receive training in algae growth, marine ecology, and shellfish dynamics, and also get to eat half their harvest of fresh, mature shellfish. In turn, they report changing their daily habits that affect water quality, such as shunning chemical fertilizers, upgrading home septic systems, and using nontoxic paint on their boats.
Eating Little Fish to Save Big Ones
In Peru, massive schools of the tiny Peruvian anchovy are netted each year. Although the fish is chock-full of the same beneficial fatty acids that have made tuna, salmon, and other big fish famous for warding off heart disease and boosting brain development, nearly all of the anchovy catch is turned into fishmeal and fish oil, used to fatten pigs and chickens on factory farms worldwide. To address this problem, students at the University of Lima have launched a campaign to change the image of the anchoveta from something that only poor people eat into a tasty dish for well-heeled sophisticates.
###
Purchasing Information: Worldwatch Paper 176: Farming Fish for the Future costs $12.95 plus shipping and handling, and can be purchased through the Worldwatch website (www.worldwatch.org) or by calling 1.877.539.9946 (in U.S.) or 1.301.747.2340 (from overseas), or by faxing 301.567.9553.
About the Worldwatch Institute: The Worldwatch Institute is an independent research organization based in Washington, D.C. Through accessible, fact-based analysis of critical global issues, Worldwatch helps to inform people around the world about the complex interactions among people, nature, and economies. For more information, visit www.worldwatch.org.
###
The Earth Policy Institute’s Jonathan G. Dorn submits data on energy:
Background
More Drilling Cannot Make the U.S. Energy Independent
More Drilling Will Not Reduce Oil or Gasoline Prices
We Can Move Beyond Oil
The increase in U.S. automobile fuel economy standards to 35 miles per gallon of gasoline mandated by the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007 is projected to save more than 1.1 million barrels of oil per day in 2020—roughly half of current U.S. imports from the Persian Gulf. Technology exists to raise standards higher faster. (13)
Electrifying the U.S. transportation system and restructuring urban transport could reduce petroleum consumption by over 50 percent, nearly eliminating the need for imports. (14)
Wind-generated electricity could power plug-in hybrid cars, such as GM’s prototype Chevy Volt, at the equivalent of less than $1 per gallon of gasoline. (15)
NOTES
1 Petroleum includes crude oil, lease condensate, unfinished oils, refined products obtained from the processing of crude oil, and natural gas plant liquids. U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), Energy Information Administration (EIA), Petroleum Basic Statistics, at www.eia.doe.gov/basics/quickoil.html, updated July 2008.
2 Ibid; crude oil from “U.S. Daily Average Supply and Disposition of Crude Oil and Petroleum Products, 2007,” Table 2 in DOE, EIA, Petroleum Supply Annual 2007, Volume 1 (Washington, D.C.: 28 July 2008).
3 Projection based on average imports since 2005 and average price for first six months of 2008. DOE, EIA, U.S. Imports by Country of Origin, at http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_mbbl_m.htm, updated 26 August 2008; DOE, EIA, F.O.B. Costs of Imported Crude Oil by Area, at http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_pri_imc1_k_m.htm, updated 29 August 2008.
4 “Liquid Fuels Supply and Disposition, Oil and Gas Technological Progress Cases,” Table D.9 in DOE, EIA, Annual Energy Outlook 2008 (Washington, D.C.: June 2008), p. 179.
5 DOE, EIA, “Analysis of Crude Oil Production in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge,” at www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/servicerpt/anwr, updated May 2008; U.S. Geological Survey, “Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, 1002 Area, Petroleum Assessment, 1998, Including Economic Analysis,” fact sheet (Washington, D.C.: April 2001).
6 The OCS refers to the underwater area under federal control, typically between 3 and 200 nautical miles offshore. DOE, EIA, Annual Energy Outlook 2007 (Washington, D.C.: February 2007), pp. 50-52; U.S. Department of the Interior (DOI), Minerals Management Service (MMS), Gulf of Mexico Region, “What is the Outer Continental Shelf?” at www.gomr.mms.gov/homepg/whoismms/whatsocs.html, updated 6 January 2000.
7 DOE, EIA, “Impacts of Increased Access to Oil and Natural Gas Resources in the Lower 48 Federal Outer Continental Shelf,” at www.eia.doe.gov/oiaf/aeo/otheranalysis/ongr.html, viewed 16 September 2008.
8 Proved reserves are those that are recoverable under existing economic and operating conditions. DOE, EIA, “World Proved Reserves of Oil and Natural Gas, Most Recent Estimates,” data table, at www.eia.doe.gov/emeu/international/reserves.html, updated 27 August 2008; DOE, EIA, op cit. note 7.
9 DOE, EIA, Crude Oil Production, at http://tonto.eia.doe.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbblpd_a.htm, updated 28 July 2008; Lester R. Brown, “Is World Oil Production Peaking?” Eco-Economy Update, 15 November 2007.
10 A reduction in oil price of $1 per barrel translates into a reduction in gasoline price at the pump of approximately 2.5 cents per gallon. DOE, EIA, op. cit. note 5; Government of Nebraska, “Nebraska Gasoline and Diesel Prices,” at www.neo.ne.gov/statshtml/125.htm, updated 12 September 2008.
11 Bill Scher, “Offshore Drilling Comes Up Empty,” Campaign for America’s Future, at www.ourfuture.org, updated 17 June 2008.
12 DOE, EIA, op. cit. note 5.
13 Projected oil savings from Union of Concerned Scientists, “Clean Vehicles: Successes,” at www.ucsusa.org/clean_vehicles/successes, updated 27 August 2008; The White House, “Fact Sheet: Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007,” press release (Washington, D.C.: 19 December 2007).
14 Gary Kendall, Plugged In: The End of the Oil Age (Brussels: World Wide Fund for Nature, March 2008), pp. 79-86; potential reduction in consumption calculated from Stacy Davis and Susan Diegel, Transportation Energy Data Book – Edition 26 (Knoxville, Tennessee: Oak Ridge National Laboratory, 2007), pp. 2-7, and from Table 5.21 in DOE, EIA, Measuring Energy Efficiency in the United States' Economy: A Beginning (Washington, D.C.: October 1995), p. 43.
15 General Motors, “Chevy Volt FAQs,” at http://gm-volt.com/chevy-volt-faqs, viewed 17 September 2008; cost equivalent of $1 per gallon calculated from Ryan Wiser and Mark Bolinger, Annual Report on U.S. Wind Power Installation, Cost, and Performance Trends: 2007 (Berkeley, CA: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), May 2008), p. 17; American Wind Energy Association, “Inflation Adjustment Bumps PTC Up to 2.1 Cents/kWh,” Wind Energy Weekly, 20 June 2008; integration, variability, and transmission costs from Ryan Wiser, LBNL, Berkeley, CA, email to Jonathan G. Dorn, Earth Policy Institute, 31 July 2008; General Motors, “Chevy Volt Specs,” at http://gm-volt.com/full-specifications, viewed 1 August 2008; U.S. Department of Transportation, Summary of Fuel Economy Performance (Washington, DC: October 2006), updated to new MPG estimates using U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Office of Transportation and Air Quality, “EPA Issues New Test Method for Fuel Economy Window Stickers,” regulatory announcement (Washington, DC: December 2006).
Copyright © 2008 Earth Policy Institute
For information on Earth Policy Institute’s plan to restructure transportation systems and move away from oil, see Plan B 3.0: Mobilizing to Save Civilization, available at www.earthpolicy.org for free downloading.
###
by Laurence R. Smith, Chief Knowledge Officer, GOAL/QPC
A number of years ago several keynote speakers would tell a similar story to demonstrate a point they wanted to make about vision and mission and purpose.
The story involved a VIP visit to a construction site. The visitor walked up to a stonemason at work and asked him what he was doing. The mason replied that he was shaping large rocks into rectangular blocks for the building. The visitor came to another mason who looked happier in his work and was singing as he deftly wielded his hammer and chisel. The visitor asked this mason: “What are you doing?” The mason proudly replied: “I’m building a cathedral!”
One trend in today’s economy, today’s world, is that of failing institutions, with the leaders of failing institutions coming into the cathedrals of government, seemingly with inner fear and outward arrogance, demanding a savior who will give them the people’s money so they can basically keep doing what they’ve been doing.
Thirty years ago GOAL/QPC was organized to work on basically the same problem in one small city in northeastern Massachusetts. It was a totally planned industrial city created in the mid 1800s on the banks of the Merrimack River, where hydro power was economically feasible at low cost.
For about 100 years the city was prosperous. But then, after World War II ended, corporate management started outsourcing and relocating their operations to places where they could pay workers lower wages and benefits, and find cheaper land, taxes, energy, and other costs. The impact on the city and its people was devastating. City leaders wanted a bailout, too, but it didn’t happen. The expectation was that the city needed to pick itself up by its bootstraps.
Thirty years later, after three decades of not finding a solution to regaining a prosperous urban economy in the face of massive waves of taxpayer-financed suburbanization in the nation, the possibility of a breakthrough emerged. City leaders learned of a NYU professor who had helped Japanese industrialists develop profitable industries after World War II. He was Dr. W. Edwards Deming, a man “discovered” in the United States thirty years after he taught Japanese CEOs how to manage in a global economy.
Deming was discovered because American industrialists were producing products that were no longer attractive to the American consumer, products that were also priced higher than the better-quality and lower-priced Japanese alternatives. American CEOs quickly and loudly rushed to Washington demanding a bailout because they believed Japanese government MUST be subsidizing their industries, trying to defeat America again. The American CEOs wanted government protection, too. They could not and would not believe that it was their own style of management that was causing the problem. They would blame workers, or unions, or national politics.
A little research at the time showed that Japan was not subsidizing their industry. What happened is that Japan’s leading CEOs had changed their company’s style of management thirty years earlier, and they were now reaping the fruits of their better management style.
So the mayor, Bob King (the CEO of GOAL/QPC), and myself as CEO of the chamber of commerce started offering Dr. Deming’s course on management to local business leaders. Shortly after that many others in the nation began to teach what became knows as Total Quality Management, Six Sigma, Lean, Reengineering, Business Process Management. And Congress passed an act to create the Baldrige National Quality Award Program to encourage the leaders of all forms of organizations to change the way they manage from an empire-building authoritarian style to a participative, quality-enhancing, community building, style. Very few CEOs paid attention then, and very few pay attention today. The majority of CEOs keep doing what they’ve been doing and we keep getting what we’ve been getting.
And that brings to today’s situation. What is our individual and collective sense of vision, mission, and purpose in the world? That question is important because it is our sense of vision, mission, and purpose that generates the trends that results in the creation of our economy and world.
Will the trend line of tomorrow be a continuation of today’s dominant management style that is intended to be empire building and focused on rewarding greed and consumption in pursuit of artificial (monetary) wealth, which has produced today’s reality?
Will the trend line be improved by changing to a style of management that is more participative, quality-enhancing, and community building? Will we choose a style of management that envisions building a greater quality of life as the mission and purpose; with money being a created tool that enables the employment of real resources for the production of real wealth—better communities, better lives, and a better Earth?
What trend line will we choose to participate in? If we do choose to change, it will start by simply changing our minds, changing our attitudes. We need to be asking ourselves questions like these:
What are we doing with our lives? Are we just blindly hammering rocks into rectangular blocks for someone else to do whatever they want with them? Are we building communities for ourselves and our children and grandchildren so that we can live healthy and prosperous lives?
###
PRODUCTS