Toyota Slow to See Scope of Problem Even After Fatal Crash – NYTimes.com

Toyota Slow to See Scope of Problem Even After Fatal Crash – NYTimes.com.

A horrific mistake in governance parading as partisan politics

Go back almost a century, to the time when the modern corporation was created, and you’ll find laws that prohibit or limit the use of corporate money in elections. And yet this week, a 5-4 Supreme Court struck down the limits that Congress passed in 2002 in this tradition in the case Citizens United v. FEC.

Read here: The misguided theories behind Citizens United v. FEC. – By David Kairys – Slate Magazine.

A thoughtful attack on brand- and experience-based design

Re-Thinking Interaction Design | design mind.

From Frogdesign.

“If there is a future for designers and marketers in big business, it
lies not in brand, nor in “UX,” nor in any colorful way of framing
total control over a consumer, such as “brand equity,” “brand loyalty,”
the “end to end customer journey,” or “experience ownership”. It lies
instead in encouraging behavioral change and explicitly shaping culture
in a positive and lasting way.”

Google pursues raw power | GreenTech Pastures | ZDNet.com

I’ve been working in the energy sector recently.

This is a very interesting “turn of events”. More later.

Google pursues raw power | GreenTech Pastures | ZDNet.com.

Jonathan Lethem on Writing

Click here to go to a very interesting interview with him. If you haven’t read anything of his, I recommend Motherless Brooklyn.

Here’s a bit from the interview: ‘The secret is that you can’t teach writing. You can only teach editing and listening….’

Michael Pollan On The Daily Show (VIDEO)

Michael Pollan’s new book, Food Rules, builds the same set of arguments that Ed Huling, friend of many years, developed in his work with food over the years. Here is Pollan playing with Jon Stewart.

Michael Pollan On The Daily Show (VIDEO).

Also take a look at A Completely Different Way to Fix the Healthcare Crisis, an interview about his book

Misled by Technology: Compumorphics

David Brooks in the NY Times writes about the tenor of public impatience with public institutions. “Many people seem to be in the middle of a religious crisis of faith. All the gods they believe in — technology, technocracy, centralized government control — have failed them in this instance.”

Our modern tendency to understand human beings as analogues of computers, which I have begun to call “compumorphizing, gives this kind of result.

via Op-Ed Columnist – The God That Fails – NYTimes.com.

Stephanie Frost Documents Closing Her Account With Bank Of America, Switching To Community Bank (VIDEO)

As Ms. Frost looks forward to 2010, one of her new Year’s resolutions is to “stop doing business with companies that I feel are taking advantage of me, don’t appreciate my business, treat me poorly as a customer… The first place I’m starting is with my bank.”

Stephanie Frost Documents Closing Her Account With Bank Of America, Switching To Community Bank (VIDEO).

Here is something YOU can do about the financial mess: Move Your Money

Arianna Huffington has proposed something simple and practical and effective that you and I – and everyone – can do about the financial mess in America, right now.
For all those who are asking what can WE do about this financial mess, this is fabulous. Read the whole posting. Watch the video. Follow the instructions. Email to everyone.

From Arianna Huffington: Move Your Money: A New Year’s Resolution.

Selections from the post:

“Last week, over a pre-Christmas dinner, the two of us, along with political strategist Alexis McGill, filmmaker/author Eugene Jarecki, and Nick Penniman of the HuffPost Investigative Fund, began talking about the huge, growing chasm between the fortunes of Wall Street banks and Main Street banks, and started discussing what concrete steps individuals could take to help create a better financial system. Before long, the conversation turned practical, and with some help from friends in the world of bank analysis, a video and website were produced devoted to a simple idea: Move Your Money.

…

“The big banks on Wall Street, propped up by taxpayer money and government guarantees, have had a record year, making record profits while returning to the highly leveraged activities that brought our economy to the brink of disaster. In a slap in the face to taxpayers, they have also cut back on the money they are lending, even though the need to get credit flowing again was one of the main points used in selling the public the bank bailout. But since April, the Big Four banks — JP Morgan/Chase, Citibank, Bank of America, and Wells Fargo — all of which took billions in taxpayer money, have cut lending to businesses by $100 billion.

“The idea is simple: If enough people who have money in one of the big four banks move it into smaller, more local, more traditional community banks, then collectively we, the people, will have taken a big step toward re-rigging the financial system so it becomes again the productive, stable engine for growth it’s meant to be. It’s neither Left nor Right — it’s populism at its best. Consider it a withdrawal tax on the big banks for the negative service they provide by consistently ignoring the public interest. It’s time for Americans to move their money out of these reckless behemoths. And you don’t have to worry, there is zero risk: deposit insurance is just as good at small banks — and unlike the big banks they don’t provide the toxic dividend of derivatives trading in a heads-they-win, tails-we-lose fashion.

“Think of the message it will send to Wall Street — and to the White House. That we have had enough of the high-flying, no-limits-casino banking culture that continues to dominate Wall Street and Capitol Hill. That we won’t wait on Washington to act, because we know that Washington has, in fact, been a part of the problem from the start. We simply can’t count on Congress to fix things.

“….”

GM’s Core Strength

GM’s Core Strength | The Big Money.

“It’s probably time we stopped calling Buick-Chevy-GMC-Caddy GM’s “core.” In fact, this is all GM really has, assuming the sales and wind-downs of the other brands goes as planned. What was the core is now the company.”

The Big Money was quoting from this article in the Huffington Post.

Op-Ed Columnist – The Protocol Society – NYTimes.com

David Brooks plugs my friend Richard Ogle’s book, Smart World, and reflects on the changes in the world’s economies. I wish he had gone from physics to biology in the last, but one can cannot expect all one’s wishes to come true….

Op-Ed Columnist – The Protocol Society – NYTimes.com.

How health lobbyists influenced reform bill – chicagotribune.com

The Huffington Post headlined this story: Gift-Wrapped for Lobbyists: How the Health Care Lobby Swarmed Congress and Got What It Wanted. At Least 278 Former Congressional Aides Lobbied On Health Care, Over $600 Million Spent… Health Industry Stocks Hit 52-Week Highs Last Week… Arianna: Lobbyists Should Be Time’s Persons Of The Year.

Hope for a Healthcare Agreement

Deal on health bill is reached.

This link has the President speaking historically about a battle with the healthcare industry over a patient’s bill of rights stretching over decades.

I pray that the extension of care to uncovered citizens that he believes will be now provided, and that this fight is now over. For decades the insurance industry (and other parts of the healthcare industry) have spent astonishing amounts of their customers’ money to aim an army of marketers in the guise of lobbyists at the telling of tall tales, lies, and murderous interpretations about that industry’s behavior to those who we elected to govern the nation. About the nature of the army that has been fighting against healthcare for all of our citizens, the President is right, but I think that the fight is by no means over, and that his words will end up more fuel for partisan fires.

The biggest part of the problem lies with us. I guess that holding the healthcare industry accountable, while a paramount issue, is by no means the crux of the issue of our ‘best of times/worst of times’ healthcare system.

The core of the fight, I think, is over what kinds of human beings we think we are, and what we are going to be concerned with, and right now far too many of us are afraid of the wrong things, ambitious for the wrong things, willing to commit ourselves to care for the wrong things.

When our people was a baby, and in the hands of people named Jefferson and Adams, here is what they said about what we were up to:

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. That to secure these rights, governments are instituted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. That whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these ends, it is the right of the people to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. ….”

“We are incompetent for communication,” my friend Fernando Flores said in a speech in the early 1980s. The we is you and I, and the citizens of this country, and one of the areas in which we are presently harvesting the benefits of that incompetence is in our healthcare.

The disappearance of Flight 188. – By William Saletan – Slate Magazine

The pilots “forgot” that they were flying the airplane!

I saw that this had happened a short while ago. William Saletan has asked good questions about what happened here.

This inevitability was anticipated by an early joke of the computer era, about the world’s first fully automated flight, in which a the computer-generated recording announced, more or less, “Welcome to the world’s first computer-managed flight. You will enjoy a new world of comfort, conveniences, speed and safety on this flight. … Sit back and relax. Nothing can go wrong…can go wrong…can go wrong.”

The joke got the danger wrong. The problem is not malfunctioning computers. Nor is the problem malfunctioning people. People “malfunction” as an essential feature of our existential design, and our machines malfunction because we, imperfect and blind to our functioning, are their designers. On the other hand, our “malfunctioning” is the ground in which our freedoms are born, including what we call free will. Without malfunctioning, we have no invention, no new possibilities.

The danger is that the kind of beings we are is being redesigned by the tools and the world we have invented, and we are not observing what is happening.

This is an example of why I spoke so strongly against the metaphoric background that Jill Bolte Taylor spoke from in her poetic and inspiring TED Talk. When we are in the business of inventing what it is to be human and human futures, we should take care about what we are inventing.

Following the line of another joke, we should be careful that we do not end up where we are headed.

Tell me what you think.

Best,

Chauncey

Changes and New Directions. I’m back!

If you have followed me in this blog you will have noticed that over the last year I have been somewhere else! I and my colleagues dove deeply into our commitment to grow CareCyte.

In June/July of this year, after two years of continuous effort, Shirah and I, and my partners in the company, decided to stop investing in CareCyte. The company was not moving. We have not closed the company; we are continuing in conversations with possible customers. Our website is still active; we continue to think that the company represents a historic opportunity, and we look forward to bringing it forward at some moment in the future, but the timing is off and we don’t have the millions that would be required to alter the readiness of the country and the industry for this innovation.

To all who supported us in this effort, I extend my heartfelt thanks. The challenge of reforming healthcare is unmet and will become more and more difficult as time goes on and it is not addressed. For now, however, it will no longer be at the center of my attention.

I am returning to consulting and constructing another business that fits with the consulting. Stanley Stein, Chris Majer, and I are forging a new offer to customers who need capital to grow their businesses but are having trouble finding it through traditional sources. The new company, PNW Financial Services, will be the subject of forthcoming postings. I will tell you here when we complete an initial website for the company. For those who talk to me directly, my new email address there is cbell@pnwfs.com.

A brief diagnosis of what happened with CareCyte is that we were stopped by paralysis in the healthcare industry combined with structural weaknesses in our own plans. It was obvious in 2008 that there would be a significant challenge in raising money for the company. However, we received almost universal approval for the ideas involved. We thought that the desperate trouble in the healthcare industry, combined with the big commitment of Barack Obama to address the healthcare disaster in the US, would combine to give the company a place to stand given its vast potential impact on healthcare costs and care quality. Obama declared that the ‘…only real danger to the economy is the rising cost of healthcare,’ and he is right. Spending on healthcare in the US is approaching 20% of GDP, at the same time that we will soon will have the largest aging population ever encountered in the country. It seemed a good bet that our offerings, with their systemic effect on the industry, would attract customers and broad support. No such luck, even with good support from the Washington State Congressional Delegation.

I plan to say more about the situation with healthcare in the country as well, in later postings.

I’m glad to be back.

Fernando Flores Offering Workshop in San Francisco

Gloria Flores tells me that Fernando will be leading a three day session in San Francisco on January 27 – 29th, 2010, where participants will explore new ways of learning critical new skills for the 21st century — in particular, learning to work more effectively with others in “pluralistic networks.” During this session, besides engaging in group discussions led by Fernando, participants will participate in various exercises using virtual role-playing game technology to become more aware about how they learn and how they can become more effective in engaging with others. For more information, see www.pluralisticnetworks.com. Fernando and his colleagues are also doing a 4 month virtual leadership and teams program that begins in February. Their website has information on that program as well.

Darwin on Poetry and Music

From my friend Margaret McIntyre comes this cautionary song:

Letter by Charles Darwin, late in his life, to a friend:

“Up to the age of thirty, or beyond it, poetry of many kinds, such as the works of Milton, Gray, Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, gave me great pleasure…But now for many years I cannot endure to read a line of poetry;…My mind seems to have become a kind of machine for grinding general laws out of large collections of facts…and if I had to live my life again, I would have made a rule to read some poetry and listen to some music at least once every week…The loss of these tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature.”

Charles Darwin: His Life Told in an Autobiographical Chapter & in a Selected Series of his Published Letters, Edited by Francis Darwin. London: William Clowes and Sons, Ltd.1892, p. 51.

Qliance Healthcare Goes Upscale in the Internet

Yesterday Daily Kos, one of the most widely read blogs in the Internet, posted a well-crafted story the about the primary care physicians I use and have written about, Qliance (see here and here). The story, titled Seattle Doctors Avoid the Middleman: Monthly Fee Medical Care, is well worth reading. Look for others to follow their lead.

Toyota Taking the Lead

For a decade or so I have been saying terrible things about our automobile companies, and for a couple of years I have been saying them here. (Bullshitting in the Economist is a suitably provocative example. You can search the blog for automobile, Toyota, or Detroit and you’ll get a bunch more.)

Now Toyota is about to pass GM as the #1 auto company in the world. GM, Ford, and Chrysler are not catching up. They are headed in the other direction. Yes, I know the same old excuses are still on the table, to which now we see added “this unexpected economic turnaround.” “Who could possibly have predicted….?” Anyone who was paying attention. Many are culpable. The auto executives, who stopped thinking and learning a long time ago. The media, who have been buying the excuses. The rest of us, who have not spoken out early enough or strongly enough. Our American style of bravado, in which, Rocky style, we praise what is “ours” no matter how obviously troubled it may be.

Business Week, in a December article about the world’s most influential companies, doesn’t spend much space on their automobiles. They tout the way that the quality of thinking in the company is being applied to other fields. Healthcare in this case. (Anne Miller gave me the article.)

Toyota deserves the praise it is getting. What a pity that with 50 years to listen to them – and they have been talking to us for that long, and they have not been hiding their secrets under baskets – we still don’t know how to listen to them.

Argh.

I would appreciate your help

As I noted a few days ago, my colleagues and I at CareCyte have posted a proposal to the Obama Healthcare team, inviting them to undertake a project that we believe would significantly reduce healthcare costs at the same time that it improved quality, and, simultaneously, because we would be using automobile-style manufacturing processes, make a huge contribution to the automobile and steel industries in the U.S.

(Roald Laurenson reminds me that it is not so easy to find the proposal in the way that I pointed to it.  So I put this link to the proposal in this posting. Thank you Roald!)

I would really appreciate it if you would take a look at the proposal and help us raise it to the attention of the new administration. You can leave your comment on the Change.gov website.

To see how to do that, click here.

Thank you very much!

Chauncey

An Invitation from Fernando Flores

My friend Fernando Flores (see here, here, and here, and, for readers of Spanish or those who know how to get a web page translated, see here) briefed me last week about his new venture. I asked him to send me something in writing about what he is doing, and I reprint below substantially all of what he sent me. I recommend you read his invitation and consider it carefully.

Dear Chauncey:

As we discussed, I am in the process of starting a new enterprise that takes the work that we have done together in the past to the “next frontier” if you will, by putting it in the center of what people need to cope and thrive in the reality of our world today.

CareCyte Proposal to Obama Healthcare Team

We just posted an abstract of a CareCyte proposal to the incoming healthcare team, on their website, and we have put the abstract and a more detailed version of the proposal into the CareCyte website and blog. Take a look and leave us a comment on the CareCyte Blog about what you think about what we are attempting to do.

Thanks!

Important Advance in Oral Health

I have had severe gum disease since I was in my late 20s. I brought it on with a combination of poor home care and smoking. I have evidence that 0steoporosis and some poor orthodontia contributed to my difficulties. Of course, as a dutiful son, I held my mother responsible. She always got a laugh out of that.

Along the way I have discovered that a lot of people suffer with difficulties with oral health – cavities or periodontal disease. The published numbers say that more than 5% of those over 35 have moderate gum disease. By the time you get to my age, more than 10% of the population have at least moderate gum disease.

The real problem is some wicked little bacteria that like to live in pockets and create mischief in our mouths. And, recent research has shown, that mischief in our mouths can contribute to even more serious difficulties in other parts of the body, including the heart.

Some friends of mine have developed and just released a probiotic product that puts into the mouth a combination of “good bacteria” which, when ingested as directed (and alongside appropriate home care) will effectively eliminate gum disease and dental caries. Side effects that they promise include fresh breath and whiter teeth….

I have just ordered my first supply of the product, EvoraPlus from ONI Biopharma, Inc. They have an offer where if you set up automatic reorders they pay shipping. In a few weeks or months this product will be available in your local Drugstore.

If you have any concerns at all about the health of your mouth, your teeth, or your gums, I recommend you join me in using this product.

Full disclosure: Stanley Stein, the CEO of ONI BioPharma, is chief strategist for CareCyte, and I serve on the board of directors of ONI BioPharma’s Mexican subsidiary.

Violinist in the Metro

My friend Alan Solinger alerted me to this striking story. One of the world’s best violinists, dressed as a street person, played for 45 minutes in a Washington DC Metro station during rush hour. No one recognized him. He collected some tips, and the most interested listener may have been a small child. No one stopped and really listened. Read the whole story. It’s amazing. What conclusions would you draw about the way we listen in our world today?

Think you know how to be responsible for your money?

My friend Fran Quittel has the background, the discipline, and the diligence to do the homework about what it will take to be responsible for your money in the world that is coming to us. By “be responsible” I am talking about the basics – finding out about the rules of the road at your local financial institution. What can you count on your bank (or credit card issuer, or insurance company, or …) to tell you, and what do you need to plan to dig to find out. The situation is getting hairier and hairier.

What do you need to do to exercise minimal, prudent vigilance over your money? Rest assured that you cannot trust today’s financial institutions, as a general rule, to exercise good judgment in your behalf, to act on intentions that are built around your concerns, or, to put it succinctly, to treat you as a customer. The bad joke of the recent election – capitalism for the masses, socialism for the financial elites – describes our current situation, not one that is in our past.

Read Fran’s essay in a recent issue of the California Progress Report, here.