Updated: 9/11/06; 6:57:32 AM.
Gil Friend
Strategic Sustainability, and other worthy themes of our time
        

Friday, February 4, 2005

[Crossroads Dispatches]:

Tom Peters is saying basically the same.

They say 'Take a deep breath. Be calm.'
I say 'Tell it to Wal*Mart. Tell it to China. Tell it to India. Tell it to Dell. Tell it to Microsoft.'

They say 'Eighty-hour weeks will kill you.'
I say 'Work 35-hour weeks, and the Chinese will kill you.'

They say 'continuous improvement.'
I say 'Bold Leaps.'

This talk reminds me of the late 90s. The dot-com period had to be one of the most wasteful periods I've ever witnessed. Working eighty-hour plus is, in fact, terribly UNproductive as hell. Although it might work on factory floors - but Ricardo Semler, CEO of Semco, and author of Seven-Day Weekend would argue with that.

Throwing time and/or money at problems typically results in extremely inelegant, uncreative solutions that require even more time and more money to sustain.

If you're truly operating in a conceptual and idea age, you have got it backwards. You can't win by playing the game using the same rules as your opponents. That's yesterday's race. Where labor is cheap, they'll just throw more bodies at the problem. That's a crazy strategy to follow in a country where no one blinks forking over nearly $4 for a coffee drink.


9:09:06 AM    comment []  trackback []

The Solar Energy Industry Association roadmap 2030 (PDF). I can't find the total cost of the roadmap. Regardless, this is a classic market-state program. It radically increases the opportunity of US citizens by reducing dependencies. Freedom of action enhances opportunity formation. Want an industry of the future? Retrofitting the US economy for solar power is one. Flash forward 10 years. If energy prices then are volatile (as they are likely to be given the rise of global guerrillas), a state that has incentivised the construction of a decentralized energy infrastructure will be put at an amazing advantage. Systemic shifts take time. The advantage goes to the early adopter. My future opportunity, and yours, is being diminished by a state that doesn't value decentralized energy and prefers to spend its coin on military power. [John Robb's Weblog]

'nuff said.

7:27:59 AM    comment []  trackback []

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