Articles

Having prevailed for centuries, the expectation of unending economic expansion is now buttressed by deep belief systems. Evidence that expansion has to end contradicts these beliefs, so any alternatives contradicting both beliefs and prior experience are hard to...

A series of three webinars will begin with the first at 1 pm Eastern Time on January 22. They are under the auspices of the Association for Manufacturing Excellence, and AME has a fee: $25 for AME members; $50 for non-members. For descriptions of all three webinars...

 In the biblical story in Genesis 11, people speaking the same language wanted to build a great city with a tower reaching the heavens. Displeased by this ambition, God scrambled their language so that they could no longer understand each other, and the project died...

Bet you did not know that the United Nations designates December 5 as World Soil Day. The UN is trying to bring attention to an environmental threat that could be existential, but to little avail. Every day is proclaimed to be for something. When mentioned in lists of...

From the beginning of the Compression Institute, we’ve been aware that its mission is a huge shift in thinking from business-as-usual. This is no small endeavor. We’ve been pretty quiet because becoming consultants helping people do something new seldom penetrates the...

Last week I (Doc Hall) went to the 10th Lean Accounting Summit. Having attended most of the first nine, I saw many familiar faces, although the majority of attendees were first-timers. The objectives of lean accounting are to align cost systems with the actual flow of...

Although the climate change march in New York City failed to top the news, it was much bigger than organizers’ ambitions for the march three months earlier. The next day saw a follow up demonstration called Flood Wall Street. With the fossil fuel industry as its main...

In theory we think it fair to justify all processes on the basis of the total process, not just part of it, financially or otherwise. An external cost is one that somebody else pays, so it may be considered a subsidy. An example is a picnic in a park. If picnickers...

Global consumption of fossil energy and raw materials continues to rise. Doubling consumption (and extraction) every decade, or even every 50 years, has to stop sometime. Were there no concerns like putting more greenhouse gases in the air, this system is running...

Robert Owens' Vision of Utopia -- New Harmony                                                                                  How it Actually Turned Out Robert Owens' New Harmony in Indiana is a 19th century cautionary tale about visions and utopias. A sect of...

Migration toward vigorous learning seems easiest to see from a company view, one that most of us are used to: 1. Eliminate operational waste of no benefit to customers or any other stakeholder – the prime objective of lean thinking. 2. Then minimize environmental...

Learning to do better while using much less will involve endless messy issues, from large scale to small. Understanding threats like endocrine disruptors depends on technology known to few. In addition, issues are loaded with values clashes, conflicting interests, and...

We really do have to cut back our overall use of resources – transform from resource intensive “cowboy” economics into an economy of wiser competence. From what we have seen, that is unlikely through government policy or by entrepreneurs inventing independent partial...

Compression refers to humanity being squeezed tighter and tighter on a finite planet having limited resources. It also refers to the learning processes by which we must address tangled complex issues in a practical way, engaging in much more effective interaction...

“Mind the gap” is a robo message on British trains cautioning departing passengers to beware of the gap between train and platform. This catchy phrase is being applied to many gaps, like the income difference between the 99% and the 1%. The Compression Institute and...

Food and agriculture illustrate clashes between “learning organizations,” especially local ones, and industrial economies of scale to supply consumer societies. In industrial economies few people now grow what they eat or prepare meals from scratch. Instead they buy...

Nearly all the stories we tell ourselves ignore the obvious, that ultimately we cannot consume more than nature can provide. Perhaps we keep telling them because a realistic story seems to be such a downer. On a macro scale, our economic theories (stories) presume...

This issue begins a series intended to picture a world that is improving quality of life while consuming far fewer natural resources. Can you help us visualize this very different future? Doing better while using less – much, much less – is simple to understand, but...

Sadly, the graphs below have a similar pattern. In each case, the lines closing together coincide with increasing political unrest. There’s much more to the story from the resource shortage angle, but standard journalism is not designed to probe that deeply very...

Economic growth depends on expanding use of physical resources, but it has been the easiest and fastest road to improved quality of life – or to a high life that we think is quality at the time. We became really good at it. The Chinese miracle converted resources to...