Recent Posts:
Bloat
December 16, 2010 Wondering what went wrong, much of the world is still gassed by bloat deflating from the global financial bust. A Compression view of the global economy as a physical entity helps explain it. Financial valuation is a human overlay on physical...
Critical Materials
December 16, 2010 On December 15, the Department of Energy released its Critical Materials Strategy Report which is downloadable. Many horses escaped before this barn door started to close, but within the last few months, imagination began to perk up. For example, the...
Ricocheting Shortages and Ceteris Paribus
December 2, 2010 A new book, Global Resource Depletion by Andre Diederen, reads much like the opening chapter of Compression, only better. Although published in the Netherlands, it’s written in English, and available from on-line booksellers. You can glean the gist of...
Peg Points
December 2, 2010 Dealing with Compression is a wooly undertaking. Just contemplating so many new factors in making decisions taxes any individual’s intellectual comprehension beyond its limit, and emotional strain may be more draining. To make it humanly possible to...
Doc’s Traveling Education
November 16, 2010 Went to the Pegasus conference last week. Attendees were deep into systems thinking, methods of organizational change, and environmental issues. Most seemed to underestimate the challenges facing industrial societies, but not the depth of human...
Industrial Society’s Extra Challenge
November 16, 2010 Global Compression is necessary to globally reduce the consumption of resources. But from a conventional business and economic view, Compression's operational goal is unimaginable: By 2040 globally develop a quality of life somewhat like industrial...
Strategic Re-Valuing
November 3, 2010 The world is full of environmental movements. Some like the World Wildlife Federation, Worldwatch Institute, and The Rocky Mountain Institute are well established, each in its way undertaking “doable” projects to better the environment. Activist...
Resource Wars
November 3, 2010 Historically, most hot wars were partly motivated by grabs for land and resources, as with colonial wars and World War II. For example, early in the 20th century Japan aspired to industrial power status, but lacked the natural resources for it and was...
Austin Compression Thinker Meeting
October 20, 2010 On October 9-10, some of us met in Austin, Texas to discuss how to move Compression from being a book to more of a movement. How can real work organizations actually start on this? The group chewed for a while on a vision for itself, working through...
Compressing Our Differences
October 20, 2010 From tribal wars to functional silo squabbles, rifts among people that don’t understand the world the same way seem to be a normal condition. Even an affinity for multiple human factions at once does not assure that we’re able to agree with each...
Complexity and Communication
October 5, 2010 CEOs seem to be awakening to increasing complexity, and that it could compel them to restructure their organizations. Doing this, they think, will require greater CEO creativity, according to IBM’s May CEO survey. It’s the best known of several...
Progress by Asking Better Questions
October 5, 2010 Basic arithmetic has definitive answers. Most other problems are only resolved using countermeasures that take us to a better state, presuming that we agree on what might be “better.” If we can’t do that, our problems run deeper than tough technical...
Business Models as Tools?
Sept. 22, 2010 As long as economies can physically expand, business models and profitability calculations are objectives, and money their motivator. In Compression, this logic flips. Minimizing resource use and abuse become major objectives. However, human...
Organizational Adaptability
Sept. 28, 2010 Rapid adaptation characterizes a Vigorous Learning Company as described in the book Compression. The need to adapt can come from any cause: market shift, financial crisis, environmental changes, and resource shortages among many others. One way that...
For Vigorous Learning, Dare to Dialog
Sept. 8, 2010 Whether accepting a new view of ourselves “rewires” our brain is unknown, but a truly open exchange – dialog – can be traumatic. To engage in this we have to let down our psychological barriers and prepare our minds to see things we may have been unaware...
Antibiotics and Wicked Problems
Alexander Fleming, who discovered penicillin in a mold in 1928, warned in the 1940s that overuse and misuse of antibiotics would make bacteria become resistant to them. Ever since, prolific use of antibiotics has cycled through periods of conflict followed by lulls....
Rules of Learning
"Rules of engagement" is a phrase familiar to military personnel engaged in almost any mission. Any vigorous learning enterprise has a characteristic in common with the military, a mission shared and hopefully understood by all. Military rules of engagement shift...
The LED Compression Lesson
A couple of reports out this week from Sandia National Lab nicely illustrate the dilemmas of reducing resource use. They also illustrate that more and more thinkers are catching on that Compression is a real, looming challenge. The first report is on lighting. LEDs...
World Grain Supply — 2010 and Beyond
August 15, 2010 World grain prices are up sharply since June. U.S. prices rose for several days ahead of the USDA's much awaited projection of this year's global grain harvest, issued on August 12. Excess heat cut this year's harvest in Central Asia. Russia and the...
The Case for Compression
The case for Compression rests on no single, simple threat. We can't support the present human population level, seven billion, headed for nine, by going back to a primeval environment. However, our existence is symbiotic with that of our home, earth, so neither can...