BUYING BOOKS
I love to buy books and read books. I don’t often use the library. I don’t own a Kindle. I buy books. But I’ve noticed that I end up reading only about two thirds of the books I buy. Not a good percentage. Each of those I don’t read wastes stuff: paper, ink, money, time, and space. I’d like to raise the percentage.
My family and I (wife, kids and grandkids) visited my parents in Palo Alto, California over New Year’s. We stayed at the Stanford Faculty Club in the middle of the very quiet – on recess – Stanford campus. The Stanford Bookstore – one of my favorite bookstores anywhere, and I rate bookstores like food critics rate dinner – is a three minute walk away. 
So I decided to spend time in the bookstore every day, and carefully evaluate books for reading. I looked at a lot of books. I was trying to look at each one carefully enough, and read enough of it, to determine whether once I got it out of the store, it would grab my attention deeply enough – and for long enough – that I would actually read it. The goal is to get my percentage up, way up.
Among the books I spent time with were:
• Tracy Kidder’s most recent book, Strength in What Remains, an against-all-odds story about a kid fleeing to New York to get away from the genocidal war in his native Burundi;
• Kurt Vonnegut’s new collection of previously unpublished stories, Look at the Birdie – I don’t read much fiction these days, but I love Kurt Vonnegut;
• Journalist Amanda Little’s book Power Trip, an account of a cross-country road trip to discover the impact of fossil fuels (and the need for alternatives).
• Commonwealth, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s latest intellectual tour-de-force full of radical solutions to our current economic predicaments;
• Glimmer, written by Warren Berger and subtitled How Design Can Transform Your Life (and Maybe the World), in which he collaborates with celebrated Canadian designer Bruce Mau to explore the power of design to solve business and social problems.
• The Department of Mad Scientists: How DARPA Is Remaking Our World, from the Internet to Artificial Limbs, Michael Belfiore, a look under the hood of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency—the maverick and controversial group whose work has had amazing civilian influence in addition to its impact on the military.
There were many others, too, and I would like to read every one of those books listed above, but in the end I only bought one, and it was an odd choice. It was written by Tina Seelig, a professor of entrepreneurship at Stanford, and called What I Wish I Knew When I Was 20. 
The book was written in response to the coming-of-age of her son Josh. Wondering about how he would make his way in this world, she looked back at her life, and her teaching methods, and produced a provocative manifesto for the young.
The reason I chose it is because my daughter is grappling with the same issues – where does her true passion lie and what kind of career and life will she develop? I thought it might be a good read for both of us. She hasn’t read it yet – she left two days ago for a winter of wildlife research in Costa Rica with Global Vision International, which will surely be more life-changing than any book her father could toss her way – but I have, and it was worth it.
What sold me – as I sat at the bookstore with a pile of books stacked on the broad arm of a comfortable chair – was a story at the very beginning about an assignment she used with her students. She gave them an envelope with five dollars of “seed funding”, granted plenty of planning time, and then allowed them two hours, once they open the envelope, to generate as much money as possible. She says, “Most of my students eventually found a way to move far beyond the standard responses. They took seriously the challenge to question traditional assumptions – exposing a wealth of possibilities – in order to create as much value as possible.”
The teams that did best didn’t use the five dollars at all. They realized that the money framed the problem way too tightly, and that five dollars is essentially nothing, and that the assignment is really to figure out how to make money when you start with nothing. . They identified problems they experienced or noticed others experiencing – problems they might have seen before but had never thought to solve and became very inventive.
One group set up a stand in front of the student union and offered to measure bicycle tire pressure for free. If the tires needed filling, they added air for a dollar. They had the uneasy feeling that they were taking advantage of their fellow students, who could go to a nearby gas station to have their tires filled for free. It turns out their first few customers were grateful and that they were providing a convenient and valuable service. Nonetheless, after the first hour, they stopped asking for a dollar and requested donations instead. Their income soared. Experimenting along the way paid off. The iterative process, where small changes are made in response to customer feedback, allowed them to optimize their strategy on the fly. Afterward the students agreed that they would never need to be broke, since there is always a problem at hand waiting to be solved.
What a lesson.
“Being in business,” says Seelig, “should be like traveling in a foreign country. Even if you prepare carefully, have an itinerary and a place to stay at night, the most interesting experiences usually aren’t planned.” You meet someone who leads you to an extraordinary place, you have unexpected encounters, and the most memorable parts of the trip are the surprising parts that happened into your path.
Come to think of it, I think I knew all that when I was 20, and the reason I read the book is that I’m now re-learning it. It’s about resilience, which may be the successor to the idea of sustainability. Since change is inevitable the impacts may be dependent on our ability to harness the unexpected.
CO-OPS ON THE RISE
I’m still excited about the budding alliance between the United Steelworkers (USW) and the Mondragon Cooperatives – and the general awakening consciousness about worker co-operatives and co-operative business in general that I wrote about last month.
And there’s more.
Rodney North of Equal Exchange (the Massachusetts-based worker owned co op fair trade coffee company) 
made me aware of an article on the New York Times Economix blog by Nancy Folbre, an economics professor at University of Massachusetts. In “The Case for Worker Co-ops” she says, “Since many of our most prestigious economic institutions have embarrassed themselves at our expense over the last year, maybe it’s time to look around. Worker-owned and -managed businesses combine the romance of entrepreneurship with solid family values and commitment to community. What’s not to like?”
In addition to the Mondragon/US Steelworkers agreement and the worker co-ops featured in Michael Moore’s new movie, she says, “Rousing examples abound. CNN Money recently profiled six worker-run businesses including Pelham Auto, whose mechanics have cheerfully fixed every car I’ve owned for the past 20 years.” One of the companies CNN profiled, by the way, is South Mountain.
But all this attention being paid to worker co-ops makes Folbre, the economist, wonder what the economic research says. Not much, according to her. Worker owned and managed companies are “largely ignored in economics textbooks.”
I have found that even the socially responsible business movement, to my ongoing surprise, pays little attention to true workplace democracy.
But she does, at least, find a little research – or maybe it’s just opinion. Mostly it’s about the troubles – or potential troubles – with employee ownership. One of these is that worker-owned and managed companies, with more complex goals than maximizing profit, tend to be less growth-oriented than other companies.
“Don’t tell Wall Street,” says Folbre, “but that could be a good thing.”
I want to say more about the USW/ Mondragon agreement.
The Mondragon initiative is not the first innovative Steelworkers alliance. In the 1990s, the USW helped found the Blue-Green Alliance together with the Sierra Club and other environmentalists and they have been involved with Van Jones’ Green For All.
And now, if this new alliance works, it might make a system of worker-owned enterprises assembled with the purpose of a green restructuring of the U.S. economy. That could be a powerful force.
The USW-Mondragon collaboration grew out of a ‘green industrial revolution’ project that created a partnership with Gamesa, 
a Spanish wind turbine firm, to retrofit abandoned steel plants in the U.S. (40,000 U.S. manufacturing facilities have closed since the beginning of the current economic crisis) and produce wind turbines (there are 200 tons of steel and 8000 moving parts in every large wind turbine). Gamesa’s connection to nearby Mondragon brought the USW and the co-operative giant together.
While this historic business alliance gives hope to the possibility of reviving manufacturing (and the communities that have been devastated by the losses), there is also congressional activity coming along to support employee ownership. According to the Vermont Employee Ownership Center, Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont
will introduce two new bills that would seek to expand employee ownership in the United States.
The first, the Worker Ownership, Readiness and Knowledge (WORK) Act would create an Office of Employee Ownership and Participation within the Department of Labor to promote employee ownership and employee participation in company decision making. The second bill, the U.S. Employee Ownership Bank Act, would provide loans and loan guarantees to employees to purchase a business through an ESOP or a worker-owned cooperative.
On the eve of the Copenhagen meetings, this collection of related activity is heartening. Perhaps the most important thing about the expanding co-operative business movement, in the long run, may be as an avenue to the large-scale collaborative alterations to the architecture of the economy that will be necessary if we are to successfully tackle the challenges of climate change and the post peak oil transition to come.
DESIGN THINKING
In the autumn issue of Strategy + Business Magazine, editor Art Kleiner interviews Tim Brown, CEO of the legendary design firm IDEO. Kleiner tells about IDEO’s first great protoype, which was created when the company consisted of eight scruffy designers crowded together in an upstairs studio on University Avenue in Palo Alto. Douglas Dayton and Jim Yurchenko affixed the roller ball from a tube of Ban roll-on deodorant to the base of a plastic butter dish. Before long Apple Computer was shipping its first mouse.
Brown is a proponent of Design Thinking – every problem, in his view, is a design issue and can only be solved with Design Thinking. He says, “I want to challenge designers to transform design practice. There will always be a place for the artist, the craftsman, and the lone inventor, but the astonishing pace of change in the world demand new approaches to design: collaborative, in a way that amplifies, rather than subdues, the creative powers of individuals; focused but flexible and responsive to unexpected opportunities. . . The next generation of designers will need to begin looking at every problem – from adult literacy to global climate change – as a design problem.”
He recently published a book called Change by Design. Reading the book reminded me of my own brief encounter with IDEO two years ago.
As a Stanford undergrad Deb Meisel worked a summer at South Mountain as an intern. She did some great work helping us develop a manual of information and company practice for new employees. When she left she was looking forward to an exciting opportunity: working at IDEO.
Not long after I was in Palo Alto and Deb took me for a whirlwind tour of IDEO. It was unlike any other company tour could possibly be.
The Palo Alto offices (there are now additional offices in San Francisco, Chicago, Boston, New York, London, Munich, and Shanghai) are a campus that has developed over time in a sprawling set of old commercial buildings and back alleys near downtown, the ultimate “low-road” facility. Outside they are unimposing and unremarkable. But open any door and watch out!! Walk in and it’s truly psychedelic. Everywhere you look there’s stuff you want to examine, touch, read, explore. It’s like a carnival, a bazaar, and a museum rolled into one. Overwhelms the senses.
Here there’s a glass cylinder piled full with crude foam prototypes of computer mouses. Then there’s a graphically beautiful poster meant to hang in a hospital room that says “Here’s what’s going to happen to you while you’re here and here’s what it’s going to be like” and elegantly explains each step and tells you all the things you never know in hospitals until they rudely happen to you. Bikes hang everywhere on cables up in the high warehouse-like ceilings (One of the IDEO designers, years ago, got tired of tripping over all the bikes clogging the passageways every day. He invented a cable system to raise and lower them, built it that night, and the next day bikes began to hang from the ceilings). There’s a beautifully appointed employee eating and gathering space. A curving glass showcase displays the various iterations – about thirty of them – of Palm Pilots.
We walk into buildings, out of buildings, down alleys, and into other buildings. We come to the Toy Lab. This is the only place at IDEO where people are not working on projects for clients. Here, a team of creatives spends all their time making new toys. The Toy Lab is out of this world. I want to take a picture. Not okay.
And then to the Kitchen, where test cooking is done and food products and packaging are developed and on to the shop. Oh, the shop. Huge, cluttered, and organized. Rows of Bridgeport Millers, bandsaws, and every imaginable kind of metal and woodworking tool. This is where prototyping happens, where people make things over and over, trying different versions, experimenting.
It’s 6 in the evening, and all the buildings are semi-occupied and busy. Deb says people work at all hours. They work when they want. People look purposeful. At the same time, they look relaxed. Some have their feet up on their desks. Some are munching. Some are hunched at computers; others are engaged in animated conversation.
All this happened in 15 or 20 minutes. I kept wanting to stop and spend an hour or two here, there, and everywhere.
It’s an intoxicating place, a collaborative Mecca, the reflection of an ethos that knows, as Brown says, “that all of us are smarter than any of us.” The long-term global transformation ahead will require more than political will and appropriate investment; it will also require collaboration, the kind Tim Brown refers to, but possibly of a type and scale heretofore unknown. We will need new tools, new abilities, and new ways of working together. New forms of governance and business.
I read a few passages from Change By Design at the most recent meeting of our Design Group. I am convinced that the future of our industry – and our business – is the fusion of Tim Brown’s Design Thinking and Stewart Brand’s Planet Craft (see Whole Earth Discipline). Seems like a vast virgin forest of opportunity . . . and necessity.
-
JOHN ABRAMS is co-founder and CEO
of South Mountain Company and the author
of COMPANIES WE KEEP read more
-
COMPANIES WE KEEP is published by Chelsea Green Publishing
read more -
