Imagine yourself in any major supermarket. One can get lost in multiple aisles of single-use plastic bottles filled with soap, gel, wash, shampoo, and conditioner for your body, face, hands, privates, and hair. The cosmetic and personal care section occupies another few aisles with attractively packaged soon-to-be landfill waste. More soaps for laundry and dishes border rows of household cleaning products, air and fabric fresheners. Toothpaste and brightly colored plastic toothbrushes have their own aisle. A few years ago one of the FMCG multinationals released a bamboo toothbrush in a flash of self-congratulatory marketing hype. I’ve never seen one in a store and that technology […]
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Fast-Food Thinking
Who writes your menu? The menu you eat from? The menu you consume information from? The menu of daily choices you consider free will. The menu of breakthrough business insights that promise a leadership advantage? Is it clear by now it’s just multiple choice, mostly bad ones? Predetermined options that deliver for someone else — someone you pay with your money, time, physical & mental health, or your privacy? Does it concern you? Surely you’ve heard a version of “the menu is not the choices/the map is not the territory.” Yet the menu and map are increasingly controlled by consolidated gatekeepers that discourage mental or […]
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The Critical Difference Between Equality and “Equity”
“Equity” went mainstream in 2020, seemingly overnight. Suddenly it appears everywhere and few note (or notice) any distinction between equity and equality. The difference is significant and, like all woke vocabulary, it evolves in real-time as a chameleon adapts to its environment. When words can mean anything, the people who use them don’t have to know anything. Debate and disagreement are stifled by meaningless sloganeering and coordinated linguistic manipulation. Equality is the expectation of equal opportunity for everyone, where effort & skill are rewarded. Equity is the expectation of equal outcomes for everyone — with no explicit requirement of effort or skill — where someone […]
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NOTE5: K-12/University Activism as Barometer of Workplace & Social Behavior
From a leadership (business, community, family) perspective it’s important to understand that at least 2 generations of the current workforce are products of a Western education apparatus where activism and indoctrination go unchecked. While university-level was known, K-12 is further along that many thought. Equally important is awareness of the bigger picture: Critical Race Theory is a one-trick pony. Corporate “diversity, equity & inclusion” is the same game as “anti-racist curriculums” in education. “Health equity,” “climate equity,” “social justice,” and “stakeholder capitalism” are all slogans for the same exact game. The top-level slogan is “The Great Reset.” I’m sharing the more egregious examples of activism […]
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Storytelling & Collapsing in Business and Society
The Key Words In 2015 and 2016 I was at Adobe conferences in Las Vegas, London and Singapore. Digital Transformation ran point, of course. Storytelling” and its sub-theme “empathy” were counterpoints in every room I entered. Storytelling was officially the thing. As software eats the world, software-enabled storytelling eats the humans at great societal cost. Empathy is just one device in the storyteller’s manipulation toolbox that includes vulnerability, purpose, meaning, and an assortment of intersectional mousetraps — all baited with emotional incentives that appeal equally to guilt mechanisms of the non-intersectional. This proven formula works for marketing, management philosophy, and all manner of public & […]
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Resources: Critical Race Theory
Diversity, Equity & Inclusion is a slogan that sits on top of Critical Race Theory (CRT). In order for diversity initiatives to have practical, real-world value for human beings and companies, they must be divorced from CRT and its poisonous political agenda. These sources aim at lifting the veil on race hustlers like Kendi and DiAngelo, and nonsense “trainings” in the public & private sector under names like anti-racism, racial-sensitivity, white-fragility, unconscious-bias, and more. *Note: Polarization about CRT or DE&I as left/right, black/white, good/evil is false. There’s a groundswell that stretches across race, gender & party lines in a coalition that has long-championed diversity of […]
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Send In The Clowns: Woke At Work And Other Gaps
This is a look at the foundations of “woke” beyond its emotional appeal; a reference to free-thinking and practical approaches for business leaders. Second are a few observations about U.S.-China relations in the context of current events. Culture is the thread. Trigger warnings all around… Successful buffet design is a PsyOp. Front-load the buffet with cheap pasta, dotted by a few colorful veggies and glaze it with a slick of “Italian” dressing from a 5-gallon bucket. Name it something catchy — Pasta Primavera! It’s neither Italian nor faithful to the original recipe but fear not. Diners overwhelmingly consume what is presented first. A majority consume […]
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Debt: Knowledge, Financial, Technical, Operational, Emotional
In the meantime, I’d suggest the solution is empathy in its authentic form. Leaders need to shoulder responsibility for emotional debt and create mechanisms to pay it down. On the surface it sounds like a bailout. In reality it’s more like giving people a bucket and patch kit.
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Unpacking Transformation 2020, Part 9: Signal/Noise
As a leader it’s important to recognize that everyone is confronted with their own version of overload and are likely getting more noise than signal. The S/N ratio is one of many reasons why I argue that org-wide transformation, as a starting point, is fantasy. More on change and group dynamics here.
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Unpacking Transformation 2020, Part 8: Contradictions
Thought leaders have been selling an academic fantasy of digital transformation for decades. It doesn’t work. Here’s what does: stealthy, small scale initiatives that start with a wide berth. Determined non-conformists on a mission. Cross-pollinating, multidisciplinary teams of fewer that 5 people. Organic opt-in over forced buy-in. Controlled-environment R&D over spray & pray ‘org-wide.’
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