Check the Wiring

The landing of Flight 1549 in the Hudson River was a stirring tale of heroism, but it was also a test.  Communications and coordination in aviation events has been beefed up dramatically since 9/11.  “An episode like this is a chance to check the wiring and see how things are working,” said Philip Zelikow in an insightful New York Times article on how everything worked during the Flight 1549 incident.  The article describes the operation centers, open telephone networks, coordination committees and perhaps most importantly, the feeds from airborne cameras and telephone reports that helped managers get a grip on what was happening.

Do you have seldom-used emergency operations systems?  How are they activated?  How do you gather information to make good decisions?  Most of us don’t have life-and-death responsibilities, but a test of the wiring would still be a worthwhile simulation of how well your organization collaborates when something out of the ordinary occurs.

Be the Change We Seek

I opened my newspaper this morning to find some snarky opinions about the election.  If only the media, McCain and the voters had dug into the unsavory truth about Obama, ran one, things would have turned out differently.  Another laid the failure to elect McCain at the feet of Republican incompetence and malfeasance, saying “now, it’s Democrats’ turn to foul out.”

 

There’s an old story about a man in the 19^th century who encountered two immigrants in steerage heading for America.  “What kinds of people do you expect to find there?” he asks one.  “People there are unfriendly and unscrupulous,” said one.  “They’ll be out to cheat me.”

 

“Yes, that’s who you’ll find in America,” said the man.  He walked further down the deck and asked another traveler, “What kinds of people do you expect to find in America?”  The second immigrant got a faraway look in his eye and said, “I expect to find new friends, a boss I can work for, perhaps even a wife.”  “Yes, that’s who you’ll find in America,” repeated the man to the second immigrant.

 

Barack Obama freely admitted that he was not the perfect candidate, and that he’ll make mistakes as president.  More importantly, he’s asked voters repeatedly for their help to create lasting change. “We are the change we’ve been waiting for,” he said in one speech.  I was thinking about that invitation when my cousin called this morning.  He’d voted for Obama, but now he was wrestling with his own instincts.  He wanted to believe that the country could change, but his experiences have made him cynical.  He asked me how he could be more positive.

 

I told my cousin I was searching for a small, concrete way in which I could contribute to the changes that we all want.  I hold no position of power; I’m just a consultant who works on business plans and performance management systems for large companies.  But I told him about a talk I’d had with a colleague, who directed me to a European software company that sells software for monitoring corporate responsibility initiatives.  If American companies are going to make progress reducing their carbon footprint or being more energy efficient, they’ll need to define performance metrics throughout their organizations that align with those objectives and their compensation and incentive systems.  So, I’m investigating whether there will be a market for this kind of software in the U.S.  If I’m successful, I hope it will be a tiny contribution to the effort President Obama will lead to free our country from dependence on foreign oil and to address our response to managing climate change.  I’d like to think there are millions of people out there now quietly asking themselves, “What can I do to help?”

Does gasoline need a price floor?

In the run-up to the (keep your fingers crossed) Obama administration, discussions on how to actually accomplish “change we can believe in” are starting. The NYT covered the formation of Obama’s transition team last Saturday, and now Andrew Sullivan has posted on Robert Samuelson’s suggestion for a gas tax.  From a letter I posted recently, here are some additional thoughts on how to preserve momentum for consumers and investors to conserve and promote alternative energy: 

Recognizing that U.S. policy intervention cannot set the world price of oil, why would a floor for domestic prices be a good idea?  Because as a cartel, OPEC does appear to have the power to influence world prices, and they use that power to discourage conservation and alternative energy investments. If you look at U.S. petroleum imports and the change in prices for energy relative to the consumer price index, the real $ value of those imports have gone up dramatically, while energy prices through 2007 remained in a narrow band relative to overall U.S. price inflation.  I don’t know if you could prove it, but I think at least until the end of 2006, staying in that narrow band by manipulating production levels was a key OPEC goal. The chart below shows that the relative price of energy never increases faster than general inflation[1]:

As long as price increases aren’t too volatile, Americans don’t seem to change their behavior regarding energy, either as investors or consumers.  It was only in 2008 with $4 per gallon gasoline that real changes in miles driven and types of cars bought started to kick in.  Now, with gasoline prices apparently headed back to $2/gallon, we risk losing progress on energy independence even before we start.  See this press release from a sustainable travel advocacy group on a potential rise in American auto sales with a drop in gas prices:  http://www.acttravelwise.org/news/1199

Using a flexible tax to set a 2009 floor on energy prices (say $3 per gallon on gasoline) with regular annual increases to the floor(e.g., a 4% increase would create a floor of $3.12 in 2010) would bring certainty that the days of cheap gasoline are over.  Investors and consumers would have a clear understanding about future fuel prices to make decisions on the kinds of cars they buy or the miles they drive.  You could argue that people should have figured this out already, but the history of the U.S. sport utility vehicle market in the 1990s suggests that consumers make short-term decisions; “reduced energy costs, whether achieved through energy efficiency or less expensive energy supply, will result in increased energy demand, a phenomena know as the rebound effect.”[2]  Extending this flexible tax to other forms of energy would encourage conservation and create a return on investment for other forms of alternative energy. The flexible taxes could decrease as market prices rise to and then above the floor; the revenue from these taxes could be used to fund green energy programs.  If this approach is sold as a response to OPEC’s cartel behavior and a step towards energy independence rather than as a new tax, I think Americans would support it.

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[1] Figures from the CEA Economic Report to the President 2008 (B-70) and the Energy Information Administration Annual Energy Review 2007 (p. 130).

[2] CEA Economic Report for the President 2008, p. 169.

More on Obama’s Money Machine

A great article in the June Atlantic on how technology and collaboration techniques financed Obama’s nomination:

http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200806/obama-finance

Tribes

The New York Times (“Can the Cellphone Help End Global Poverty?”) and the Economist (“Mobile telecoms”) published articles this week on the anthropology of cellphones.  Did you know that 3.3 billion people, or half the world’s population, are wireless?  Nokia’s Jan Chipchase and other “user anthropologists” are roaming developing countries to figure out how to sell phones to the other half.  According to Chipchase, your cell phone number is becoming the one fixed piece of your identity.   

“Over several years, his research team has spoken with rickshaw drivers, prostitutes, shopkeepers, day laborers and farmers, and all of them more or less say the same thing:  their income gets a big boost when they have access to a cell phone.”

The Economist articles tell stories of how wireless is changing the patterns of work and social life in advanced economies.  Most telling are the percentages of people by age that send text messages, listen to music, watch TV, etc. on their phones; as I can testify, the kids of the baby boomers live in a new universe when it comes to communication.  Who’s in tune with this trend?  The Obama campaign.  At their big rallies, they’ve encouraged hundreds of thousands of people to text the word “hope” to 62262; then they text you back.  Since I attended a rally in February in Minneapolis, I’ve gotten an average of a message a week.  They’ve encouraged me to vote and to watch debates, they’ve updated me on primary results, invited me to parties and to volunteer opportunities, and of course they’ve asked for donations.  According to his web site, Obama has received contributions from almost 1.4 million people.  In March, an average contribution of $96 from 442,000 people yielded donations of $40 million.

Can you organize people into interest groups and communicate with texting while not being perceived as the latest purveyor of spam?  Obama seems to have managed it.