thoughtsignals

Tom Friedman, in a long piece in the Sunday New York Times magazine, argues that reducing CO2 emissions is not only an environmental necessity, but also vital to national security.

President Bush’s refusal to do anything meaningful after 9/11 to reduce our gasoline usage really amounts to a policy of “No Mullah Left Behind.” James Woolsey, the former C.I.A. director, minces no words: “We are funding the rope for the hanging of ourselves.”

No, I don’t want to bankrupt Saudi Arabia or trigger an Islamist revolt there. Its leadership is more moderate and pro-Western than its people. But the way the Saudi ruling family has bought off its religious establishment, in order to stay in power, is not healthy. Cutting the price of oil in half would help change that. In the 1990s, dwindling oil income sparked a Saudi debate about less Koran and more science in Saudi schools, even experimentation with local elections. But the recent oil windfall has stilled all talk of reform.

That is because of what I call the First Law of Petropolitics: The price of oil and the pace of freedom always move in opposite directions in states that are highly dependent on oil exports for their income and have weak institutions or outright authoritarian governments. And this is another reason that green has become geostrategic. Soaring oil prices are poisoning the international system by strengthening antidemocratic regimes around the globe.

Link.

The Washington Post’s Sunday magazine has a story about a small “intentional community” in the mountains of North Carolina where the residents are trying to build a low-energy lifestyle.

Earthaven is not a “commune,” a term now in disfavor (too stale, too ’70s); the members prefer to call it an “intentional community.” It’s the kind of counterculture social experiment more typically found in places such as Oregon and Northern California. I visited because, while the rest of us worry about gas prices and global warming and terrorists taking over oil fields, the residents of Earthaven have a special approach to energy. They make their own.

Aside from how much I’m spending on gas, I tend to be an optimist about these things, believing that in the long term innovation, free markets and most people’s desire to have a clean environment will produce solutions to the “energy crisis.” I do not believe, as some folks in this article do, that a decades-long world-wide depression would help. Yes, that would lower overall consumption, but it would also likely lead people to practices that are environmentally harmful. Nonetheless, the Earthaven experiment is interesting.

Link.

I’ll be at ConvergeSouth today. I wasn’t at the famous Dave Hoggard barbecue last night, but there’s a set of photos up on Flickr.

Creating Passionate Users has an incisive post on the differences between what kind of employees CEOs say they want and what kind of employees most managers actually want (and get). Does this sound like any place you’ve ever worked?

So yes, I’m thinking Mr. CEO of Very Large Company would say that their company should take the upstart whatever-it-takes person over the ever-compromising team player. “If that person shakes us up, gets us to rethink, creates a little tension, well that’s a Good Thing”, the CEO says. riiiiiiiiiight. While I believe most CEOs do think this way, wow, that attitude reverses itself quite dramatically the futher you reach down the org chart. There’s a canyon-sized gap between what company heads say they want (brave, bold, innovative) and what their own middle management seems to prefer (yes-men, worker bees, team players).”

Meanwhile, USA Today reports that more people are working at “third places,” like coffee shops. A big part of the attraction seems to be the ability to get away from the distractions of the office (not to mention not having to sit in a cubicle). Whether this is really a sustainable trend, or not, remains to be seen.

But some question the permanence of such work. “It remains to be seen if this is a cultural breakthrough or a generational artifact,” says Lee Rainie of the Pew Internet & American Life Project.

“The obstacles remain those bosses who insist on face time and bean counters who equate being outside the office with wasted time,” he says. But the reality is “most businesses run on 24-hour work cycles that follow the sun around the globe. That means it’s not where you are that matters, but what you’re doing.”

And the current issue of the Economist has several stories on the escalating “battle for brainpower.” One article says workers, especially talented, workers are gaining the upper hand over employers.

THE world headquarters of what its proprietor jokingly calls “Pink Inc” is in the attic of a redbrick house in north-west Washington, DC. Children’s pictures decorate the walls; highbrow novels are jumbled up with business books. Daniel Pink spent much of the 1990s working for the Clinton administration, ending up as chief speechwriter for Al Gore. But in the late 1990s he decided to branch out on his own. He now makes his living as what he calls a “free agent”—doing a bit of consulting, giving speeches, writing articles (he is a contributing editor to “Wired”) and books, including, in 2001, a book about people like himself, “Free Agent Nation: How America’s New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way We Live”. Mr Pink has no doubts about the changing balance of power in the corporate world: “Talented people need organisations less than organisations need talented people.”

he Economist piece mentions blogger, by the way, as one class of folks who need organizations less than organizations need them (link; you can watch a short ad to get one-day access to the Economist’s premium content if you’re not a subscriber).

What does all this mean? If you’re an individual cultivate your talent (and your visibility and your network, without which all the talent in the world is pretty useless). If you’re a company, improve your working conditions and make sure the office reality matches your rhetoric.