Timesizing® Associates

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Good News in Jun. 1-15, 1999
[Commentary] ©1998,1999 Phil Hyde, The Timesizing Wire, Box 622, Cambridge MA 02140 USA (617) 623-8080

[Hey, slamming the superscammers - with humor! What more can we ask?]
6/15 Dinosaurs on Wall Street, by Steven Levingston, Bos Globe, C4.
I invited my stockbroker, T. Rex, to lunch to wish him a happy extinction. We'd had a terrific business relationship for, what, a hundred million years or so, but in the past few weeks things had really changed and now it was time for me to say good-bye. I was going on-line....
"You're stuck in the Cretaceous, old man," I told him.
"But I've got expertise - experience!"
"We're all experts now, T. Rex," I informed him, "and after a week or two at anything, who isn't experienced?...It's a self-service world now...."
[That's right. Aside from the "ever better technology, ever worse service" angle here, how long can it take to become an expert on Random Walk? (- see the Wall St book of that name.) Skills are either getting specialized into asymptotic/forever-fractal irrelevance, or the relevant ones are so general, gradual, obvious or all of the above that no one can package them (but we're trying). And so we're all doing virtually a random walk on the really important stuff.
[Who needs "experts" like Greenspan, Rubin, or even Les Thurow and Bob Reich (tho' they try harder)? They could all have a gigantic blind spot right in the middle of their thinking. After all, they all assume an eternal economic décor of basic Keynesianism, especially in the light of Reagan's big embrace of such and at levels which would make even Keynes gawk. And Keynes himself told us it was all from Bandaidsville in his NY Times letter 65 years ago, two years before he enshrined it in his more-snob-than-sense mastertome (see the Dahlberg paragraph on our bibliography page).
[25 years ago the experts were mystified by upward stagflation - simultaneously rising unemployment and inflation - which by their lights should have been impossible and bad, but in retrospect was mostly good and completely possible. Now they're equally mystified by downward stagflation - simultaneously low unemployment and inflation - which by their lights should be impossible and but in retrospect will be seen as mostly bad and, again, completely possible. Given a few hints from Jane Jacobs, these conditions are quite comprehensible, even predictable, within the framework of worktime economics, which points to the 1920s as a precedent for downward stagflation.
[What can we say? Trying to communicate with conventional brains about this is a challenge that hasn't seriously been taken up since 1933. All we can do in our limited time today is refer kind readers to our newest (wordy) webpage with the wordy onramp, Why should I be forced to stop work at a certain number of hrs/wk?!....]

6/14 Qwest bids $55b for US West, Frontier - Looks to break up firms' deals with Global Crossing, by Noelle Knox, AP via Bos Globe, A16.
[Good. A plague on all their houses. Scan down to background stories on 5/17 and 3/18 on our mergers pages.]

[GOP presidential hopefuls converging on time bind? First, Steve Forbes - story below 6/02. Now, Dan Quayle?]
6/13 Strong economy steals GOP thunder - Candidates hampered by satisfied electorate, by Aaron Zitner, Boston Globe, front page.
WASHINGTON - You are tired, says Dan Quayle. You are "exhausted and stressed," he says. "You work hard. You miss dinners. You miss breakfasts...."
[Whoa, is this a genuine focus on the longer and longer hours worked by Americans who still have "fulltime" jobs? Not exactly. After a confusing Quaylian reference to sometimes skipping your child's play at school (play at school?? - why didn't he use "your child's soccer after school"?), he goes on to blame it all on taxes - ]
And all because the government demands that you work ever-harder to pay always-higher federal taxes.
[Oh well, at least he's got the two ends of the problem of our 60-year freeze on the American workweek despite inpouring work-saving technology. We refuse to share the vanishing work and let the workweek get shorter to spread the work across everyone, so we're an anxious surplus commodity trying vainly to get more money by working more hours (that way lies the sweat shop) while building up a bigger and bigger underclass that requires more and more taxes to keep in line. Our bursting prisons alone are eating up a huge chunk of our taxes.
[And yet our cognitive dissonance about the imperative of work-spreading by hours-cutting, our pandemic perceptual disability in thinking about the workweek as anything but a negligible constant, goes on and on.
[Yet just as Jesus said 2000 years ago, "No man cometh to the Father but by me," so we say, at the dawn of the third millennium after Jesus, "No society cometh to real progress but by Timesizing."
[You call Star Wars "progress"? Ha! You call the future-projected battles of the now-disappointing Star Trek spinoffs "progress"? Give us a break!
[The reality is that the American Dream has become hitting the lottery or suing the deep pocket. The category of "economic sci fi" is virtually empty, and our future looks bleaker than our present, without even mentioning our growing ecological distress. We either close the income gap by closing the work and skills gap by Timesizing, Not Downsizing, or our burgeoning underclasses and insulated overlords will give us ongoing nightmares forever.]

[And here's another growing problem among overworked Americans - ]
6/13 Into thin air - "Most modern Americans are bored to tears, so they need a challenge. It used to be work...," by Barbara Huebner, Bos Globe, front page.

["Boosting competitiveness and saving jobs are contradictory."
= deeper "triumph" in the quicksand for current welfare economics vs. current short-term capitalism,
and muddier "logic" from short-term capitalism vs. long-term capitalism via simple terra-firma Timesizing - ]
6/12 Japan plans to add 700,000 jobs - Half will be public; firms to get subsidies, by Yuri Kageyama, AP via Bos Globe, F2.
[aka The Fix du Jour news from Tokyo...]
Japan will try to tackle record unemployment, foster business growth, and beef up its competitiveness by creating more than 700,000 jobs, the government announced yesterday. "We must allay people's worries about job security and put our nation's economy on track to self-sustained growth," Prime Minister Keizo Obuchi said in announcing the program. Unemployment is at an all-time high of 4.8%, about 3.4 million people, and government officials are worried that it may rise higher. Nearly half the new jobs will be in the government sector, including a two-year program to boost hiring of part-time language teachers at public schools. To encourage hiring, the package also promises subsidies to companies in growing industries, such as telecommunications, ecology, and biotechnology.
[Q - how dey gonna pay for all this?]
Obuchi said he hopes to get a supplementary budget passed as soon as possible to fund the program. The Japanese media has speculated that he will request $4.2 billion....
[So how's the reaction?]
While business leaders praised the package, analysts expressed doubts about its potential effectiveness.
[Wouldn't ya know, eh? The guys that actually have to do it, like it. The bullshooters that just have to yap about it, don't like it - and for all the wrong reasons. Check out this glowing articulation of one of capitalism's major MAJOR current contradictions - ]
The main problem is that boosting competitiveness and saving jobs are contradictory, said Andrew Shipley, an economist with Schroders Japan in Tokyo.
[Funny how these boys can word-lassoo tricky stuff about other economies that they'd just never get aboaut their own. Boosting competitiveness and saving jobs are contradictory. Kate Jurow once foresaw that the future of this kind of economy is infinite competitiveness via NO JOBS, or maybe just one to oil the robots in case it rains all over the Earth at the same time. This contradiction received its canonical form back in the late '30s when Henry Ford was giving labor leader Walter Reuther a tour of one of his newly mechanized plants. "Let's see you unionize these robots," says Ford. "Let's see you sell them cars," was the devastating reply. Standard short-term capitalism, rife with shallow analysts and blackbox theorists, is in fundamental contradiction - its view of competitiveness, colored by efficiency and technology, contradicts its need for (jobs=wages=earnings=spending=) markets. Those parens are important, because such is the Partitioned Brain Syndrome of standard economists that they think markets exist by magic, independent of jobs=wages=earnings=spending. Black box economics. Magical, floating-in-air markets. How can so many, such highly paid people, be so stupid? Just listen to this birdbrain drivel - ]
"If you want to protect jobs, you have to sacrifice productivity and wage growth..." [Shipley again].
[Luckily there's a simple solution whose discovery is aided by the fact that we can pinpoint, if not where this kind of thinking all started, at least where it all tremendously accelerated, and that was with Rexford Tugwell's strange opus, "The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts" (1933), followed up by an equally turbid but much more fashionable and snobby chaser from John Maynard, Lord Keynes himself, with the affraying appelative, "The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" (1936). Spreading forth from America and Britain and the whole of the English-speaking world from that time forth came a pandemic virus that absolutely hid the general direction of the solution from human eyes, such that, even though there were several outbreaks of the truth since then, they went nowhere because they "did not compute" and were completely unintelligible to the thinking of the time - which extends right up to the present day. There's a kind of masochism in it, a blind faith in the healing power of pain a la "no pain, no gain" that quite contradicts its inheritance practices - ]
"...[Obuchi] is trying to generate the benefits of a restructuring and market-oriented policy without enduring any of the pain..\.. [Shipley again].
[As if Shipley is not assuming we can access the benefits of a market in the first place - without the "pain" - the inconvenience, the expense, the irritation, the bother, the management demands - of providing employment - that we can have markets without jobs=wages=earnings=spending!]
"What the Obuchi administration is trying to do is have its cake and eat it too." [Shipley again.]
[And what Shipley and the whole of short-term capitalism is trying to do is have its markets and the total "efficiency" and "competitiveness" of few or no employees.]
Abitaka Saiki, the prime minister's spokesman, acknowledged that social welfare was a major part of the jobs program at a time when the old system of lifetime employment - in which workers could expect to be employed at the same company for their entire career - quickly eroding.
[Hey, if CEOs can't be bothered providing job security and lifetime employment - but still expect "magic markets" to survive.... There's a name for you - "magic market" capitalism.]
"This is a painful phenomenon for most workers," Saiki said.
[What about the pain for CEOs who can't understand why their markets are shrinking, because they no longer recall the continuum of jobs=wages=earnings=spending?]
The program offers a way to help adjust, he said, by offering job-training for midcareer workers and opening up new job opportunities for business executives, such as foreign language teacher or school guidance counselor.
[The problem here is that these skills are targeted by artificial and arbitrary guesswork, not by market-determined overtime, and the hidden assumption is that Japan needs an unlimited number of language teachers and guidance counselors.... Well, actually, if there are no jobs, we suppose they might well "need" an infinite number of what amount to job counselors, just as patients without tongues would "need" an infinite amount of speech therapy.] The package also seeks to make it easier for small- and medium-size businesses to reconstruct and declare bankruptcy....
[Oh that's rich. We're trying to make bankruptcy harder on this side of the Pacific and they're trying to make it easier on the other side! We can't both be right, and since our approach reverses what we learned the hard way during the Depression, it probably isn't us.]
...[The package] is intended to help companies shift stock holdings and sell off parts of their operations....
[Here they aren't right because, as we said elsewhere, since when do companies "need help" shifting stock holdings or doing sell-offs or spin-offs or acquisitions or mergers? Lazy CEOs do those things as a matter of course.
[Back to the broader issues here. Both Obuchi's and Shipley's approaches qualify as welfare economics anyway - except Shipley and his pals squawk at welfare for the poor and unemployed while blindly ignoring welfare channelled to the military and to private-sector corporations, especially to corporations via the stock market, where alone they tolerate, indeed totally fail to perceive, unlimited inflation, for are they not even now trying to "privatize" social security in America? And what is that but welfare for the financial markets? Basically Shipley's welfare system works like this: we socialize and spread the pain but we privatize and concentrate the profit. Not surprisingly, that way lies war, because of the fundamental contradiction expressed in our chorus "the more concentration [of wealth], the less circulation" = just another way of expressing Shipley's and standard economics' virus-borne "contradiction" between competitiveness and jobs, and because of the unwillingness to really share, that is, to share the good stuff - today's CEOs only want to share the bad stuff - the pain, the unwanted employees, the costs of doing business, well, their business anyway.
[So what is this virulent virus, this pandemic type of brain partitioning dyslexia/aphasia that blocks the perception of any connection between "undesirable" jobs and desirable markets (sort of like the combo of desirable personal projects and goals superimposed on an "undesirable" body and bodily functions&needs). Well we could just dismiss it as greed and laziness on the part of CEOs, but maybe there's something behind that. Maybe something creepingly slow allowed CEOs to gradually get more and more spoiled, bratty, greedy and lazy. Where do we look for clues?
[One big clue, now that we're all among Keynesians here, both right (Reagan's military Keynesianism and corporate cave-ins) and left (LBJ's "war on poverty" and its successors), is tracing back Keynes to Tugwell and doing some reverse engineering. Tugwell provided the heavy academic artillery for the New Deal's huge propaganda campaign against those who were trying to stamp out the spreading virus (and bear in mind we're talking about a computer virus here, a software virus, a virus in our social software and that means in the semantic structures of our language, manifesting in our socioeconomic institutions) and Tugwell's very title "The Industrial Discipline and the Governmental Arts" is an attempted rebuttal to the one man in the early 1930s who really understood this now-pandemic virus. Here's the link.
[Tugwell's title describes two Good Things, industrial discipline and governmental arts. But suppose we didn't like those two things and wanted to spin them as negative. We might substitute "industrial control and governmental interference" and then, because the latter is more familiarly negative, we might put it first to clarify our negative intent, thus "governmental interference and industrial control." Is there any book, published just before Tugwell's, that contains this very pair and where it figures largely and stands out?
[As it happens, yes. The following sentence graced the first chapter in a widely read book published the year before Tugwell's "Industrial Discipline" - "For I believe that our balking, backfiring profits economy can - by injecting one planned adjustment - be made to work in socially desirable ways, and even be made to satisfy high-grade engineering standards of efficiency, with even less involved governmental interference and industrial control than we already have." That sentence stands out on the third page of Chapter One in Art Dahlberg's "Jobs, Machines, and Capitalism" (p. 23) published in 1932. Having been trying to explain his ideas to friends and colleagues for at least eight years before he published this book, Dahlberg was more aware than most of the type of blindness the "virus" conferred. It was indeed a kind of time blindness, a chronocybernetophobia that took as carved-on-concrete the Forty Hour Work Week and started excluding from its victims' consciousness the fact once upon a time (only a century and a half before), workweeks were much MUCH longer - like how about TWICE as long - and in fact the 84-hour-workweek (yes, that's right, folks = seven 12-hour days!) that persisted in our most dangerous industry, big steel, right up into the 1920s. The "virus" confers the blind assumption that the workweek is either a negligible variable or even a constant that can be taken for granted, and that anyone who even thinks up, let alone expresses, the idea that it could be a control variable, is a ridiculous fool, and probably a dangerous one. More anon.]

6/11 Japanese economy posts first growth since mid-1997, AP via Bos Globe, C2.
TOKYO - Massive public works spending helped Japan's economy reverse itself in the first three months of this year, with the ogovernment reporting yesterday an unexpectedly strong 1.9% growth rate - the first sign of growth since the summer of 1997. While hardly torrid, the Jan-Mar GDP increase...was well abouve the 0.8 contgraction in the last 3 months of 1998 - the fifth straight quarter of decline. Officials [such as gov't spokesman Hiromu Nonaka]...said the government will continue its attempts to spur a full recovery from the country's worst recession since World War II....
[Check out the bad statistics in the article below. Japan's first growth in 2 years is lovely, but let's recall it's all fake "job creation," not real worksharing, and the biggest non-military peacetime job creation effort in history, the New Deal of the 1930s, failed to solve the Great Depression until the return of world war. And of the two biggest military peacetime job creation efforts (Hitler's, 1933-36, and Reagan's, 50 years later), only Hitler's was an economic success because Reagan's was followed by the sharp recession of 1989-91 and a guru-baffling "boom" ever since that many, including us, see as a mere bubble, albeit a megabubble - like the Roaring Twenties.]

6/10 Japan proposes to create jobs to ease layoffs, by Todd Zaun, AP via Bos Globe, A2.
TOKYO - ...The governing Liberal Democratic Party [evidently no smarter than our Democrats] is expected to announce [tomorrow] a package to replace jobs lost in a recent wave of corporate cost-cutting.
[Hey, at least they've identified the problem.]
..\..To combat record-high unemployment... [of course, they're not "smart" enough to grossly undercount it like us] the government would create hundreds of thousands of jobs in temporary public service projects and give money to companies to boost hiring....
[Here's where they really get stupid. Apparently the Liberal Democrats in Japan are no smarter than our Democrats here with their strained job creation instead of easy work sharing, but then our Republicans perpetrated "job creation" too - in the 1980s in gross violation of their own free-market principles and at levels a hundred times worse than the Democrats (got our national debt from the 100-billions to the trillions, didn't it?!) but channelled it all through the military so it was all right - just like Hitler did 1933-36 in solving the Depression in Germany.]
The package would also contain legal reforms to encourage mergers and to make it easier for companies to sell off parts of their operations.
[Since when do companies need help in merging, selling out and selling off? They're calling this "reforms"?]
The central and local governments would hire 100,000s of people directly, and would give funds to companies in fast-growing industries to encourage hiring of 100,000s more.
[Oh yes, the old "government as employer of last resort" routine - that didn't work in the 1930s until the war came along. It only worked in Germany before the war because Hitler didn't wait for the war to militarize his economy. Seems that war is the only thing so far that really incentivates us supposedly "intelligent" human beings to do the type and scale of sharing necessary to recover from deep recession.
[And more corporate welfare? That's only smart if you do it the way France did with the Robien Law of 1996-97 (stupidly revoked by the Socialists) where the government gave 7-year taxbreaks to companies who cut hours to share the work among more employees or cut hours instead of cutting jobs. For more info, scan way down to the Nation section on our Working Models page.]
Some of those brought in by the government would be used as school guidance counselors [yeah, you're gonna need a LOT of those when there are no jobs - "No wait, Suzuki, you might really like it at Burger King...."], on ecological projects [the superficial appeal to long-term values forward], and to excavate and preserve historical artifacts [the superficial appeal to long-term values backward]....
[Ah it's all so drearily familiar. We did the same "really needed" things in the CCC and the WPA tidying up parks and cemeteries. But (a) how are they gonna pay for it and (b) the whole expense and hullaballoo of the New Deal did not perform more than a cosmetic (40%) solution until the war. When will we ever learn. We should have pursued the work sharing route primitively embodied in the Black Thirty Hour Work Week Bill that passed the U.S. Senate on April 6, 1933, and saved all the headstands, backbends and ultimate taxes. And maybe saved a lot of lives too by modelling a solution that didn't need war to justify graduated taxes at the necessary astronomical levels.]
The plan would also expand...training programs for job seekers....
[Well this is hopeful, but how would the programs be targeted, triggered, funded and paced? Probably they'd be funded by taxes or government debt, and everything else by guesswork. We have a better way. The incidence of overtime should be allowed to do all this automatically. That's part of the Timesizing design.]
"The government has to look into new sources of money" to pay for the plan....[PM spokesperson Akitaka Saiki]
[Yeah, we bet!]
While unemployment in Japan is low by international standards [so much the lower for our quality of life], a recent surge in layoffs has alarmed this country, where unemployment status is scorned....
[Just like our surge in the early 1990s, which resulted in nothing but more strained spindoctoring from our American Pravda (TedTurner) and Izvesetia (RupertMurdoch) empires and more masochistic worship of Chainsaw Dunlap.]
Even giants like Sony Corp. and NEC Corp. have announced that they will cut thousands of jobs over the next few years..\..
[So much for the traditional Japanese guarantee of lifelong employment, and Deming's core miracle-postwar-recovery advice "Banish fear from the workplace." Now Japan is following the big US economy just like a little puppydog, same as the dumb econogurus in Canada, and coming up with the same disastrous results. Gone is loyalty and goodwill, here now is economic anxiety and insecurity.]
The number of jobless rose to 3.4 million in April, which is an all-time high. The jobless rate among men hit a record 5%. Japan's overall jobless rate remained at a record 4.8% in April.... A recent survey by the Bank of Japan found that people are spending less because of worries over job security, a trend that could further delay an economic recovery [or bar it forever].
[That is very much at work everywhere in the world, even in the touted "strangely booming" US economy. Consumers are supposed to spend freely when they're worried about downsizing, and if they're still "full time," being worked 50-60-70 hours a week. The only people who have time to spend are the under-employed - and they don't have the money! Great use of technology! = freeze the workweek so that labor loses leverage and those with time have no money and those with money have no time. We say it again - the answer is not straining for more failed makework and job creation, but simple work sharing - for example, via Timesizing.]

[Another commentator sees the light - or some light anyway.]
6/09 New Economy, new problems - Technology spawns great wealth along with a growing underclass, by Charles Piller, LA Times via Bos Globe, D4.
Silicon Valley's techno-rich looked awfully petty when the local United Way was recently reduced to begging to make up an $11-million shortfall in funding for the area's underprivileged.... But the United Way fiasco doesn't really capture the dynamics of need, greed and generosity in Silicon Valley. By keeping the focus on philanthropy, high-tech do-gooders miss a golden opporutnity to demonstate the superiority of a genuine private-sector solution to the valley's poverty problem....
[Then Charles has four suggestions that he thinks of as a genuine private-sector solution.]

• Pay a living wage with benefits to all employees. Use [permanent] employees for essential services, such as cleaning offices, or insist that contractors offer temps a living wage with benefits. [This is still pretty arbitrary, discretionary and market-unguided. Who defines a "living wage," for example? Who defines "essential" services?]
• Give every employee affordable stock options. [What, pray, are "affordable" stock options? Presumably options that a company can afford? And who decides that? We're still in the realm of charity here - a realm of discretion and arbitrariness, not really that of a "private-sector solution."]
• Train at-risk employees and workers in local communities for better or more stable jobs, even if it costs more than importing professionals from India. [Again, this is very good, but it's still tantamount to charity. Who defines "local communities"? Who defines "workers" in them? Who defines "better or more stable jobs"? Timesizing takes care of all of the above by shortening the workweek enough to create such a genuine scarcity of skills that firms are led by market forces to raise wages and benefits, and training is taken care of simply by requiring that any overtime trigger reinvest in training in the overtime-indicated skills. How much reinvestment? Enough to completely demotivate the overtime in the first place for both company and employee. Companies must reinvest their overtime advantage (over hiring) and individual employees must reinvest their overtime earnings. If they're on salary, we figure their overtime earnings by prorating their 40-hour salary over however many total hours they're working. And overtime must not be pressured. So the only people still doing it at all are going to be those who enjoy their work or want "project leader" on their resume.]
• Commit 1% of annual profits to supporting public schools. [France goes farther. They commit 1½% of every company's total compensation budget to training. But we think the overtime-focused program outlined above is still superior. We don't want to meddle with public schools now that the whole concept of "education" has become little more than a gigantic makework campaign subconsciously designed to keep youth OUT of the job market for as long as possible - similar to early retirement on the other end of life. All this is made unnecessary when the whole, strained, job creation mentality is replaced by the work sharing approach.]

• The high-tech boom has pushed the median selling price for a home in Santa Clara County past $400,000.
• ...Household incomes reflect growing class divisions. As manufacturing jobs fled the area for developing nations, two kinds of employment took over: highly paid tech professional jobs and low-wage service work. Only one of those groups can afford valley prices.
• ...The high-school graduation rate for...by far the largest minority [Latinos] has plummeted to 55% in recent years, and only 19% of those graduates meet basic college entrance requirements.

[A real hero trying to stop mergers = the investment of more and more money in making markets smaller and smaller.]
6/09 Lawyer seeks to delay Unum-Provident deal, by Lynnley Browning, Bos Globe, D9.
Seeking to derail Unum Corp.'s $5.6 billion merger with Provident Cos., Boston insurance activist and lawyer Jason Adkins has asked a Maine court to delay administrative hearings for the deal. Adkins represent six policy-holders of Portland, Maine-based Unum, the nation's top disability insurance underwriter. The group asserts that Unum's deal to buy Provident would hurt competition and boost prices in the disability insurance market.
As part of their merger plan, Unum and Provident announced plans to cut 1,575 jobs, or about 11% of their combined work force. About 925 jobs will be eliminated, while 650 employees are expected to take early retirement.... The combined firm will have about 13,000 to 14,000 employees.
[We need more lawyers like Jason Adkins to stop the short-sighted, self-inflicted, market-shrinking, compeitition-clobbering carnage of mergers and takeovers.]

["Hold that line! Hold that line!"]
6/08 Group wants hearings before Fleet merger, by Lynnley Browning, Bos Globe, C11.
...A New York-based [community group]...Inner City Press/Community on the Move, is protesting the $16 billion [Fleet-BankBoston] deal as a threat to low-income lending and competition..\.. Asserting that Fleet...reduces lending to poorer people and minorities after it acquires other banks, [Inner City] called yesterday for public hearings on [the] proposed merger [and] filed documents supporting its claims with the Federal Reserve Board and Justice Dept., which must approve New England's largest banking combination. Fleet rejected [the] claims...but declined to comment....
[This is one of the standard results of the bump in bank mergers that always precedes depressions, which in turn are one of the more efficient mechanisms of the concentration and de-activation of wealth. "The more concentration, the less circulation."]

6/6 What is the Fifth Discipline?, by David Warsh, Bos Globe, F1.
...It is almost ten years since Senge distilled Forrester's view on the counterintuitive behavior of social systems in "The Fifth Discipline."... Senge's book has achieved the status of a management classic...sold more than 600,000 copies and catapulted Senge into the front ranks of management gurus, along with Tom Peters, Michael Porter, Henry Mintzberg, John Kotter, Rosabeth Moss Kanter [we'd replace the last three with W. Edwards Deming], and a handful of others. For a time in the 1990s, enthusiasm for [Senge's] "learning organization" was rivaled only by the "re-engineering" craze [how ironic then, that the 1990s with all their "re-engineering" = downsizing have re-introduced fear into the workplace and made it much harder for organizations to learn].... From the beginning, Senge worried about what would happen when the fad began to fade. After all, [Deming's] Total Quality Management, among the most widespread movements of the 1980s, petered out in two-thirds of the organizations in which it was tried for lack of results. Re-engineering didn't do much better....
So what is the Fifth Discipline really? It is a "community of inquiry and experimentation" of some tens of thousands of disciples distributed equally among big US corporations and the education establishment [in other words, among our biggest downsizing campaign and our biggest makework campaign]. The editorial dogma resembles in style and content the Whole Earth Catalog of a few years back [and the cartoon of Peter Senge resembles a doofus hippy in a suit and a jimmypot haircut]..\..
The first four disciplines ["component technologies" of corporate culture] in Senge's scheme are familiar...to those of us who think about our lives in organizations.

1. Personal mastery...commitment to lifelong acquisition of new skills and improvement of old ones....
2. Mental models...that inform personal understanding....
3. Shared visions are like mental models, except that they are...widely held....
4. Team learning...builds on personal mastery and shared vision....

1. personal CI
2. personal vision
3. shared vision
4. shared CI
5. systems vision

1. personal vision
2. personal CI
3. shared vision
4. shared CI
5. systems vision
6. systems CI

6/05 Northeast Health, North Shore Medical cancel merger plans, by Alex Pham, Bos Globe, F1.
...in a sign that merger mania in the hospital industry has cooled considerably....
[Thank God!]

[More time to polish the long-term solution? - or a case of cooked figures?]
6/04 Factory orders, retail sales seen speeding up, Bloomberg News via Bos Globe, E2.
WASHINGTON - Orders placed with US manufacturers other than airplane makers rose in April and retail sales accelerated in May, signs that a record peacetime expansion may be picking up speed....
[Ah, remind us again why we excluded airplane manufacturers?]
Factory orders rose 0.5% during April when often-volatile demand at Boeing Co. and other aircraft makers is factored out, making it the fifth increase in the last six months, Commerce Dept. statistics showed yesterday. Overall orders fell 1.2% during the month after declining 0.6% in March.
[Oh, so we just factor out any area of manufacturing that's deemed "volatile," so we can keep congratulating ourselves on our "record peacetime expansion"? Sounds more like 'rapture of the deep' than anything we'd really want to celebrate.]
Sales at chain stores open at least a year rose 6.8% last month, according to Bank of Tokyo-Mitsubishi....
[Oh this is great! We got a Japanese bank doing our stats for us now, so we can scapegoat them if anything goes wrong, and we're defining "retail" as only chain stores and excluding even them if they're open less than a year. Talk about 'phragile euphoria'! And even that carefully defined rise could be just gardeners and spring fixer-uppers.]
Initial jobless claims rose 4,000 to 305,000 last week, the Labor Dept. said.
[As Curly (3 Stooges', or was it Moe?) would say, "Oo oo oo!" Sounds bad, so what can we dig up to soften it? Wouldn't wanna leave 'em with anything but a smile, now, would we?!]
This year, claims have averaged 305,000 a week, lower than 1998's average of 316,000....
[Oh "modified rapture"!]

[Optional-see graffiti tool vs. any website!]
6/03 Reactive voice, by Hiawatha Bray, Bos Globe, D1.
...It's been called digital graffiti..\..New product, Third Voice, makes any Web page your own, by letting you add comments and criticisms that can be read by other visitors to the site [if they are] also running the Third Voice software \with\ no harm to the Web sites on which it's used.... www.thirdvoice.com....
[But can you also comment on the comments? The wording hints at this feature - ]
You can also set up groups of users and post notes only they can read. This way, Third Voicers can create impromptu discussion groups at any site....
[But is it original?]
A band of open source software writers came up with the same idea a couple of years ago [but "Crit"] is hard to use.... crit.org....

6/03/99 2 mergers scrapped -