Baby boomers versus the rest ... are you a pessimist or optimist about the future?

We had a great debate last evening about "the boomer generation", and how they compared with today's young people. We drew a few contextual differences: The boomers were the first to see such massively broad social changes affecting everyone in their generation, and not just a select few. Here's a mix from different parts of the developed world:

• equality of race and sex became a real goal
• colonialism started to die
• the contraceptive pill made sex free and easy
• tertiary education became broadly available
• mass consumerism was everywhere
• "own your own home" arrived, via cheap mortgages paid from increasingly disposable income
• the military draft ended - after centuries of being the way that armies were raised
• a "cold" not "hot" war was the military paradigm ...
• ... aided by the early forms of the European Union, which supplanted centuries of war with less harmful bureaucracy and red tape
• air travel for leisure became a normal activity, available to ever more people
• social support programs were broadly available in health and education ...
• ... yet there was still little apparent change in the "age of dying" - retirement was still expected at 65 for men ... and death by 75 or so.

This all clearly left the boomers as both a blessed and marked generation. Despite today's upheavals, and the recent financial mess, is there the same breadth and complexity of social change today - and what does it mean? We have more and more technology - and business globalization is a "done deal". But I'd argue that both had roots or parallels in the boomer generations, yet are not surrounded by the broader social changes noted above. There were telephones in every home, colour TV, cheap cars, supermarkets. Even in music, I've heard it argued that there will never be another Beatles. Musicians no longer make money on albums - they make it on concerts. The Beatles reached the entire world through albums, worked at a pace rarely seen by today's bands, yet stopped touring ages before they split. I'd suggests that many of the trends we see today have roots in that boomer generation, with three additions:

1. Today we all belong to non-geographic tribes - not just the Facebook tribe but the micro-Facebook tribes. Boomers were told what their country and therefore tribe was. Now we all chose tribes to suit the mood, it seems. Technology makes this possible, and it will only accelerate. Yet, I'd argue that the tribes are still just a natural implication of the 60's attitudes and aspirations, now made possible by technology.
2. The "I deserve it now, and then I'll move on" generation. Boomers were just crawling out of World War II, and had to be careful, and rebuild for the future. Yet, again, isn't this just the obvious next step in the consumer society? Like it or not, the boomers started this trend, even if they don't like what they see now.
3. Technology development has reached critical and sustainable mass - there's more power in my Blackberry than room sized machines had in the 60's. The boomers can't take all the credit for this, but technology in the home was one of their themes. Of course, we generate more knowledge in a year than generations did in times gone by. Research and development is so diverse and broadly democratized that virtually anything may be invented anywhere by anyone these days. I heard Bill Gates, private individual, talk about how he planned to change the way we power this planet at TED last week. He's not waiting for a State-driven Manhattan project. His buddy Nathan Myhrvold was happily shooting down mosquitoes with lasers (maybe he should run "Star Wars"?). Oh, and aren't they both boomers?

Even if you don't fully accept these contextual premises, one critical implication is clear. The boomers have a stranglehold on the world's financial resources, and that is unlikely to shift short term. It's pretty clear that today's boomers will not be handing down all this capital to their kids.

• First, we all live a lot longer - and with the crunch that now exists on pensions, the boomers will spend what they have accumulated to survive until they die (at 90? 100? 110?).
• Second, the boomers are now being forced to financially care for both their kids and their parents - who also are living longer ...

Here's an extract from today's Financial Times ... "... a third of the value of all UK pension benefits was held by those aged 55 to 64, the boomer generation that is approaching retirement. Those aged between 45 and 54 held a further quarter of the £3,500bn of pension benefits. The aggregate value of housing wealth held by those aged 50 to pension age – 60 for women and 65 for men – was £1,280bn, more than twice the housing wealth held by any other age group. The next wealthiest group were those between pension age and 75, whose housing wealth was £600bn." So, is it all doom and gloom for young people today? On the surface, yes. It is most unlikely that Government will be able to do much about this. With rare exceptions, Government "sweeps up" after the fact, rather than get ahead of the curve. And a good part of that is the boomer's fault, who are still very unlikely to accept being told what to do by the state - they will use their considerable political and financial power to exert peaceful regime change at every election. Yet there are equally clear causes for major optimism.

1. Kids are smart and will adapt - they, like all previous generations will innovate and thrive in ways that us older folks will have no inkling about.
2. Kids will be able pursue their dreams with more freedom. They have more information available, more education, more choices, more communication, more openness in society. Yes, we have domestic terrorism, and that is a relatively new and deadly threat. But we do not have the spectre of mass annihilation. If the Russian or Chinese nuked the US or Europe, all their money and markets would go with the nukes. Hardly a likely prospect - and certainly not the state of affairs in the Cold War.
3. Kids will live longer ... and the boomers will just die;-)

Thoughts?

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Dr William Li's list of Antiangiogenic substances ... which slow down cancer

Fascinating talk at TED 2010 about the power of diet to hold back the growth of cancers ... by restricting the blood flow to nascent cancer cells. Food that is "antiangiogenic" will help ...

via conferences.ted.com

TED 2010

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Jaron Lanier at the RSA - "You Are Not A Gadget"

One of the things I really enjoy as a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts (the RSA) is attending their thought-provoking talks and conversations. Last night Jaron Lanier was talking about his new book, "You Are Not A Gadget". He is a computer scientist, composer, visual artist, and author.

As the talk synopsis said, Jaron is worried that " Individual creativity has begun to go out of fashion. Machines, specifically computers, are no longer just tools to be used by the human mind - these days, we treat them as if they are altogether better than humans."

In essence he is saying that we should all be pro-internet, pro-technology - but there are certain myths (e.g. "everything that's best is free", "social networking is always a good thing") and certain problems (e.g. "our gadgets/technology drive us not the other way round") that we should fight against. Only by challenging these can we nurture individual creativity (and thus further develop our own humanity).

Jaron wrote an article for the WSJ earlier this month - and rather than try to further explain his proposition, let me extract a couple of paragraphs from that article ...

"Most people know me as the "father of Virtual Reality technology." In the 1980s and 1990s, I was a young computer scientist and entrepreneur working on how to apply virtual reality to things like surgical simulation. But I was also part of a circle of friends who tried to imagine how computers would fit into the peoples' lives, including how people might make a living in the future. Our dream came true, in part. It turns out that millions of people are ready to contribute instead of sitting passively on the couch watching television. On the other hand, we made a huge mistake in making those contributions unpaid, and often anonymous, because those bad decisions robbed people of dignity. I am appalled that our old fantasies have become so entrenched that it's hard to get anyone to remember that there are alternatives to a framework that isn't working.

Here's one problem with digital collectivism: We shouldn't want the whole world to take on the quality of having been designed by a committee. When you have everyone collaborate on everything, you generate a dull, average outcome in all things. You don't get innovation.

If you want to foster creativity and excellence, you have to introduce some boundaries. Teams need some privacy from one another to develop unique approaches to any kind of competition. Scientists need some time in private before publication to get their results in order. Making everything open all the time creates what I call a global mush.

There's a dominant dogma in the online culture of the moment that collectives make the best stuff, but it hasn't proven to be true. The most sophisticated, influential and lucrative examples of computer code—like the page-rank algorithms in the top search engines or Adobe's Flash— always turn out to be the results of proprietary development. Indeed, the adored iPhone came out of what many regard as the most closed, tyrannically managed software-development shop on Earth."

You can read in full Jaron's article here.

What was also interesting was that Nico Macdonald, the RSA's event moderator, encouraged the audience to comment and ask questions in real time via twitter, complete with its own hashtag. Here's a sample of the stream ....

@ThinkAboutArt Thanks to Jaron Lanier for stating that artists deserve the dignity of their own creative work!! http://bit.ly/8Q4CpP #rsalanier

@mahemoff "The Machine Stops" is one of the most prescient things ever written acc to Lanier #rsalanier

@milwardoliver Interesting thought out of #rsalanier that children on facebook have their growing up recorded in digital form without the ability to forget.

@mickyates "The geeks have created a world that benefits geeks - so others are denied chance for own personality formation" Jaron #rsalanier

@tomux @melex #rsalanier. It's like a health-food movement for the internet generation. We should eat more broccoli.

@petemarcus Economic model of 'free' doesn't work. Web does not provide bounty if you give your stuff away for free. #rsalanier

@petemarcus Originally PCs allowed consumers to also be creators. New devices like Kindles only make us consumers now. #rsalanier

@melex #rsalanier Lanier concludes that he's not anti-tech per se, but is against 'ritualistic, anti-human design'. Hear hear, sense at last.

@mickyates It's not a problem with the internet - that's brilliant - it's the dogma of the "open/free culture" of web 2.0 that's the issue! #rsalanier

So, quite an event - and an exercise in the new (social media) and the old (the RSA - or more completely the "Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce - a cradle of enlightenment thinking and a force for social progress", founded in 1754) that was fascinating in its own right.

The RSA's founder, William Shipley, would have been proud!

Posted via web from mick's posterous

Creating Leaders for Science-Based Businesses

From HBS Working Knowledge, by Garry Emmons ....

It's been said that in this century, carbohydrates will replace hydrocarbons, and biology will supplant physics as the innovation-producing science. As science fiction becomes science fact, and with science-based firms presenting unique challenges for managers, HBS is examining how, in its teaching and research, it can best contribute to what will be a major new force in the American economy.

For several decades, the view from the HBS campus across Western Avenue has been decidedly "old economy." But now, creative destruction has come to the neighborhood, and change is in the air.

While trucks continue to rumble in and out of the container-cargo rail yard opposite the HBS parking lot, the depot's days are numbered. Adjacent to it, several blocks of low-rise commercial buildings are already history, demolished and carted away, seemingly overnight. Spiking skyward above the flattened landscape left behind, giant construction cranes, clustered over the site's several acres, accentuate its emptiness. It is here that Harvard University is putting down a big bet on the future—and on a dramatically new, emerging economy. From the rubble will rise the 530,000-square-foot Allston Science Complex—four multistory buildings, due for completion in 2011—the centerpiece of the initial phase of Harvard's 300-acre development on the Boston side of the Charles River.

New management skills needed

Both in the scale and scope of Harvard's ambitions and in the proximity of these new buildings, this emphasis on science will affect HBS. The unique challenges of managing and leading science-based businesses—certain to be a driver of this century's new economy—demand new management paradigms. For a core group of HBS professors, that has meant some soul-searching in terms of how and what the School teaches, and to whom. How can HBS best complement and contribute to the work of the University's world-renowned laboratories as well as to cutting-edge, science-based firms in Boston and beyond? 

Can the School itself learn from the labs' inspirational (but results-oriented) dedication to finding solutions to huge challenges? For example, should blocks of the HBS curriculum focus on big, multidisciplinary problems—such as the world's water shortage—and how to solve them? How about increasing the number of MBA students who have science backgrounds and the number of Executive Education offerings that teach scientists business and organizational fundamentals? What about joint MBA/Ph.D. programs? How about science/business seminars, more science-based cases, and more science-savvy faculty to teach them?

Read the rest of the article ...