What is reverse nostalgia?

A mental illness perhaps where the patient longs for the future to come sooner. Many suffer from it unwittingly, or at least hold their tongue for fear of standing out. Many become sci-fi, fantasy or fiction writers, revealing possibilities we never knew existed and never expect will come true.

Some fear the future, because the present is lucrative, certain, within their control. It's hard to let go of what you have and risk the unknown, even if it's better for most. None are immune from thinking this way, but we may be negligent culprits in our own right.

The future is already here. You can't stop it, you can't prolong the present, nothing is ever certain. This isn't doomsday thinking, it's what we choose not to see because we're passing through it, like the air around us.

Very few are building that future our forefathers have given us the stepping stones for. All the philosophy, culture, medicine, technology, engineering, behavior is just enough so we can exist with each other and take the next step forward.

Whether electric cars, biofuels, stem cells, or artificial intelligence doesn't matter. Once the idea, and more importantly the execution to make the idea possible, exist, there's no stopping the eventuality that we will see it sooner or later. As Vinod Khosla says, "Everything that's possible eventually happens." Accepting, rather than fearing what's to come, moves the dial along that much quicker.

Reverse nostalgia is in us all. The only way to get rid of it is to build that tomorrow we long for.

Can you value empathy?

How would you measure the value of empathy?

It's emotional, much like happiness, which we measure using surveys. We sometimes use scales from 1-5, with 1 being the unhappiest and 5 being the happiest, and ask people to rate themselves. Or we qualify the happiness so it's not just numbers, such as are you "very happy", "somewhat happy", or "not happy at all"? It makes more sense to collect this data over a long period of time so you're not catching a person just after they lost their job or got a promotion.

Knowing we can rate happiness, can we rate empathy - in ourselves, in other people, in corporations, in our government?

I'm still working out the "algorithm", if there is one, so I'm going to echo Bob Sutton's post, which inspired this thought process, Felt Accountability: Some Emerging Thoughts. He puts out a 4-part framework for accountability:

1. Authorship
2. Mutual Obligation
3. Indifference
4. Mutual Contempt

The first two represent the positive side of empathy. Authorship is wanting to do a good job because you believe you're the best person for it and spurring others on to do the same. You're an example simply because you showed up and did the right thing. Empathy is contagious by definition and by paying it forward through your skill, you motivate others to do the same.

I have a personal example for mutual obligation. I came into healthcare wanting to build a system I'd want to be a patient in. I wanted to be a part of that change, knowing it would not only give back to me but also so many others. Proverbially, it's what got me up in the morning and as Bob said in his post, got me to "do the right thing even when no one was looking."

Indifference happens when bad incentives make us lose our empathy towards others. If you feel that the people around you don't care, why should you? When the group mentality favors indifference, it's hard to be the author or feel that everyone is mutually obligated to help each other. It's like soda going flat. It just tastes wrong and you can't drink it, so you either find another soda or force yourself not to care about it.

Mutual contempt has got to be the worst. It's the opposite of empathy. You care so little about the person next to you that you begin to despise them and resent them for putting you in this emotional state. It's a self-fulfilling death spiral and the only way I can think of avoiding it is by leaving or at best planning a managerial coup.

I like that Bob Sutton brings awareness to the injustices some people suffer at work so we can begin to recognize them and deal with them head on. In my opinion, finding the value of empathy is a step towards that, because it's in the search for it that I believe we'll find it.

1BL, 2BL, 3BL, 4

1BL - single bottom line measures the financial health of a business. Few examples:

Return on investment (ROI)
Return on assets (ROA)
Profit margin
Price-earnings (P/E) ratio
Customer lifetime value (LTV)
Cost of customer acquisition (CAC)

...and the list goes on. They're quantitative vital signs.

2BL - double bottom line simply tacks on a social layer.

# of training hours per employee
# of staff volunteer hours
% of payroll invested in training
# of reports of discrimination
# of health & safety violations
$ amount of charitable donations

Tip of the iceberg. They're accountability metrics for internal/external social benefit.

3BL - triple bottom line adds an environmental layer.

% decrease in CO2 emissions
% of energy savings
% of water returned to natural cycle
Total amount of recyclable waste collected
Compliance rate with environmental regulations

4 - it's called triple bottom line, so having a fourth, or even fifth or sixth metric to account for could be over the top. The idea though is to go beyond the single bottom line and think ethically about negative outcomes of your business.

What's missing? What kinds of things does your business measure that go beyond contributing to the margin? Continue the conversation on twitter @akshaykapur or #triplebottomline. 

Thinking like a librarian

Librarians are curators. You ask them a question and they find you the best possible resources to reach an answer, often redefining the original question itself. They're not consultants, analysts, managers, decision-makers, engineers, logisticians, or artists. Their drive is to accumulate large volumes of information and categorize it effectively so it may be referenced at any time. Prior to Google or Wikipedia, they were the search engines.

And they are far from obsolete. In fact, librarian thinking is an incredibly necessary skill set when, everyday, we query search engines for answers to both mundane and extremely complex questions. How we search may have changed, but what we search for is still mostly the same.

"How do I...?"
"What is...?"
"Directions to..."
"Places to visit in..."
"Best..."

"Cheapest..."

We want quality answers quickly, but the #1 result may not be it. How do we know? What judgment skills do we use to evaluate whether the "best restaurant in Santa Fe is ___" or if "easiest way to hard boil eggs is ___" The answer doesn't matter, but the way you evaluate the answer does.

The essence of librarian thinking is curation. How would a librarian conduct a Google search? They would start by looking for something, get some answers, review those answers, ask the question in a different way, narrow down the answers, rate the answers, research each answer to qualify it, review the original question and see if the final answer is accurate. This process only skims the surface of what a librarian might do.

There are technical features that make the search process much more specific. The use of operators is one example. Using +, -, and, or, quotes, ~, and *, adds a level of specificity to your search. Using allin operators lets you manipulate your searches further by restricting where exactly Google will search for the word or phrase you entered.

These are tools, though, that are readily available for anyone to use. The key to librarian thinking is in the prefix, "re-": re-defining, re-searching, re-organizing, re-versing, re-evaluating, etc. It's not one step, but many. Much like the metaphor of peeling back the layers of an onion, librarians have a multi-layered approach to their searches.

The importance of a librarian's knowledge, experience and thinking can only grow as the volume of information available to us grows. We must all learn the basics of these skills to decipher, judge and better evaluate the answers we receive. We make medical, legal, business, and general life decisions based on these answers. Librarian thinking is a skill that will be invaluable in developing our foundational reasoning in the generations to come. 

Ethical Conscience

At its most basic, triple bottom line (TBL) is about ethics. Whether we call it sustainability, corporate social responsibility, or responsible business, the essence of TBL provides financial, social and environmental factors to promote an ethical conscience within business and society.

When I look at the transport trucks that pass by on the highway and local roads and read their signs, I have a general idea of what they do, but I'm clueless about who they are. There is little neighborliness in branding. Its objective is to convey a single message of value to its potential customers. The stakeholders that invest in the company benefit financially from the value customers receive from the company's products and services. In this sense, maximizing stakeholder value is in fact equivalent to maximizing customer value.

This starts to fall apart when you consider the negative outcomes or externalities of production. It's easy to pick at oil mining and cigarette companies, but consider the organizations you're involved with on a daily basis like laundromats, coffee shops, electronics manufacturers, book publishers, furniture producers, real estate developers, waste management companies, fashion designers, and utility suppliers, to name a few.

The world around us works through large, complex supply chains that, at their most efficient, deliver products right to our door. This kind of convenience is simply amazing, but it comes at a price to the workers who are required to meet large quotas and the increased use of transportation to deliver goods on time. Customer convenience rarely equals responsible supplier behavior. Just look around you and think about the potential social and environmental waste that is produced.

If, with our convenience, we added a few other requirements, such as smaller quotas, more humane working hours, and a limit on CO2 emissions, we may not get what we want when we want it, but it's difficult to say whether we'd be less happy or satisfied. Knowing others are being treated fairly has ethical value, a soft metric that may be impossible to measure but as a belief in the minds of consumers.

The belief in ethics, though, can also change how we measure stakeholder value. The opportunity cost of delivering less to less people is made up by ethical responsibility a company develops for workers and the environment. As a whole, it is a net positive for society; satisfied customers (profit), happier employees (people), and a cleaner environment (planet).

The case against TBL often comes from the perspective of defining value by our current, single bottom line framework. A better question is, "what would happen if we defined value differently?" Would customers be less satisfied if their perspective on value shifted from single bottom line to triple bottom line? Would companies truly produce less stakeholder value if stakeholders had a similar shift in ethical belief systems?

TBL is a conceptual framework with ethics as its backbone. We make decisions based on price and judgments based on quality every day. Applying the same analytical mindset to companies we buy from and asking about their social and environmental policies will be the true enabler of change. 

Self removed

I've felt myself removed from the world in general. A part of this removal is my environment, where I am responsible for myself most of the day, without obligatory responsibility. I create my own work in my own time, but even if this were to change, I'm not sure the sense of personal ownership would go away.

Another part of my removal is ideological. I question sometimes whether it is holier-than-thou, but having experienced that negligent, ego-inflating sensation before, I don't believe it plays a part. The removal is more from a place of exhaustion, a mental and emotional sigh. And just as a sigh leaves the body, I leave the world for a bit. I step out of my body, which is very much in the world, and choose to be an observer. 

The choice isn't real-time, not something I decided then and there, it's a choice I made a long time ago and am only cashing in on now, in that moment. Since my mind knows what I want, my body, through it's mental processes, takes me there. It's a little like Mike discorporating in "Stranger in a strange land", like the God Emperor going into a memory trance that takes him so far back in time it's hardly imaginable, but only a few seconds go by.

The time lapse is important to note. Personally, I feel the removal lasting much longer than the actual time that passes. I'm "gone" for but a few seconds, five at most, but I feel like I've taken a trip - vacation or drug - your choice. I'm in a past decision-induced mental coma. 

It's not from a place of apathy or escape and again I feel confident in saying so because I've experienced each of those emotions very strongly throughout my life. This is far more peaceful, a letting go, knowing the now matters more than anything. 

There is so much I don't understand and perhaps we all read and learn to expand our understanding of the unknown. This experience is not one of reading or learning or practicing though. It is one of being. Knowing who you are and being so comfortable with yourself that you're willing to let yourself be without butting into the flow of you. Emerging through to the Self by letting go of the self.

EDIT: What I've described above is an outcome of experiencing reality subjectively. Watching yourself as an outside observer. It's not the same as being on auto-pilot, which can be very passive. You're very much engaged, there, completely in the present, and flowing through time.

Steve Pavlina describes subjective reality really well here. And the quintessential read on the subject is I Am That.  

Peopling Corporations

Often, talk of triple bottom line boils down to what policies a company has to promote not only financial, but also social or environmental benefit. Charitable donations, health and safety considerations, maternity/paternity leave, carbon footprint reduction, sustainable development and many more emerging ideas are all proactive measures of a sound triple bottom line infrastructure.

There is a reactive side to the picture as well and I came across one such example today through Seth Godin's impassioned blog post, Corporations are not people. To summarize, Seth describes an ongoing situation with Progressive insurance using their retinue of lawyers to fight an otherwise open-and-shut case where one of their insured members was killed in a tragic car accident by another driver who ran a red light. Progressive is on the line for paying the family $75,000 and they are doing their best to pay nothing to 1/3 of that amount.

The paragraph that struck me most in Seth's post was this:

"Like many people, I'm disgusted by their strategy, but my point here is this: if someone in your neighborhood used this approach, treating others this way, if a human with a face and a house and a reputation did it, they'd have to move away in shame. If a local businessperson did this, no one in town would ever do business there again. 

Corporations (even though it's possible that individuals working there might mean well) play a different game all too often. They bet on short memories and the healing power of marketing dollars, commercials and discounts. Employees are pushed to focus on bureaucratic policies and quarterly numbers, not a realization that individuals, not corporations, are responsible for what they do."

Even beyond the direct social benefit that could be offered to the deceased's family and the overall benefit of earning long term goodwill with their customers, Progressive, as an insurance company is acting outside the boundaries of fiduciary responsibility to its members.

Any short term gain: $75,000 - legal fees (which could be a net negative), is lost on customer acquisition and retention. Simply on a financial level, it is a poor decision.

To "bet on short memories and the healing power of marketing dollars," is outdated and unfortunate. The power of blogs counters this influence and spreads the message that Seth sparked and Matt Fisher - the deceased's brother - continues to update us on.

The long since-emerged, internet-based, trust economy keeps corporations honest. Corporations are not people, but their growth - financial, social and environmental - depends on those peopling corporations. Commercials, discounts and marketing eventually lead back to word-of-mouth, still the strongest form of loyalty marketing. These hard-to-shake stories will proliferate and slowly dilute the message corporations want you to believe until the people who run it do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

Links to begin understanding the triple bottom line

Here are three links that I've sent out at least 50 times over the last few months. Might as well throw them out there for anyone who's interested.

1. The Empathic Civilization (youtube video) - Jeremy Rifkin explains how we all have mirror neurons that light up when we see someone going through an experience, like eating chocolate or seeing a spider on their arm, in the same way as if we were going through that experience ourselves. Another example, when one baby cries in a nursery, all the other babies start crying as well. We're soft-wired for empathy: homo-empathicus.

2. Resilient Communities - This is the torch that John Robb lit, but really, it's a common sense reaction to when we think, "Why aren't we already living this way?". Who knows, but the idea of resiliency is simplifying self-reliance on a community level. Right now, it's attracting people on the extreme, but the message will trickle down in a packaged way soon enough.

3. Capitalism 3.0 - Otto Scharmer presented this paper in 2009 and since then he's started a company and perhaps a movement around replacing ego-systems with eco-systems that look at financial, political, social and environmental benefits as equal. He goes beyond the theoretical and works with organizations to make these ideas a reality.