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Steve H. Hanke

In his second inaugural address, President Obama made a series of direct and indirect references to the Declaration of Independence and other founding documents to make his case for collective (read: state) action. In doing so, he fell into the fallacy of argument ad antiquitatem – an illegitimate appeal to ages past in order to justify present and future actions.

Most people, including most Americans, would be surprised to learn that the word “democracy” does not appear in the Declaration of Independence (1776) or the Constitution of the United States of America (1789). They would also be shocked to learn the reason for the absence of the word democracy in the founding documents of the U.S.A.  Contrary to what propaganda has led the public to believe, America’s Founding Fathers were skeptical and anxious about democracy.  They were aware of the evils that accompany a tyranny of the majority.  The Framers of the Constitution went to great lengths to ensure that the federal government was not based on the will of the majority and was not, therefore, democratic.

If the Framers of the Constitution did not embrace democracy, what did they adhere to?  To a man, the Framers agreed that the purpose of government was to secure citizens in John Locke’s trilogy of the rights to life, liberty and property.

The Constitution was designed to further the cause of liberty, not democracy.  To do that, the Constitution protected individuals’ rights from the government, as well as from their fellow citizens.  To that end, the Constitution laid down clear, unequivocal and enforceable rules to protect individuals’ rights. In consequence, the government’s scope and scale were strictly limited.  Economic liberty, which is a precondition for growth and prosperity, was enshrined in the Constitution.

The Bill of Rights establishes the rights of the people against infringements by the State.  The only thing that the citizens can demand from the State, under the Bill of Rights, is for a trial by a jury. The rest of the citizens’ rights are protections from the State.

While invoking America’s founding documents and predecessors to justify collective action might appear as cleverness on the part of the President, it is a brazenly overused rhetorical instrument: an argument ad antiquitatem.

The story of the day comes from Bianca Bosker of The Huffington Post. She has written a massive feature about the origins of Siri. If you have the time, it’s worth examining. It touches in plenty, including the future potential of the virtual assistant. But the story’s greatest revelation comes near the beginning. Before Apple bought Siri in 2010, it was nearly launched on another platform. Specifically, it was slated for Android phones from Verizon Wireless.

What started out as a Department of Defense project soon turned private, with a dedicated team working on a Siri app. That app hit the App Store in early 2010, shortly after which Apple acquired it for more than $150 million. But before that acquisition, before Siri eventhit the App store, Verizon had a deal in place to put Siri on its Android handsets. Given the state of Android at the time, it could have been an enormous game changer.

Remember, it wasn’t until the original Droid, along with Verizon’s Droid Does marketing campaign, in late 2009 that Android actually became relevant in the mass market. It had been around commercially since the T-Mobile G1 in 2008, but few Android handsets impressed consumers by that point. The Droid, and Android 2.1, marked a turnaround.

Now imagine if Verizon had Siri to push along with its new Android handsets.

Even though it bought Siri in early 2010, Apple didn’t unveil it until late 2011. Part of that was certainly the timing of its releases. The iPhone 4 was slated for a July release, so Apple was already dedicating significant resources to that in early 2010. Chances are Verizon could have gotten that out to users much earlier, perhaps in late 2010. That could have changed the competition level immediately. But the real effect would have come in October, 2011.

That’s when Apple released the iPhone 4S. While iOS 5 was certainly an improvement, it was merely a free software download. In terms of hardware, the 4S was just an incremental upgrade over the 4. Yes, it had a slightly nicer screen and a slightly more powerful processor. But that kind of incrementalism rarely sits well with users.

Siri was the big selling point of the iPhone 4S. In fact, despite its easy compatibility, Apple did not put Siri on any of its older-generation devices — even the iPad 2, which had been released earlier in 2011. That was the big selling point for the 4S, and it apparently worked well. But it’s easy to imagine a much damper reaction to the iPhone 4S if it didn’t contain Siri.

The competition is becoming stiffer now that Google has its own voice-driven assistant application. The hope is that this drives Siri further — many users have noted a lack of progress in the past year-plus that Siri has been available. But one thing is for certain: Steve Jobs pulled off a coup when he snatched Siri away from Verizon and got it on his own devices. It’s easy to imagine history unfolding quite differently if he hadn’t.

The post Where would the iPhone be without Siri? appeared first on MobileMoo.

This week, the White House will continue a series of conversations with top administration officials on Google+. On Thursday, January 24 at 1:45 p.m. ET, Vice President Biden will join the latest “Fireside Hangout” – a 21st century take on FDR’s famous radio addresses – to talk about reducing gun violence.

On January 16, President Obama and Vice President Biden released a plan to help protect our children and our communities by reducing gun violence. The plan outlines specific, common-sense steps we can take right now to help keep guns out of the wrong hands, ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines, make our schools safer, and increase access to mental health services. Learn more about the plan here.

During the hangout hosted by Google and moderated by Hari Sreenivasan from PBS NewsHour, Vice President Biden will discuss the White House policy recommendations on reducing gun violence. Google+ users from the around the country will join the discussion, including Guy Kawasaki and Phil DeFranco. If you have a question, you can suggest it by writing it on the participants’ on Google+ pages. Watch the hangout with Vice President Biden live on WhiteHouse.gov, or tune in to the White House's Google+ page or YouTube channel.

We'll continue to host hangouts with key members of the President’s cabinet on a range of second term priorities. Follow us on Google+ for updates from the Administration and opportunities to participate in upcoming hangouts.

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Happy birthday, National Geographic. The intrepid magazine turns 125-years-old this month. Yesterday, NPR’s Talk of the Nation invited TED speakers Robert Ballard and Sarah Parcak on the air to discuss the notable anniversary.

Robert Ballard on exploring the oceansBallard, who is a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, talked about a recent expedition to the Black Sea, where he discovered a very well-preserved shipwreck. Ballard, who gave the TED Talk “On exploring oceans,” told host Neal Conan, “The deep sea is the largest museum in the world. It has more history in it than all the museums of the world combined.”

Ballard also proved that he has a photographic memory for National Geographic issues, telling a caller who described his favorite story that it came out in December 1981.

Sarah Parcak: Archeology from spaceTED Fellow Sarah Parcak, who gave the talk “Archeology from space,” also joined the program to talk about her work as one of National Geographic’s emerging explorers.

“When you think about the scale of human populations all over the world and the fact that there’s so much here, really the only way to be able to visualize that is to pull back in space … It allows us to see hidden temples and tombs and pyramids and even entire settlements,” she says. “What satellites help to show us is we’ve actually only found a fraction of a percent of ancient settlements and sites all over the world. … It’s the most exciting time in history to be an archaeologist.”

Parcak said that, growing up, she kept every National Geographic issue that contained images of Egypt. “It’s both Indiana Jones and National Geographic that inspired me to be an Egyptologist,” she said.

To hear much more about the magazine — like how its second president, Alexander Graham Bell, caused a scandal when he decided to publish pictures — listen to the full interview on NPR’s website » 

Earlier this week we trekked down to Washington, D.C. where BlackBerry was the technology partner at a Canadian Embassy inauguration event. Government leaders, military officers, and Capitol Hill personnel were in attendance and eager to get hands-on with BlackBerry PlayBook tablets and BlackBerry 10 Dev Alpha devices.

Reactions to the QNX-based tablet and upcoming smartphone were solidly positive, and it was a real pleasure to see individuals discovering features, functionality, and gesture-based interaction that they hadn’t before experienced. The ability to peek into BlackBerry Hub, the overall flow of BlackBerry 10, and the separation between work and personal data with BlackBerry Balance were clear differentiators for the attendees. Check out the video below to see what a few of them had to say:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry for Business Blog »

Israeli markets cheered election results today, with stocks rising 1 percent and the shekel edging up towards recent nine-month highs. Right-wing prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed victory, but his Likud party and ultra-nationalist allies Yisrael Beitenu lost ground to a new centrist party. Final results are expected tomorrow.

Voters seem to have concentrated on domestic issues, including the state of the economy, but foreign investors tend to look at the geopolitical risks, and these appear to have lessened.

Punters have been removing their bets on an air strike on Iran, particularly since the re-election of Barack Obama as U.S. President in November. The chance of a strike on Iran by the U.S. or Israel by the end of the year has fallen to 23.1 percent today, according to online exchange Intrade.com, compared with around 35 percent shortly after the U.S. election, and a high of 60 percent in October.

Political risk analyst Alastair Newton at Nomura also thinks chances of a strike have diminished. He writes in a note today:

Although Israel’s stated policy on Iran is unlikely to shift significantly whatever the make-up of the next government, securing the necessary support in the security cabinet for a strike now looks like a much harder task than would have been the case had Mr Netanyahu won a clear majority.

Prepublication Now Available

Review of the Research Program of the U.S. DRIVE Partnership: Fourth Report follows on three previous NRC reviews of the FreedomCAR and Fuel Partnership, which was the predecessor of the U.S. DRIVE Partnership (NRC, 2005, 2008a, 2010). The U.S. DRIVE (Driving Research and Innovation for Vehicle Efficiency and Energy Sustainability) vision, according to the charter of the Partnership, is this: American consumers have a broad range of affordable personal transportation choices that reduce petroleum consumption and significantly reduce harmful emissions from the transportation sector. Its mission is as follows: accelerate the development of pre-competitive and innovative technologies to enable a full range of efficient and clean advanced light-duty vehicles (LDVs), as well as related energy infrastructure. The Partnership focuses on precompetitive research and development (R&D) that can help to accelerate the emergence of advanced technologies to be commercialization-feasible.

The guidance for the work of the U.S. DRIVE Partnership as well as the priority setting and targets for needed research are provided by joint industry/government technical teams. This structure has been demonstrated to be an effective means of identifying high-priority, long-term precompetitive research needs for each technology with which the Partnership is involved. Technical areas in which research and development as well as technology validation programs have been pursued include the following: internal combustion engines (ICEs) potentially operating on conventional and various alternative fuels, automotive fuel cell power systems, hydrogen storage systems (especially onboard vehicles), batteries and other forms of electrochemical energy storage, electric propulsion systems, hydrogen production and delivery, and materials leading to vehicle weight reductions.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Energy and Energy Conservation | Engineering and Technology

Paul C. "Chip" Knappenberger and Patrick J. Michaels

Global Science Report is a weekly feature from the Center for the Study of Science, where we highlight one or two important new items in the scientific literature or the popular media. For broader and more technical perspectives, consult our monthly “Current Wisdom.”

As economic heavyweights assembled for their annual summit held by the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland, they were greeted by a call for $700 billion/yr of increased spending out to the year 2030 to “to close the green investment gap worldwide, leading to sustainable economic growth that attains global climate change goals.” They were told that this goal can be reached through an additional $36 billion/yr investment from the world’s governments (on top of the $96 billion/yr currently spent) that will “spur up to US$ 570 billion in private capital needed to avoid devastating climate impacts on economy.”

This call was made by the WEF’s own Green Growth Action Alliance as it released its first Green Investment Report at the outset of the Davos conference.

The Green Growth Action Alliance justified the call for the extra spending this way:

Such investments are urgently needed to avoid the potentially devastating impacts of climate change and extreme weather events as witnessed in many parts of the world in 2012. Scientists agree that extreme weather has become the “new norm” and comes at a huge, and rising, cost to the global economic system. Without further action, the world could see a rise in average global temperatures by 4ºC by the end of the century. According to scientists, this could lead to further devastating impacts, including extreme heat waves, more intense tropical storms, declining global food stocks and a sea-level rise affecting hundreds of millions of people.

Using a poor excuse to call for a bad idea doesn’t seem much like progress.

The science of global warming re extreme events is hardly compelling.  The data noise, generated from both natural processes and from other human influences, largely overwhelms any anthropogenic greenhouse effect signal in most cases.

However, compelling evidence is emerging that the magnitude of the climate sensitivity—that is, how much warming we should expect from a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration—has been overestimated. Even if there was good scientific evidence that higher temperatures lead to a more “extreme” climate (there’s just about as much evidence for the opposite), an overestimate of the sensitivity would lead to an overestimate of extremes.

And these overestimates are being used by the Green Growth Action Alliance to oversell the need to do something about climate change.

In fact, there are much more pressing needs.

For example, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), there are currently 1.3 billion people globally without access to electricity. The IEA recognizes that getting these folks hooked up is imperative for economic growth:

Energy alone is not sufficient for creating the conditions for economic growth, but it is certainly necessary. It is impossible to operate a factory, run a shop, grow crops or deliver goods to consumers without using some form of energy. Access to electricity is particularly crucial to human development as electricity is, in practice, indispensable for certain basic activities, such as lighting, refrigeration and the running of household appliances, and cannot easily be replaced by other forms of energy. Individuals’ access to electricity is one of the most clear and un-distorted indication of a country’s energy poverty status.

It would seem to us, that getting electricity to those without is a better way to achieve the Green Growth Action Alliance’s goal of “driving development and well-being” than is “reducing greenhouse gas emissions.”

And the best way to get (cheap, reliable) electricity to large numbers of people is through electricity systems that are powered by greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuels. This is not to say that there are not instances where boutique energy sources such as solar may provide a better solution, but just that those instances are minor compared to the magnitude of the task—which makes doubly bad Green Growth Action Alliance advice to shift substantial capital from fossil fuel projects to help fund its green solutions.

The bottom line is this: Fossil-fuel energy leads to more people with electricity which leads to more economic growth which leads to richer, more stable, more resilient and more environmentally-friendly societies with greater wellbeing.

Don’t get us wrong, we are all for market-driven innovation, but in Davos, the urgency for such innovation is being overhyped, and the situation is made worse by the urging for public sector spending in order to fuel it.

The Almond+, a successor to Securifi’s popular Almond home wireless router, made its Kickstarter debut today after making its first hardware demo appearance at CES this year. The router adds 802.11ac network compatibility to the Almond’s existing basic, no computer necessary touchscreen hardware, along with support for Z-Wave and ZigBee based smart-home devices and appliances, making it a standalone central control hub for the connected home.

The appeal of Almond and Almond+ routers lie in their ability to take a device that has remained largely unchanged in terms of user interface, and update that hardware for a world where users have generally moved beyond having to enter IP addresses into browser address bars just to configure their device. The original Almond was the first router that brought complete setup via touchscreen input to the device itself, which while already handy, will probably become more so as the trend towards mobile computing continues.

The Almond+ takes that leap forward and adds another, building in support for ZigBee and Z-Wave wireless home automation standards, which means that the router can also directly control Phillips Hue light bulbs, for instance, and SmartThings-compatible devices. The ZigBee and Z-Wave standards are those with the most early traction, so Almond+ should work with hundreds of devices and sensors right out of the box. Even at its retail price of $99, the Almond+ beats out the competition in terms of standalone home automation hubs on price, plus it includes the 802.11ac-compatible router, which will come in handy as more CE devices build in that successor to 802.11n Wi-Fi.

Another advantage of the Almond+ is arguably its design, though the bold colors and boxy look might not fit your particular taste. Personally, I can easily see throwing one of these things on the wall and actually enjoying its presence there, which is a different strategy from many other router maker’s approach of “make this as invisible or bland-looking as possible.” And at $99, it’s a fair-priced device that has a lot of future-proof features, since it’s unlikely that home electronics companies will abandon both ZigBee and Z-Wave given that companies like Philips are already on board.

The really nice thing about the Almond+ is that it’s being made by Securifi, which has already built out a supply chain for the original and distributed thousands of them through Amazon. That means that you’re more than likely to actually receive a product that resembles what you see on the Kickstarter page today, which is not something you can say for every crowdfunded gadget.

According to Colin Powell, the retired four-star general and former United States Secretary of State, learning to give a salute can be life changing.

Geoff Mulgan: A short intro to the Studio SchoolAt TED, many have shared what they believe to be missing from our current education system — Ken Robinson says its space for kids to flex their creative muscles while Geoff Mulgan argues it’s a lack of hands-on doing. But in today’s talk, given at TEDxMidAtlantic, Powell gives a very different answer. He says that what kids really crave is structure.

To explain what he means, Powell tells his own story of growing up in the New York public school system. He admits that he wasn’t a very good student.

“I didn’t do well at all … straight ‘C’ everywhere,” says Powell, revealing that he felt lucky to be accepted into the City College of New York given his grades. “Then I found ROTC. I found something that I did well and something that I loved doing … From there, my whole life was dedicated to ROTC and the military.”

Powell says that it was the army’s sense of order that allowed him to change his course and become one of CCNY’s most famous graduates. And it’s a phenomenon he sees repeated whenever a new class of shows up for boot camp.

“The first thing we do is put them in an environment of structure — put them in ranks, make them all wear the same clothes,  cut all their hair off so they look alike … teach them to obey instructions and understand the consequences of not obeying,” says Powell. “The most amazing thing happens over that time. Once that structure is developed, once they understand the reasoning … in 18 weeks they have a skill, they are matured … We need more of this kind of structure and respect in the lives of our children.”

To hear Powell’s ideas on how to provide structure, and the importance of “the gift of a good start,” listen to his talk. And here, watch more talks by and about military generals.

Stanley McChrystal: Listen, learn … then leadStanley McChrystal: Listen, learn … then lead A fellow retired U.S. Army four-star general, in this talk from TED2011, Stanley McChrystal gives unexpected thoughts on leadership. His take? That it’s as much about absorbing the wisdom of the people around you as it is about giving orders.

James Stavridis: A Navy Admiral's thoughts on global securityJames Stavridis: A Navy Admiral’s thoughts on global security In the U.S. Navy, admiral is the equivalent rank to general. Here, a talk from admiral James Stavridis, one of the few high-ranking military officers in the United States who tweets and blogs. In this talk from TEDGlobal 2012, he shares why he believes the security of the future will be built with bridges rather than with walls.

Peter van Uhm: Why I chose a gunPeter van Uhm: Why I chose the gun A retired four-star general in the Royal Netherlands Army, as well as his country’s former Chief of Defence, Peter van Uhm says that his career path has been motivated by a deep love of peace rather than a hunger for war. In this talk from TEDxAmsterdam, he shares his story.

Jennifer 8. Lee hunts for General TsoJennifer 8. Lee hunts for General Tso You may know him as a tasty plate of fried chicken in sauce — but who was General Tso? Was he even a real general? Journalist Jennifer 8. Lee investigates the origins of popular “Chinese food” dishes in America, including General Tso’s Chicken. In this talk, she tracks down the background of the Qing dynasty military hero and visits his distant relatives — who were shocked that the dish named after the icon was even considered Chinese.

Untappd is an awesome app that combines a social network, beer guide and venue checkins. In short, the app lets you tell your friends what beers you’re drinking and where. The location element allows you to discover venues that offer the best beers and the beer guide is constantly expanding as it’s crowdsourced. The good people at Untappd have officially announced that a native BlackBerry 10 Untappd app is now available and come January 30th, you’ll be able to use it on your new BlackBerry 10 device, along with features that are exclusive to the platform. Read on for more details.

Here is the official blog post from the Untappd team:

“We’re always working hard to bring Untappd to as many devices as possible and it’s our goal to get as many people drinking socially as possible. In keeping with this goal, we’re excited to announce that Untappd is officially available on BlackBerry 10 as a native app. Blackberry 10 is set to launch on January 30th, 2013.

Featuring the latest updates (many of which haven’t even hit iPhone or Android yet… don’t worry, they’re coming soon) the BlackBerry version of Untappd is sure to delight those of you that continue to stand by our friends at RIM. You will now be able to add photos to your check-ins, gain better GPS accuracy, and enjoy all that a native app has to offer in terms of performance and reliability.

So when you get your BlackBerry 10 device on January 30th, be sure to go download Untappd for BlackBerry and drink socially. While you’re at it, please leave a review!”

Check out Untappd for BlackBerry (available for all devices) at this link.

I recently got back from the New Media Expo in Las Vegas. Scheduled before the massive annual CES gathering, it’s a powwow for bloggers and other social media enthusiasts, early adopters who are quick to jump on board the next great thing. So imagine my surprise when I realized one of the undercurrents of the event, burbling repeatedly to the surface, was a desire to cut back on social media efforts.

That doesn’t mean doing less overall or abandoning new media. But it does speak to a desire to prune and focus on the platforms that have the most impact. It’s hard to say no to the crush of social media demands. During a panel I moderated with well-known blogger and tech expert Robert Scoble, he said there was no alternative to constant, ubiquitous engagement and held up a spare battery he carried for his smartphone, so he’d never run out of juice. No time to respond to tweets? Do it while you’re walking down the hallway, he said. Plenty of people agree with him. One consultant friend recently chided me for not being on Pinterest or Instagram — and like her, many worry they’ll fall behind if they’re not hard-core super users, or if they don’t get in on the ground floor. Clearly there is a first mover advantage in some cases: Chris Brogan developed a passionate following as an early blogger, and Guy Kawasaki jumped onboard Twitter and became a powerhouse there.

But as I advise my clients to do, I believe everyone needs to think about which platforms best speak to your strengths. At the New Media Expo, I also interviewed Nick Harris, head of digital marketing for Benjamin Moore. For such a visual product, literally differentiated by its color, Pinterest is a terrific platform. But for a consultant like me who traffics in ideas, blogging and tweeting make a lot more sense as investments.

In fact, we’re now reaching a point where having a scattered focus could truly be deleterious to your goals, because you’re only able to half-engage or create mediocre content. Marcy Massura of Weber Shandwick, who was on another panel with me, commented that “presence means nothing.” Indeed, if you have a Twitter profile with 35 followers, or a MySpace page that hasn’t been touched since 2007, it often looks worse than having nothing at all. (Personally, I just KO’d my Foursquare account.)

It’s become increasingly clear that with the proliferation of new platforms, no person or company can become the master of them all. Nor should they. The harder decision is figuring out which ones you should prioritize — or jettison. Establishing ROI has always been the holy grail of social media. We may still have a ways to go before we can quantify its objective, dollars-and-cents impact (if you read about something on Facebook, and then saw a tweet, and then went to the mall to buy it, does it count?). But even anecdotally, you probably have some good operating theories. For instance, if you target women, Pinterest is a great bet; if it’s males, Google+ is currently their stomping ground. And as I’ve written about here on HBR.org, blogging is the best way to demonstrate true content mastery and thought leadership.

The “best” platforms will be different for every person or brand. But in 2013, think hard about how you can cut back, so you can focus on what matters.

Prepublication Now Available

Chronic multisymptom illness (CMI) is a serious condition that imposes an enormous burden of suffering on our nation’s veterans. Veterans who have CMI often have physical symptoms (such as fatigue, joint and muscle pain, and gastrointestinal symptoms) and cognitive symptoms (such as memory difficulties). For the purposes of this report, the committee defined CMI as the presence of a spectrum of chronic symptoms experienced for 6 months or longer in at least two of six categories—fatigue, mood, and cognition, musculoskeletal, gastrointestinal, respiratory, and neurologic—that may overlap with but are not fully captured by known syndromes (such as CFS, fibromyalgia, and IBS) or other diagnoses. Despite considerable efforts by researchers in the United States and elsewhere, there is no consensus among physicians, researchers, and others as to the cause of CMI. There is a growing belief that no specific causal factor or agent will be identified. Many thousands of Gulf War veterans1 who have CMI live with sometimes debilitating symptoms and seek an effective way to manage their symptoms. Estimates of the numbers of 1991 Gulf War veterans who have CMI range from 175,000 to 250,000 (about 25-35% of the 1991 Gulf War veteran population), and there is evidence that CMI in 1991 Gulf War veterans may not resolve over time. Preliminary data suggest that CMI is occurring in veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars as well.

In addition to summarizing the available scientific and medical literature regarding the best treatments for chronic multisymptom illness among Gulf War veterans, Gulf War and Health: Volume 9: Treatment for Chronic Multisymptom Illness recommends how best to disseminate this information throughout the VA to improve the care and benefits provided to veterans, recommends additional scientific studies and research initiatives to resolve areas of continuing scientific uncertainty and recommends such legislative or administrative action as the IOM deems appropriate in light of the results of its review.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Health and Medicine

President Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama kicked off the second term with a tradition that began in the first: A special surprise greeting for guests on a White House tour on Tuesday. Followers of the First Lady's new Twitter account were given a heads up that something special was about to happen in the Blue Room when Mrs. Obama sent a tweet teasing:

Shhhh! Barack, Bo & I are about to surprise folks on @whitehouse tours! I love doing this. Watch here: wh.gov/live –mo

— FLOTUS (@FLOTUS) January 22, 2013

The President and First Lady welcomed the guests with handshakes, hugs and even fistbumps, and Bo was treated to a near-constant stream of affectionate pats and petting. The entire event was livestreamed, and you can watch a replay below: 

 

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For two years now, we have been holding regular “community” meetings at our office to give team members an opportunity to check in about how they’re doing, not just professionally but also personally. Each person answers several questions beginning with a deceptively simple one: “How are you feeling today?”* The rest of us simply listen.

It was only when we faced a sudden crisis that I finally understood why these meetings had been so important. On a weekend last October, the 23-year-old son of one of our team members died unexpectedly and tragically. On Monday morning, I called our team together in our conference room.

The feelings that surfaced that morning were raw — grief, bewilderment, fear, an acute awareness of the fragility of life and the preciousness of our own loved ones, and empathy for our grieving colleague.

The emotions ran even higher at a community meeting on the first day our colleague returned to work several weeks later. Painful as it was for all of us, we were able to create a container for our colleague’s heartbreak. Sharing our feelings also made them feel less burdensome. We held her, and holding her held us. It was cathartic, and that helped each of us to go back at the end of the meeting and focus again on the work at hand.

It dawned on me that day how powerful and liberating it is to say exactly what you’re feeling, and to feel truly listened to without judgment.

The impetus to hold community meetings came to us from something called “the Sanctuary Model,” developed by a psychiatrist named Sandra Bloom as a way to help people deal with chronically stressful and overwhelming circumstances — mostly in the world of mental health.

Increasingly, however, the everyday experience of corporate life can be overwhelming in and of itself.

In addition to whatever stresses we bring from home, including not getting sufficient sleep, we’re deluged with email, running from meeting to meeting, skipping meals, and working longer and more continuous hours than ever. Is it any surprise we’re struggling? Worse yet, in most workplaces the unspoken expectation is that we will check any strong emotions we’re feeling at the door.

You know the drill. You put on your game face when you walk into work. “How are you?” a colleague asks, by rote and without real interest. “Fine,” you respond, automatically, regardless of how you’re actually feeling.

“How many of us,” Bloom writes, “have ever felt truly safe in a social setting … [meaning] cared for, trusted, free to express our deepest thoughts and feelings without censure, unafraid of being abandoned or misjudged, unfettered by the constant pressure of impersonal competition, and yet stimulated to be thoughtful, creative, spontaneous and solve problems?”

To the contrary, as demand grows, we feel more anxious, more isolated, and more vulnerable.

Each of us has a tipping point — a moment when we feel so depleted that we fall into survival mode. We’re often unaware of it, but when we move from feeling calm and secure to anxious and under siege, we literally become different people.

Our fight or flight physiology kicks in. In turn, our focus automatically narrows to protecting ourselves. We lose the ability to think clearly and creatively, respond to others with care and consideration, or consider the long-term consequences of our choices. Instead, we do whatever we think we need to do to survive in the moment.

Community, I’ve come to deeply believe, is the cure. It does indeed have the power to serve as a sanctuary — to protect, ground and encourage us, not just in extreme circumstances, but also in the face of countless everyday challenges. Support in a community can also give us the strength to forego immediate gratification in favor of choices that uphold shared values, serve the collective good, and generate long-term value.

I’m convinced that it’s the strength of our community at The Energy Project which has allowed us to become a truly high-performing team. The safety and trust we feel with one another has freed us to focus our efforts on our mission. We have a small full-time staff — 14 of us, along with another dozen working part-time — but we’ve been able to work at senior levels in some of the world’s largest companies. One reason is that we squander almost no energy on internal politics. We’re in this together, including when one or another of us is struggling and needs help.

I’ve always thought of our core team as a living laboratory for the practices we teach our clients — whether it’s the power of renewal, or focusing on one thing at a time, or learning to deal more skillfully with conflict. What I now realize is that I’ve been overlooking one of the most powerful elements of our work.

Each of us is far less likely to succeed by forever pushing to stand out from the pack than by building communities of care and trust committed to raising the bar for everyone.

Transformation takes a village. None of us can truly do it alone.

* The other questions we ask at community meetings include “What’s the most important thing you learned last week?” “What’s your goal for this week?” and “What are you feeling most grateful for?”

Malou Innocent

Secretary of State Hillary Clinton will face the wrong questions when she testifies today on the September 11, 2012, terrorist attack in Benghazi. The buck stops with Secretary Clinton—and it should. But members of Congress will focus on politically charged and distracting issues. The terrorist attack on the consulate was abhorrent. However, a broader discussion about the NATO-led regime change in Libya—and its unfolding political aftermath in Mali—would be a better use of Congress’s time. The consequences of intervention should not be ignored, and its antecedents must be explored.

Secretary Clinton was among the handful of U.S. and European officials who urged Western military action in Libya, a mission that entangled the United States in yet another volatile, post-revolutionary Muslim country, and accelerated neighboring Mali’s destabilization. North Africa’s vortex of Islamist crosscurrents has now sucked America and France into Mali. Indeed, the reverberations of NATO-led regime change in Libya impelled U.S. and French involvement in Mali. Like the conflict in Libya, France cannot do the heavy lifting in Mali on its own. Senators should ask: How far will the conflict in Mali go? Will the United States end up holding the broken pieces once again? Is America now “leading from behind”?

Furthermore, Congress should ask Secretary Clinton about how the White House shamelessly recast the word “war” into “kinetic military operations.” That Orwellian revisionism allowed the administration to side step the War Powers Act and bypass congressional authorization. In the course of supposedly demonstrating America’s selflessness in the promotion of democracy abroad, the administration compromised the integrity of our institutions at home. In that respect, the Libyan adventure has added to the steady aggrandizement of America’s imperial presidency. 

Secretary Clinton probably won’t go into any of that, and pitchfork wielding senators likely won’t ask her about those far-reaching consequences.

The highly anticipated BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 officially launches today. RIM’s enterprise mobility management solution with BlackBerry Enterprise Server has evolved over the past decade, and today we’re pleased to offer our re-invented solution to help businesses embrace mobile trends and enable management, productivity, and secure interaction with corporate data. I caught up with RIM’s Jeff Holleran, Sr. Director of Enterprise Product Management, to discuss the launch:

[ YouTube link for mobile viewing ]

Learn more at www.blackberry.com/bes10

Features of BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10

A cost-efficient, secure, reliable, and scalable solution, BlackBerry Enterprise Service 10 offers a robust feature set to help you get your employees up and running on their, or your, devices. Here are some of the new features, and there’s much more.

Read more at the Inside BlackBerry for Business Blog »

Tad DeHaven

The Washington Post’s David Fahrenthold reports on a tiny federal program that House Republicans and even the Obama administration would like to terminate but that is seemingly invincible. The Christopher Columbus Fellowship Foundation, a grant program created in 1992, was supposed to pay for itself from the proceeds of coins honoring the 500^th anniversary of Columbus’s landing in the new world. 

After the coin money ran out, however, the foundation’s board of directors ran to Congress. In 2008, Mississippi Republican Sen. Thad Cochran came to the program’s rescue with a $600,000 appropriation. It has received an annual handout ever since: 

“It’s a sort of a national treasure, if you want to know the truth about it,” said James H. Herring, a lawyer who was the board’s vice chairman until recently. Herring was also a former chairman of the Mississippi Republican Party, which had donated more than $28,000 to Republican causes, including $1,250 to Cochran’s campaigns. 

A spokesman for Cochran said the senator supported the program long before Herring, his fellow Mississippi Republican, was put on its board. Cochran, he said, believes that the program has merit and has produced “notable accomplishments.” 

Cochran himself was unavailable for an interview this week.

Yep, just a coincidence there. 

It’s almost impossible to find a program that both Democrats and Republicans want to kill. And the Columbus program is miniscule. So what does it say about the prospects for spending cuts when politicians from both parties can’t even get rid of a dinky program that neither supports?  

Increasingly, I see people looking starry-eyed to business and markets to solve social problems. In so doing, they run the risk of dismissing the impact of nonprofits — and diminishing the value of organizations that seek to make a difference without creating the potential conflicts that come with the profit motive. My view is that pretending companies and markets hold all the answers actually puts at risk our ability to deal with our most pressing societal problems — and to help our most vulnerable citizens.

The rhetoric is everywhere — from the trade press to the mainstream media to business school faculty to corporate titans to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs. Former GE CEO Jack Welch, writing in Business Week, characterized the nonprofit sector as a “foreign land” in which performance is not a priority and employees are guaranteed “lifetime employment.” Alexis Ohanian, co-founder of Reddit, wrote last year on the Wired web site, “Let’s be real: The nonprofit model is broken. The 20th-century way of “guilting” people into giving to an opaque, inefficient organization with massive overhead is no longer a viable model.” In a recent blog post here on HBR.org, Dan Pallotta suggests that nonprofits should use the tools of capitalism such as high pay and providing returns to investors to increase charitable giving.

The rush to disparage nonprofits and the stampede to embrace the idea that for-profits — or for-profit models — can more easily combat our toughest social problems deny reality. Many crucial objectives simply cannot be accomplished while generating a financial return. Other objectives can but there is a price to be paid. In health care, for example, research indicates a decline in quality when non-profit hospitals switched to become profit making, as Eduardo Porter explained this month in the New York Times.

The laudable push for companies to commit more energy to dealing with social problems should not obscure the need for strong independent nonprofits that focus on mission not profit. And while nonprofits can learn from companies and companies can learn from nonprofits, it is a mistake to deny differences.

After all, there is a crucial distinction between an institution that reinvests surpluses in its mission and one that faces unrelenting pressure to distribute profit to shareholders. Consider higher education in the United States. Nonprofit universities frequently offer an education that costs more than actual tuition — the difference made up through charitable gifts and endowment returns — while for-profit institutions must cover their costs with tuition and create a profit margin. The results — and the evidence from lawsuits, media reports, and congressional and GAO investigations of for-profit universities — speak for themselves.

Despite this and many other cautionary tales, an increasing number of people both inside and outside the nonprofit world seem drunk on the Kool-Aid of business superiority. Too often people equate “business thinking” with effectiveness. Even those inside the world of nonprofits and philanthropy have internalized the idea that operating “like a business” means operating effectively (never asking which business: Countrywide Financial? BP? Enron?).

The stereotypes of nonprofits are just that: stereotypes. There are, of course, numerous examples of nonprofit influence and impact — from work on environmental issues to citizens’ rights to reductions in tobacco use to reductions in worldwide child mortality — but also lesser known examples. Take the work of the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, a nonprofit whose 18-month campaign to reduce hospital mortality rates has saved an estimated 122,300 lives by inspiring and guiding hospital executives, physicians, and nurses to adopt six basic patient-safety practices. As Peter Fader, a University of Pennsylvania professor and director of the Wharton Customer Analytics Initiative, has observed: Nonprofits often excel at using “their data to better understand their ‘customer base.’ In this area, big companies with lots of resources really can learn from their cash-strapped nonprofit cousins.”

The point is this: No type of organization — government, business, or nonprofit — has a monopoly on effectiveness. And nonprofits are typically tackling the most complex problems of all. If those problems could have easily been solved by government or business, they wouldn’t exist at all.

I’m a huge believer in free-market capitalism. I have an M.B.A. and have worked as a corporate consultant. But I think we’re better off being sober about what markets can and cannot accomplish.

I’d suggest three practical questions to ask in sorting through how to achieve important social goals.

• Does the pursuit of profit conflict with or facilitate the achievement of your goal? How likely are profit and social impact to be in tension? How will that tension be managed or resolved?
• What kind of choices and information do people have? Markets work best when people have choices and when there is good information, so ask, do those conditions apply? Are you looking at an opportunity — like creating products or technologies that will help poor people in some aspect of their lives — that lends itself to a free-market solution? Or are you looking at something, like the management of a prison or nursing home system for a state, where a provider is likely to have a virtual monopoly — meaning management is free to prioritize profit over the social mission without paying any kind of price?
• Finally, are you addressing an issue that actually results from market failure, such as, environmental degradation? If you don’t understand capitalism’s role in contributing to a problem, you probably won’t be able to rely on capitalism to chart a path to the solution.

Then decide what makes most sense, and don’t assume that a pure nonprofit isn’t the way to go.

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