Ben Franklin said it best: "Those who would trade liberty for a bit of safety deserve neither liberty nor safety."

This is appalling.

I urge everybody to watch this:

This is without a doubt the best business movie of the year for its content. And it is probably one of my favourite movies of the year for its film quality as well.  This movie is BRILLIANT.


It is the true story of a men's brogue shoe factory in Northamptonshire, England that in order to survive, stopped making men's brogues, the market for which had been swamped by cheap Eastern European knock-offs, and found their "niche market" - kinky boots for drag queens and transvestites.

It is: a story of commtment; advice on how to be open and flexible to changes in your business environment; a treatise on finding opportunities  in the strangest of places;  a tale about how to be true to oneself; a lesson on respecting others even if they are different than you; and finally a lesson on leadership.

The other thing that I love about this movie is that it has a strong story, a lot of heart, it used fantastic venues (a one hundred year old factory), and it employed a bunch of the shoe factory employees in the movie. The writing was great, the scenes that were awkward and tense were intentionally written that way and it was not played up for laughs. There are a lot of moments in the film that you really want to end because they're uncomfortable. But that's the magic. Those uncomfortable moments are there in life!

Go rent this movie.  And if you are a business school leader, show this to your class. Here are some great lessons that I found. Which ones will you find?

• A company is a collection of individuals who have committed their time and energy to the enterprise. Respect them and respect their commitment. Show them your loyalty - they deserve it.
  
• If disaster strikes and you have to lay people off, don't make excuses. Do it quickly and cleanly. It will suck and that's life.
• Before you lay them off though, ask them for their ideas. They are close to the work. They will surprise you and may even save the company.
  
• Look at your business environment for big changes. When they come, change your business, change your product, change your service. Adapt or die.
• Look for new opportunities every where you go. Do this by finding somebody who is in pain from an unfulfilled need. Don't try to create a market - find one that is underserved or not at all served.
• If you and your life partner don't want the same things, you'll never really reconcile it. You're better to move on and live out your lives apart.
• Also, if your life partner can't support your 100% commitment to your business, your partnership will fail. It's hard enough to run a business. It's impossible to do it when your partner isn't there to support you, or worse, is acting against your effort.
  
• Work with your customer to build rapid prototypes and get rapid feedback. If they tell you it's wrong, then go back and do it again.
• Forget your old business so that you can learn your new business. The old assumptions and beliefs and goals are probably not true. (In this case, the factory went from selling "life-long comfort" to selling "Two and a half feet of tubular delicious SEX!")
• You can push your people hard but only if they know that it's for them and not for you.
• Sometimes the tide of attitude can shift away from you or towards you on the suggestion of just one person in your team who holds a lot of sway. Earn that person's respect and you have earned the respect of the group.
• Aim high. Choose big hairy scary goals that are way beyond your comfort zone. (I disagree with the "S.M.A.R.T." goals approach in life.)
• You can run from your childhood but you can't hide. You don't need to "deal with it" all first, unless it's getting in the way of your life. In which case, go figure it out and then get on with things.
• Life, relationships, business, sex, gender, psychology - they're all messy and uncomfortable. And that's the way they're supposed to be.
• Find something you want to do. Pursue it with all your heart. And share that adventure with people you care about.
  

I'm intrigued by stories such as this one in the ABC News about the plumbers union in Philadelphia who claim that no-flush green urinals are a health threat. I wonder if the union sees them more as a health threat to the UNION DUES than to the USERS.

Does anybody have any information on negative health effects of waterless urinals??

(If you are looking for the 2007 event information, please click HERE.)

I am very excited about our launch of the 30 Days of Sustainability. For the month of March, Vancouver will host a cornucopia of events and activities, all focused around bringing sustainability to our lives and our city.

Special features of the website include: 

It is only when you take into account the sum total of a person's associations, actions, talk, relationships, you get a more complete picture of them in the real world than if you just listen to their words. The corollary in the web 2.0 world (or web 1.0 world for that matter) is that the more data points and links you have connected to a person, the more complete the picture of their identity.

There are side effects of this fact. Namely, that some peoples actions do not align with their words. Hence the old "on the internet, nobody knows you're a dog" cartoon. But it is possible to construct a fairly trust-worthy identity by connecting yourself to your activities, friends, colleagues, and related organizations and then having some of those people endorse you. Think about your online identity as you would for a company. Both a company and you need to be found, identified as unique, associated with certain character traits or skillsets, verified as a trust-worthy entity to do business with, and so on.

Could somebody forge a fake identity on the web that is complete, convincing, and well-connected? Yes, of course. Just the way those same people do in the real world. Because your ability to forge an identity is separate from the type of identity being forged. The converse of that is: are there really amazing people with fantastic connections, amazing skills, incredible work-ethic, engaging personalities and impeccable integrity who are difficult to find either in real-life or on the web? Again, yes.

What is the final message here? Work on both parts. Be the person you want to be in the world. But then make sure that your online presence is aligned with that reality as well. Make sure that there is substance first, and visibility and style second.

Back in 2003, I attended a pivotal event at the Vancouver Enterprise Forum. Normally, these events generally follow a predictable pattern. People fill in the room, buy a drink and wander aimlessly. The venture capitalists avoid the nervous entrepreneurs with the bad pitches and the keen students stand nervously in the corner, not sure who to talk to. Old friends meet up and chat and newcomers do their best to try to look as comfortable as the old-timers.

Now, don't get me wrong. This is not a comment on the Vancouver Enterprise Forum, which does a great job of bringing these people together time and time again. It is a comment on the state of networking generally in this city, if not the western world.

But that evening was different. Darcy Rezac, Managing Director of the Vancouver Board of Trade, got on stage with a microphone, introduced himself, gave the group some ground rules and "permission to network".

Some of his rules included:


The energy that this talk unleashed was enormous. People laughed and chatted and exchanged cards. In fact, it was hard to shepherd them out of the room to the upstairs theater for the actual talk! This evening was a turning point in my own understanding of networking and I will always remember it. I bought Darcy's first book "The Frog and the Prince" that night from Gayle and read it that night.

Well, I'm pleased to report that Darcy Rezac, Judy Thomson, and Gayle Hallgren-Rezac are at it again and are releasing "Work the Pond - Use the Power of Positive Networking to Leap Forward in Business and in Life" on October 4, 2005.

No matter what you do - business, government, or non-profit work - if you need to work with people and build out your eco-system of "weak links", you need to read this book. I highly recommend it.

Congratulations Darcy, Judy, and Gayle!

A Cornell university study has found that 44% of Amerikans favoured "some restrictions on the civil liberties of Muslim Americans." But remember George Bush, "this is not a war of Christian against Muslim or Westerners against Easterners, it is a war on terror." Umm, yeah, right. Shockingly, those who were most inclined to vote this way were either Republican or "more religious." Given that the local Muslims were probably not voting for their own civil liberties curtailment (but then again who knows? The Christians have certainly agreed to it), I am guessing that the "religious" people in question were the more fundamentalist Christians.

QUOTE

The survey showed that 27 percent of respondents supported requiring all Muslim Americans to register where they lived with the federal government. Twenty-two percent favored racial profiling to identify potential terrorist threats. And 29 percent thought undercover agents should infiltrate Muslim civic and volunteer organizations to keep tabs on their activities and fund-raising.

UNQUOTE

The original Cornell press release link is here.

Currently listening to (ironically) Robin S - Show Me Love (Stonebridge mix) from the album "Club Sounds Vol. 27 CD2"

(Thanks to William Gibson's blog for the link)

If you have not read about this horriffic case yet, Lisa M. Montgomery of Melvern Kansas had a baby girl fourteen years ago and then had her tubes tied. Since that time, she frequently claimed that she was pregnant to her ex-husband, current husband, and fellow dog-show attendees. Even more recently, she claimed on a rat-terrier computer forum that she was carrying twins and that she lost one of the twins in the early stage of the pregnancy. But it was all a lie. "None of the rat-terrier people believed she was pregnant," terrier breeder Nanci Strudl told the Kansas City Star. "She never gained an ounce."

Her ex-husband was filing to take custody of their children, and Lisa was desperate to have another child with her second husband. Meanwhile, she had been attending various dog shows, where at one point, she had her photo taken with a young expectant mother-to-be named Bobbie Jo Stinnett, Lisa came up with a fake name (Darlene Fischer), contacted young Ms. Stinnett on the internet and claimed that she wanted to come over to look at Ms. Stinnett's rat terriers in order to purchase one of the pups. That morning, Lisa Montgomery went to the Wal-mart to pick out baby clothing. One lady thinks that it may have been Lisa who approached her in the Wal-mart that morning, offering to hold her baby while she shopped. Her motherly instincts told her this was not a good idea so she didn't allow the stranger to hold her baby. In any case, Wal-mart officials did see Lisa on the security tapes that morning buying clothing. Then she went to the young mother-to-be's house. Bobbie Jo Stinnett had been on the phone with her mother and told her mother that she had to go meet a new customer who was interested in pups. When she opened the door, Lisa Montgomery strangled her, cut the fetus out of her womb while she was still alive, cut the umbilical cord on the child, cleaned and dressed the baby, and then called her husband to tell him that she had delivered the baby while she was out shopping. Lisa Montgomery's husband and kids met her near Topeka, Kansas the next day and the "new family" went home. Bobbie Jo Stinnett's mother found Bobbie Joe laying in a pool of blood, called the ambulance, and unfortunately Bobbie Jo died on the way to the hospital in the care of the paramedics. She was 23.

When I read stories like this, I do my best to try to understand what would cause somebody to commit such an act. Given that cases such as this occur with some regularity, the first lesson I take away is that once again, this is a reminder that we are biochemical animals with intense biological imperative drives. We are shocked because the acts seem to be the act of unreasonable people. And that's the point. Reason would not enter into it, given that it is a higher level brain function, separated from the lower instinctive drives to mate, run, kill, eat, and nurture. I will never know what Lisa Montgomery's issues were. But if I had to guess, there might be shame at having lost a child, fear of an angry husband if she told him she lost it, and the innate desire to mother that had been cut short and that needed an outlet.

It sounds like she had been a pathological liar about being pregnant and had finally worked up the courage to steal somebody else's baby and claim it as her own. So the lower instinctive drive activated the higher-level social skills, got her near a potential target, and then she killed another woman and took that child as her own. This is something that sometimes happens in the non-human animal kingdom as well. We are not as far away from it as we would like to think. Sure, we are separated by ethics and morals. But some people don't have those. My friend and mentor Peter Koestenbaum recently wrote an appropriate article in his weekly leadership newsletter:

CHOOSING ETHICS

Being ethical is always a decision. Animals may have feelings, capable of bonding and attachment, but we don't say they are ethical. Being ethical is typically human. And humans who tamper with their ethics endanger the integrity of their very humanity. The difference lies in the zone of freedom. For we choose our behavior in accordance with the criteria of what is ethical and what is not. A person may commit a heinous crime, but if that person lacks judgment, cannot reflect, cannot think, that person is given treatment instead of punishment.

Human freedom is rooted in the human fact of free will. And free will is scary. Why? Because we can choose anything we want. In the purity of our philosophical truth, the truth about freedom is that, like it or not, we are at least potentially and theoretically free to choose whether we are to attach ourselves to something, like our child, or whether we want to distance ourselves from, and do not care what happens to, people at the other end of the world. We can also choose the reverse....

December 20, 2004

[From The Philosophic Consultant, 2002, Koestenbaum]

What I want to know is, exactly how clueless is her husband? Her previous husband knew that she had her tubes tied. You would think that her current husband would know that. You would also think that he would notice if she had added 20-30 pounds of fat and was cycling through the standard pregnancy biochemical cycles for eight months. She managed to cover it up long enough to find the young mother and take her child. That alone seems bizarre and hard to believe, but perhaps she wrapped herself up with blankets around her waist to cover up the obvious or perhaps she was bearing a lot of extra weight so it wasn't noticeable. But if the rat-terrier people didn't believe her, then why did her husband? Did they never have sex? More likely, he knew she wasn't pregnant but didn't want to know where the baby came from. That is only my speculation though.

The child was taken from its womb at eight months. Who knows when it was actually scheduled to arrive, but it was brought into the world sooner and much more abruptly than anticipated, and by all accounts she is doing fine. That is the resiliency of life and I think it is quite awesome. It makes me think of my favourite line from Jurassic Park: "Life always finds a way."

I feel horrible for Zeb Stinnett, husband of the dead young mother-to-be, who will now have to live with that death and will have to raise his child by himself all because some crazed biologicially driven woman from another state murdered his wife and stole his child. And for Mr. Montgomery and his kids who will have to sit through a lengthy trial while their wife and mother is charged with kidnapping and murder.The kids are in school so I can't imagine how that is going to affect them. Fortunately, they have been handed over to Montgomery's ex-husband, the kids' biological father. Not that that will make it any easier for them.

Bobbie Jo, rest in peace. And Baby Stinnett, welcome to the world. Hopefully that will be the worst thing you will ever experience while you're here.

Book-burning and more importantly, book-re-writing has been used throughout the rein of man to erase the collective knowledge and to curb dangerous thoughts and direct society. This infamous technique for hiding knowledge continues unabated today in Texas. Dubya and the ideologues (sounds like a great rock band title), continue to push their ideological and theological worldviews on youth, ensuring that the kids know little about sex education, thereby ensuring their continued Top 5 spot on the CDC's "child pregnancies per capita" list. In case that's not clear enough, I'll translate: Our view on what you should do is more important than not bringing unwanted babies into the world.

While they were at it, Terri Leo, one of the members of the 15-person Texas Education Board made sure that all homosexual code words like "couple" (gasp) and "adults" (shriek) were properly changed to husband, wife, mother, father, where appropriate. Thank God and the Republican member for getting that straight (pun intended.)

My favourite part of the article was this one:

The board rejected a proposal from Leo asking for language saying: "homosexuals, lesbians and bisexuals as a group are more prone to self-destructive behavior like depression, illegal drug use and suicide."

How long will it be until they remove all of the science texts that reference evolution...or have they done that already. Then I guess we'd pretty much have to ensure that the kids don't hear about our newly discovered hobbit-like brethren from Flores Island or the genetic discovery that humans and mice came from the same genetic ancestor about 75 million years ago. We wouldn't want the kids to know that either. They might question the Bible, turn gay, have sex out of marriage (or in marriage), think for themselves, and grow up to be intellectually engaged adults.

My nephew Matt sent me a link to this Wired article on rat neurons being used to control a flight simulator. In essence, they have plugged the feedback and the control systems into the neurons and have found that eventually the neurons learn how to "fly" the virtual plane.

Now, I have heard of using neural networks connected to wings or to legs and then letting them learn how to walk or fly. But I have never heard of using live brain material to achieve the same thing.

It brings to mind (no pun intended) articles I have read on teaching the body to "feel" fake limbs as well as on retraining sexual stimulation (teaching quadriplegics to attain orgasm through touch stimulation of their head for example rather than their genitalia), many of which point to the somewhat universal nature of neurons and their ability to remap to different inputs and outputs by simply retraining them purposefully.

The fascinating thing for me about this work is:

• the brain works without a heart (or so it appears unless I read the article incorrectly) which makes me ask, what is feeding it? Also, it's interesting to me that all you need is the core material and then it just works - it does what it is supposed to do, which is receive inputs, establish communication channels, and drive outputs.

• it is a true bionic hybrid, similar to the guy who sent email via his thoughts recently.

Matt asked me what I thought of the ethics of this work. I don't think there are any ethical problems with designing and building hybrid bionic creatures to understand the cognitive systems and signalling networks.

Although I do admit that the idea of fleshy brain material being inside this device did give me pause for a moment for some reason that I still can't articulate.

UPDATE: This Wired article discusses research at Andrew Schwartz's neurobiology lab at the University of Pittsburgh that allowed them to train a monkey to learn how to use a robotic arm simply by sending it brain signals, in essence, re-mapping some small subset of neurons to the inputs and outputs of this robotic arm. The monkey could then use the arm to feed itself. Once again, this seems to point to the brain as being quickly able to adapt to new limbs, new motor skills, and new sensations or at least the sensation of sensation.