Archive for the ‘politics’ Category

Do boycotts ever work?

In response to my recent debate inducing post, Why the Whole Foods boycott is stupid, where I offered that boycotting someone for having an opinion isn’t that bright (though is within our rights).  In response I got an email from Steven Levingston at the Washington post.

He informed me they asked an expert on boycotts to give an opinion on the Whole Foods issue, particularly the merits of boycotts: Whole Foods Boycott: The Long View

Unlike my post, it’s grounded and informative. It’s definitely worth a read – the author is a professor of history at the University of South Carolina and unlike myself, has more than just opinions and rants to offer.

He provides some nice context to the history of American boycotts, and why they work and often don’t, and how they can have an impact long term even when they fail in the short.

5 myths about health care around the world

I’m not trying to be a healthcare reform clearing house, but a few articles I’ve found are much more useful than boycotting. They inform, or at least pretend to inform. Of course you can boycott and inform, but as best I can tell that’s not what these guys have been doing.

First up is this article, What’s wrong with Whole Foods, which presents a much clearer argument against Whole Foods, beyond just the behavior of the CE0 (It’s a crazy looking website, but the article is well written and somewhat referenced, minus the typos). Interestingly, the author of this article doesn’t recommend a boycott either.

But more important is this one, Five myths about health care around the world (Washington Post).

I’m not an expert and can’t verify these claims. But among other good stuff in here:

2. Overseas, care is rationed through limited choices or long lines.

Generally, no. Germans can sign up for any of the nation’s 200 private health insurance plans — a broader choice than any American has. If a German doesn’t like her insurance company, she can switch to another, with no increase in premium. The Swiss, too, can choose any insurance plan in the country.

In France and Japan, you don’t get a choice of insurance provider; you have to use the one designated for your company or your industry. But patients can go to any doctor, any hospital, any traditional healer. There are no U.S.-style limits such as “in-network” lists of doctors or “pre-authorization” for surgery. You pick any doctor, you get treatment — and insurance has to pay.

Which in all is a nice set of informed counterarguments to claims made by Mackey. Which is what I’d have loved to see boycotters passing out, attached to a copy of the WSJ article.

This article also hits on some things I mentioned in HealthCare as an innovation problem, namely informing us about alternatives so we can better see what we have and don’t have in our current system compared with what’s possible.

And lastly is this one from the NYT, which takes a look at the statistics for the uninsured in America: The Uninsured. It’s an editorial, but has references for most of the numbers they quote.

Why boycotting Whole Foods is Stupid

I’ve been forwarded a few emails about the Whole Foods Boycott, a movement in response to Whole Food’s CEO John Mackey’s Wall Street Journal article.

I’m tempted to find the nearest boycott and ask everyone who is so enraged if they actually read his short article. I doubt they have. It’s well written, expresses a clear opinion, and even if you disagree with him he does have some interesting ideas. (Even if those ideas read as callous, self-interested or misrepresentative of the data – note added 8/26).

Why is it in this country when someone expresses an opinion we don’t like, the answer is a boycott? A boycott is a ban and bans on other people’s opinions are can be stupid and childish. It’d be one thing if he was breaking laws, treating people cruelly, or doing something evil. But Mackey having an opinion you don’t like is not a crime. Honestly, adults banning anything from other adults can not come off as all that smart. If you want to protest, or voice an opinion, great, but you don’t need to boycott an organization to do that.

Instead of a boycott, I want passionate respectful disagreement. I want to see people treating other people’s ideas with respect in exchange for our right to do the same. I hope to see people offer superior arguments, and use intelligent persuasion,  instead of blaming others for their “stupidity”.

Regardless of what I think of Mackey’s opinion, I defend his right to have his own opinion, even if it were stupid or idiotic, which in this case it isn’t.

Many of the ideas he mentions are interesting. Minimizing malpractice insurance for doctors? Sounds good., Make individual health insurance tax deductible? Also reasonable. Make costs transparent to consumers? How could that be bad? Most of the article is a bullet lists of interesting ideas. Impractical maybe, or misguided, but there is nothing wrong with this list.

The section that seems to have pissed everyone off is this one:

While we clearly need health-care reform, the last thing our country needs is a massive new health-care entitlement that will create hundreds of billions of dollars of new unfunded deficits and move us much closer to a government takeover of our health-care system. Instead, we should be trying to achieve reforms by moving in the opposite direction—toward less government control and more individual empowerment.

Mackey goes on to describe the flaws of the Canadian and UK systems, and how many folks are forced, based on his data, to wait for care. But I want to know this: do the boycotters have better data? Counterarguments to these claims? What about Sweden or Germany, how do those government run health systems compare? I haven’t seen them yet. This doesn’t make Mackey right, but the boycott doesn’t make him wrong either.

The Boycott Whole Foods website offers this in description of their cause:

John Mackey, CEO and co-founder of Whole Foods wrote an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal on August 12, 2009 quoting Margaret Thatcher and suggesting that healthcare is a commodity that only the rich, like him, deserve.

Whole Foods has built its brand with the dollars of deceived progressives. Let them know your money will no longer go to support Whole Foods anti-union, anti-health insurance reform, right-wing activities.

This is unfair based on my reading of the article. It’s certainly less thoughtful and makes worse arguments (apparently I’m a deceived progressive – wasn’t sure I was either).

The sad thing is I suspect I agree with some of the points the boycotters could make, but they haven’t made them. I don’t know what their counterarguments are. And I’d rather not choose between an intelligent argument for a point I disagree with and a stupid argument for one I do, but that’s an approximation of the choices I see here.

I’d be more critical of the timing of Mackey’s opinion rather than its contents. Why couldn’t this message have been delivered months ago, before Obama’s plan was pitched, when it could have influenced its direction, instead of derailing it. But that’s a matter of timing, not of the content of the opinion. If I were to boycott Whole Foods or critique Mackey it’d be for poor or manipulative timing, and not much else.

My only hope at this point is to have Alex Blumburg and Adam Davidson from Planet Money, the guys who did this amazing podcast about the U.S. Financial crisis, to do one on U.S. Healthcare.

Until the level of discourse rises, and Blumburg and Davidson are among the few heroes with that power, I think we’re fucked. We don’t know how to have an intelligent debate.

Healthcare as an innovation problem

I’ve been loosely following the healthcare debate in the U.S.  and there are some obvious points for innovation gone wrong. It’s not Obama’s fault, at least not yet, as the system he is working in is designed to make innovation quite difficult. Big change of any kind, for better or for worse, is extremely hard to do as power is divided across so many people, with so many entrenched and selfish interests.

Given what I know about innovation, if I were tasked with the challenging of reforming U.S. Healthcare, the last thing I’d do is try to overhaul the entire system all at once. It’s too big, too complex, and has too many built in defenders of the status quo to ever pull off. It would also be much too hard to get right in one shot.

Instead I’d do the following:

  • Inform the populace of examples that already exist that we can emulate.  Innovation is less scary if people can see and talk to others who are already doing something.  Which U.S. states or countries are closest to what Obama wants to do? I have no idea, yet I’ve followed the high level debate points so far. Many of the criticisms hinge on the belief what Obama wants to do can’t be done, yet somehow most developed nations in the world do provide a form of universal health-care. We are ignorant of how else this can work and it’s a flaw in American culture that we’re ignorant of other successful ways governments can run. I want to see a chart comparing the U.S. to Sweden, Japan, Canada, Germany, etc. so we know how else this has been done, and can learn from them.
  • Run a pilot program so the risks are smaller.  Pilot programs are the only way to take risks in a safe way and avoid criticisms driven by fear (see idea killers). If you take a small group, and apply the changes there, and observe the results, you create a way to learn from mistakes in the small, prove the core principles and gain support from people who say it can’t be done. It’s much easier to get support for a pilot project than for the real thing. You often can do it in some form with a minimum of approvals. Do a small one, show it worked, then repeat on a bigger scale until you have enough evidence to make your case.
  • Insure more people every year instead of all at once.  Another way to minimize risk is to grow the system over time. This is a form of pilot program – piloted over time. Instead of radically overhauling the system, increase coverage to 5% of the uninsured in 2010, learn from how that worked, then expand to %15 etc. By making changes incrementally there is less to fear and less risk of abuse, bloat, and mismanagement. And it reduces the costs risks many complain about.

But the problem with my advice is the U.S. government is not designed to make this kind of thing easy. Budget cycles and Senate processes do not encourage experimentation, and the momentum required to get any legislation passed at all is so complex and momentum bound that once in motion there likely will not be a second chance – you get one bullet to spend during a term as president, if that at all.

Many corporations suffer similiar systematic problems – there is so much required to even get an idea on the table, that big ideas become brain dead easy to kill if that’s what you want to do, which most people who already have power and seniority tend to want to do.

As is often the case for me in American politics, I’m worried less about which side wins whatever battle, than I am about the low quality of discourse and discussion. It’s hard to sort our how much the headlines reflect what is actually going on, but stupidity and arrogance are harder problems to fix than innovation. Whether at work or a town hall meeting, when many arrive with decisions already made, or with the goal of silencing others, there’s not much room for progress to happen.

Calling bullshit on social media

While I like and use Facebook and Twitter, there’s enough hype and abuse of words like innovation, transformation and revolution around all things social media that a critique is warranted – if only to  take a shot at calibrating how people talk about this stuff. I hope this post is used whenever someone feels they’re being sold something phony or that makes little sense and wants a skeptical opinion to help calibrate where the truth is.

For starters: social media is a stupid term. Is there any anti-social media out there? Of course not. All media, by definition, is social in some way. The term interactive media, a more accurate term for what’s going on, lived out its own rise / hype / boom cycle years ago and was smartly ignored this time around – first rule of PR is never re-use a dead buzzword, even if all that you have left are stupid ones. I’ve been involved in many stupid terms, from push-technology to parental-controls, so I should know when I see one.

That said, here’s some points not made often enough:

  1. We have always had social networks. Call them families, tribes, clubs, cliques or even towns, cities and nations.  You could call throwing a party or telling stories by a fire “social media tools”. If anything has happened recently it’s not the birth of social networks, it’s the popularity of digital tools for social networks, which is something different. These tools may improve how we relate to each other, but at best it will improve upon something we as a species have always done. Never forget social networks are old. The best tools will come from people who recognize, and learn from, the rich 10,000+ year history of social networks.
  2. There has always been word of mouth, back-channel, “authentic” media tools. In Gladatorial Rome, in Shakespearean England and in Revolutionary America, motivated individuals had ways to express their ideas and share them. Call it gossip, poems, paintings or pamphlets, there is a long history of individuals taking action to express opinions through non-official channels. The ease of using these channels changes over time, but they always exist because #1 always exists.  Of note, IRC predates some, but certainly not all, of the features twitter is heralded for introducing to the world.
  3. The new media does not necessarily destroy the old. TV was supposed to kill radio – this was wrong. TV forced radio to change and in some ways improve. The web forced TV, newspapers and magazines to change, and they will likely survive forever in some form, focusing on things the web can not do well.  Its unusual for new thing to completely replace the old ones and when they do it takes years. Anyone who claims social media will eliminate standard PR or mass media is engaging in hype, as odds are better those things will change and learn, but never die. It’s wise to ask what each kind of media / marketing is good and bad for and work from there.
  4. Social media consultants writing about social media have inherent biases. It’s difficult to take posts like this about social media seriously, as it’s written by someone from a social media consulting firm without an ounce of humility or perspective. It’s hard to come across as authentic if you promote a revolution that you personally stand to benefit the most from. Much writing about social media is PR people writing about the importance of PR – see a problem of authenticity here? When did PR, like advertisers, become a reliable source for what is authentic? How is SEO optimization, or similiar techniques for twitter, authentic? When a system becomes popular the greedy will game it and social media is no different. We should be worried when people with PR and advertising backgrounds or consulting firms are leading us in the ways of authenticity or integrity. The Twitter Book, from my publisher O’Reilly, takes a surprisingly reasonable, authentic and low-hype approach to social media I wish was more popular.
  5. Signal to Noise is always the problem. I’m someone who would rather read 5 or 10 really good things every day, than skim through 50 or 100 mediocre ones. I find all social media frequently consists of people re-forwarding things they were forwarded that almost none of them appear to have read, as they believe they are rewarded for publishing frequently above all else. Using twitter and digg I often feel I’m in the minority since what’s popular is rarely what’s good.  If you are interested in quality, and not volume, than the size of your network matters less than the value of what’s in it. I’m more fascinated by how kottke.org and metafilter.org have kept such high signal to noise ratios for years than I am about most media tools I see.
  6. All technologies cut both ways and social media will be no different. For all the upsides of any invention there are downsides and it takes time to sort out what they all are. Blogs and Twitter have made self promotion, and self-aggrandizement, acceptable in ways I’ve never seen before, and I’m guilty myself. Is it possible to write or publish without self promotion? I don’t know anymore. I suspect digital tools for social media may have the negative effect of making authentic communication harder, not easier to find, as more people, and corporations, hover right on the gray dividing line between authentic and corporate, or selfish and generous.
  7. Be suspicious of technologies claimed to change the world. The problem with the world is rarely the lack of technologies, the problem is us. Look, we have trouble following brain dead simple concepts like The Golden Rule. Millions starve to death not because we lack the food, but because of greed and lack of political will.  We will largely behave like idiots on blogs and on twitter because we behave that way in real life. Every technological revolution must contend with the fact that we bring our stupidity, selfishness and arrogance along for the ride with our generosity, wisdom and love (12for12k.org being a great positive example). This is true for any new technology we use, and invariably its this fact that plays itself out and ruins the current technological wave, setting up the frustrated landscape for the next one.  Democracy, steam power, electricity, telegraphs, telephones, televisions, the Internet, and the web have all been heralded as the arrival of Utopia, and although there has been progress in each wave, it seems there are things we want that technological change can not bring to us.
  8. Always ask “What problem am I trying to solve?” The smartest thing to do with something new is to ask what is it you need it to do for you. Recognize  good marketing will not make up for bad products or incompetent services.  If your company is marketing itself well to customers, or your social life is fine, perhaps you don’t need a revolution and need something much simpler and more realistic from social media. Spend time figuring out what you need. If you want to experiment and see for yourself, that’s awesome, but know that’s what you’re doing. But above all use whatever media/communication tools or methods work for you, whether they are old or new, no matter what anyone says, including me.

If you liked this post, you might also like my general purpose essay, How to detect bullshit.

Update: @jmichelle posted a response, In defense of social media, on O’Reilly Radar. I responded in the comments.

Update, part 2: six months later, here’s a follow up post: twitter reconsidered.

  • By Scott Berkun on February 16th, 2009
  • 2 Comments »
  • Innovation

New video: How progress happens

The folks at the Tools of Change conference posted a video of my talk this week on How Progress happens. Here’s the description:

Talking about change is easy making change happen in most organizations is ridiculously hard. But there are things we can learn from the history of technology, political revolution and change, and there is a playbook we can reuse to help us avoid easy mistakes and seemingly popular, but actually self-defeating approaches. This fun, interactive, and entertaining talk will prime you for leading change, enhancing your skills for motivating, and making change happen in your world.

It’s mostly new material – plus includes fun references to poorly named 70s rock bands, Gandhi, The Roman Empire, Christians and Lions, and other fun unexpected stories about progress.

Press play above to watch right now, or go to the blip.tv page – either way its 40 minutes long, including Q&A.

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