OutTakes
by Edd Merritt, December 1, 2011, page 22.....Pardon me, but do you have change for an empire?

It’s funny how your mind works sometimes. I ask myself, “An idea for an OutTake? Whatever prompted me to connect these ideas and people? Is it as farfetched as it seems, and do I dare share it with a public?”
Don’t ask. Just do it, Merritt, and worry about it later. Put your house on the market if you’ll feel safer. Borrow your grandson’s Batman costume. Hide yourself under Philip Dick’s “scramble suit.”
Anyway, I received a note from Thomas Naylor recently in which he describes his experience as a keynote speaker at Yale University’s Political Union. He said he had not been back there since he and two other financial thinkers team-taught a course on “corporate strategy” 30 years ago. Two weeks ago he was the headliner for a major debate on -- that’s right -- secession. Our Charlotte neighbor Thomas, as you know, is a leading spokesman in favor of Vermont seceding from what he terms the “empire” of the United States. He envisions Vermont, and maybe a few partner states, forming a republic similar to Switzerland.
He charges the U.S. government with being “immoral, undemocratic, oversized, materialistic, unsustainable, ungovernable” and a military machine. At the moment, our intended representatives in Washington seem to be helping his cause.
Reading his piece brought to mind two old friends from Minnesota. Both of them wrote things that had people similarly scratching their heads.
One of these gentlemen, Dennis Meadows, studied at MIT with a famous computer programmer and founder of system dynamics, J. Forrester. Meadows helped author a book in the early 1970s called The Limits to Growth based on a study he and his fellow scientists conducted through the Club of Rome on “Predicaments of Mankind.” In it they modeled the consequences of interaction between exponential growth of human systems on earth and the planet’s finite resources. In an update published 30 years after the initial study, when we had a better understanding of what some of these limits really are, Meadows says, “we must tell people how to manage an orderly reduction of their activities back down below the limits of the earth’s resources.”
A second fellow from my youth, named Joel Barker, has written extensively on how we create change. In other words, if we want to limit the growth of human systems to fit better with the earth’s resources, how do we change our patterns of behavior that are heavily ingrained in us? We do it, according to Barker, through shifts in our “paradigms.”
Paradigms are patterns or models based on assumptions we make about things. In other words, we believe something is the way it is because of certain factors, and we assume those factors are correct.
The rules of paradigms do two things: 1) they set limits or boundaries and 2) offer guidance on how to solve problems successfully as long as they exist inside the boundaries.
Well, guess what, folks? Things may not fit inside our current boundaries, and a paradigm shift may be in order. Time to change from one set of rules to another. In his 1962 book, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn suggests that paradigms filter data entering the scientist’s mind. Data that fit the current paradigm comes through easily. Other kinds of data, according to Kuhn, are hard for the scientist to perceive. “It was as if their paradigms interfered with their ability to clearly see the data.”
This effect may limit our ability to anticipate the future.
Are we suffering a hefty dose of future blindness now?
Barker suggests we might look at a fellow named Michael Dell back in the 1980s. He was in his early 20s at the time, and he wanted to enter a new industry that was then dominated by one of the world’s giant corporations, IBM. He didn’t have much money to front his business, so he decided to get customer money to help him out. In order to do this, he had to develop a manufacturing process that would produce a product in very short order, well and efficiently. He decided to sell his computers only over the phone. He required five days’ worth of inventory and 20 minutes to assemble. Bingo, Dell’s business was a new paradigm for computer sales.
One of the dangers of paradigms is a disease called “paradigm paralysis,” a “terminal disease of certainty,” according to Joel. To prevent it you have to look to the fringes as Stephen Jobs did. That is also where the Green Party began and where the women’s movement was born.
And, it’s where secession becomes a true alternative.
The novelist Marcel Proust said that the “real voyage of discovery consists, not in seeking new lands, but in seeing with new eyes.” One of my heroes, hockey star Wayne Gretzky, said, “Everyone knows where the puck is. I see where it will be.”
Naylor and Meadows warn us of the limits to size. Barker urges us to check our paradigms, our assumptions about what must be and how they must change if we are to fix it.
I’m fascinated by their ideas. Whether what I perceive turns out as I perceive it or whether I look back on it and say, “Oh, so that’s where the shift occurred,” I’m ready to try.
If nothing else, the current world tells us that we have to face David Bowie’s “ch-ch-ch-ch changes (turn and face the strain).”
Seasons are changing, and my clutch is to the floor, as were those of nearly half of the Yalies at Thomas’ debate, by the way.