The forest could not rely on donor funding to survive, so it had to look elsewhere for finance. The centre’s first job was to identify the forest’s assets and to exploit them. It seems to have perfected its art. Today the centre makes money in areas such as ecotourism, timber-extraction, forest-products such as honey and [...]
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There are two different global food brands which epitomize the difference between top-down brand-driven franchising, and the bottom-up “open source” ideas we all know and love. In almost any city anywhere in the world you can find both of these options. There will be McDonald’s which is part of the corporate entity headquartered in America, [...]
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Physically, it is quite simple to re-paint a street for a horde of bicycles. One small, determined adult could do this useful task in two or three nights. If they asked no permission from anyone. If they demanded no money for doing it. If they carried out that act with cool subterfuge and with crisp [...]
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Wednesday, April 15, 2009
As the global financial crisis sinks Japan into its worst recession since World War II and hundreds of thousands of jobs are slashed in factories and offices, farming has emerged as a promising new career track. “Agriculture Will Save Japan,” blared a headline for a business weekly magazine. Farmer’s Kitchen, a popular new Tokyo restaurant, [...]
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Jim pointed me at this NYT article on Twitter. “Twitter reverses the notion of the group,” said Paul Saffo, the Silicon Valley futurist. “Instead of creating the group you want, you send it and the group self-assembles.” I think I know why this is happening. I could follow maybe 30 blogs. Every day or two, [...]
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I think I’ve made what I’m driving at a bit clearer in my own head by drawing some diagrams. Click the image for a PDF which builds out the model. What it comes down to is four models of change, which are: The Resilience Model: Normal State -> Crisis -> Resilience -> Normal State Successful [...]
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Everybody loves resilience. It’s a calm, reassuringly solid word. Resilience, n. 1. The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy. 2. The property of a material that enables it to resume its original shape or position after being bent, stretched, or compressed; elasticity. The problem is we are not ever going to [...]
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One late night in Soho, Mamading invented the phrase “economies of agility.” I thought it was brilliant and encompassed an enormous core idea that we all talk around and include in our discussions without having a simple, clear term of art for it. In the industrial age, mass production by firms exploited the economies of [...]
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Recently – and I blame twitter for this 
– I’ve had really bad information overload. This should not be that much of a surprise. Six and a half billion people, something over a billion of them online, many of them very, very smart with whole lifetimes of thinking and research behind them: there is [...]
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The likelihood of the penal system in the UK and other Western countries facing similar challenges in the current climate to the ones former Soviet countries faced post-collapse is moderate to high. Crime rates and imprisonment rates have no correlation – high or low use of custody is a question of political will and nothing [...]
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