Last Tuesday, New Hampshire voters elected 13 women to the state Senate, out of a total of 24 seats -- the first time women have been the majority in any U.S. state legislative body. Flagged by Fast Company alum Dan Pink, with an NPR interview.
South Carolina has the dubious distinction of going in the opposite direction. When the new S.C. Senate convenes next year, it will have not one woman among its 46 members. Of the two women who had been serving, one did not run for re-election, one lost in the primary; the five women running on Tuesday all lost. Via the NCSL blog, The Thicket.
Two numbers leap out of the recent news that seem to capture — in very personal ways — both how deeply serious the short term pain in this economy is going to be, and how amazingly regenerative the economy is likely to be.
The pain first. Earlier this week, Whole Foods Market, which runs the nation’s most entrancing and most expensive grocery stores, reported profits for its most recent quarter. The bottom line for Whole Foods in the months of July, August, and September?
$1.5 million in total profit.
Whole Foods has 278 stores, and its fourth quarter ran 12 weeks. A little math, and you quickly discover that each store made profit of $449.64 a week. That’s of $64 a day for each store — $6.40 an hour in profit, if the store is open 10 hours.
Talking about living lean.
Yes, Whole Foods’ quarter included some one-time charges, but the next time you’re in your local Whole Foods, pondering both the prices and the experience, remember that the whole place could be earning the company less than minimum wage. And if you spend enough, you could easily provide the profit for the hour.
The second number comes from the speech IBM CEO Sam Palmisano gave yesterday in New York, arguing that the economic downturn is precisely the time to invest in the kinds of cutting edge technologies that will turbo-charge the global economy when things turn up again. Palmisano outlined a world that’s not just digitized and interconnected and flat, but also smart. (He wants to sell companies and countries the technologies to make everything from water pipes to cows smart.)
He said that by 2010, there will be 1 billion transistors per person in the world.
Which raises a great question: What are you doing with your 1 billion transistors?
Somehow, reading the Drudge Report doesn’t seem quite enough.
Sometimes there seems to be a world of significance packed into a single moment, or a single sentence. At Pio Manzu’s four-day conference about global poverty, the speakers’ roster is packed with smart, worldly people, and there were a half-dozen moments that caught my attention.
That’s how I thought about the statement from Francesco Morace, director of Italy’s “Future Concept Lab”: Optimism too is a form of intelligence. That statement is not only true, it’s also a whole way of imagining the world.
Here are a couple others.
Sir Anthony Giddens, a British sociologist and advisor to Tony Blair: “We need a critique of overdevelopment — while letting the developing countries continue to develop.” It is, frankly, hard to imagine starting a serious conversation in the U.S. about the concept of “overdevelopment.” What has happened to the America of thrift, of self-reliance without credit cards, of conservation with a little “c,” the America where shopping was a task and recreation was possible without spending any money?
Graca Simbine Machel Mandela, a determined advocate for children, women and human rights, and the wife of Nelson Mandela: “I stand before you as an African, and as an African woman. We are often seen as victims, silent victims — in the pictures of poverty in Africa. Silent victims, helpless victims, so broken that we cannot take care of our families or contribute to the community.” As she said this, an image from the previous day immediately popped to mind: A picture just like the one she described, of an exhausted African woman, with the six grandchildren she was taking care of, after her daughter and son-in-law fell to AIDS. Such pictures try to humanize Africa, but they often do just the opposite. “African women are not broken,” said Mandela defiantly, “and neither is the continent.”
Mandela also pointed to what must seem almost ludicrously unjust, from the perspective of the $1-per-day world: “It is remarkable to note what the western governments produced overnight to rescue the banks, in comparison to what they have produced in the last decade for the alleviation of poverty.”
Tariq Ramadan, a prominent and controversial Muslim intellectual: “The global economy is producing poverty.” We don’t often think of poverty in such direct, systemic terms — but as the economy “produces” wealth, and opportunity, and innovation, it also produces poverty. Put in those terms, it’s worth asking how the economy could be adjusted to produce less poverty — as we often “tweak” it to produce more investment, or more home buying, or more trade.
Ramadan also offered what is clearly intended as a cutting critique of Western ideals in international relations: “We all have ideals and practices. We need to be self-critical enough to acknowledge that our own practices fall short of our ideals. And we need to be humble enough to avoid comparing our ideals with your practices.”
Actually, that’s one that sounds good, even reasonable, but isn’t. It depends very much on what my ideals are, and what your practices are.
The most startling thing in all these sessions, presentations, and speeches was something that was never once said. No one — not one speaker — blamed the U.S. for the economic devastation ricocheting from one side of the globe to the other. Imagine if a terror attack had somehow done to our financial system what we have done to it.
Imagine if China’s banks had collapsed, and done to our financial system what we have done to it. The scorched-earth rhetoric on the cable shout-shows would have been unrelenting.
And yet not one of these speakers took the microphone and blamed the U.S. That was, in fact, a remarkable expression of both humility, and, I think, respect.
I wasn’t quite sure what I was doing in Rimini, Italy, although I’d come a quarter the way around the globe to get there; my puzzlement aside, it’s a lovely spot to spend the weekend.
Rimini is the kind of small, surprising Italian city that most Americans never hear of, but that feels instantly comfortable. It’s a resort town on Italy’s east coast, with a wide flat beach running for miles, the gray Adriatic Sea on one side, and dozens of hotels, bars and restaurants on the other. It’s like a lot of east coast beach towns in the U.S., with signs in Italian.
In October, Rimini is a ghost town — the cabanas and clubs that give it a reputation as one of Italy’s all-night summer party towns have closed for the winter, and many of the hotels are literally shuttered.
Rimini is also the site each fall of a conference that is a kind of Clinton Global Initiative for Europe, without Bill Clinton — a meeting that tackles a single urgent topic over four days from lots of different perspectives.
The conference — this is the 34th year — gets a fair amount of attention in Italy and Europe (parts of it are broadcast live on Italian national TV), but almost none in the U.S. It’s put on by the Pio Manzu Centre, whose current leadership includes Mikhail Gorbachev, Gary Hart, and nuclear physicist and Nobel Laureate Carlo Rubbia (with CERN). Pio Manzu attracts an eclectic range of personalities — Sharon Stone came a few years ago, Angelina Jolie famously cancelled last year because she was pregnant, and there are always a few Nobel Laureates and senior European officials wandering the spectacular lobby of Rimini’s Grand Hotel, plus a seasoning of journalists and passionate European intellectuals.
This year’s topic is “le ragioni de penia,” the reasons for poverty. Four days of public sessions on “the conscience of prosperity,” and the need for “a new moral economy.”
There will be more discussion about the faces, causes, costs and solutions to poverty in this four days than there has been in a year of nonstop U.S. presidential campaigning.
The conference is also an occasion on which the Italian government and Pio Manzu confer medals from the Italian government on people they think are deserving. How each year’s medal winners are chosen is mysterious; the choices are, to use an old-fashioned word, catholic.
This year, the medalists include Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Asma al-Assad, and James Heckman. Rasmussen is the prime minister of Denmark, al-Assad is the first lady of Syria, Heckman is a University of Chicago economist who won the Nobel Prize in economics in 2000. And then there’s me. This year, I too am a Pio Manzu medalist — editor-at-large of Fast Company, author of a single, pretty-good book about Wal-Mart, but not in the same league as, say, Jim Heckman.
So you can understand my puzzlement. In fact, when the Pio Manzu Centre first sent me an email back in April, I told them I would be delighted to come to Rimini in October to receive my medal from the Italian Parliament but, um, were they quite sure they had the right Charles Fishman?
They were sure. And there I was.
* * * *
It’s an unusual moment to be talking about poverty. The global financial unraveling has literally wiped away something like half the world’s wealth — in stock market and real estate terms. The truly poor — people who live on less than $1 or $2 a day, plus what their farming and animals provide — can be forgiven some bemusement at the wailing as rich people become less rich every passing day.
With the major nations of the world obsessed with preventing the money economy from deflating completely, how much attention and assistance is there left for the truly poor? At the same time, according to one speech at this year’s Pio Manzu conference, the number of truly poor has increased by 100 million — one-third the population of the U.S. — in just the last year. Just as the needs leap, the resources to meet them shrivel.
There was little optimism in Rimini, even from a group of people who wrestle with the problems of poverty all the time.
Marcela Villarreal, an expert on food production in poor regions who works for the UN, pointed out that rising food prices should help poor farmers — giving them better prices for the crops they grow. Then she displayed a graph showing two inflation rates over the last 18 months: the price of food, and the price of the commodities like fertilizer and fuel that you need to grow food. The price of the “inputs” is growing three or four times faster than the price of food is rising.
Miguel Benasayag, an Argentine philosopher and psychoanalyst now based in Paris, was the model of the Latin-American-Parisian intellectual. He was beyond pessimistic into grim. “We are creating a fractal society,” he said. “We are building fortresses, walled off, inhabited by the well-off. They are willing to sacrifice their freedom for the opportunity to continue consuming. ... These are simply concentration camps for rich people, a kind of social apartheid that is self-establishing itself.”
That, of course, was true even before the downturn. The real change, said Benasayag, is that “once, our future was an object of love. We’ve lost that. ... If you think of ‘tomorrow’ now, you think of uncertainty, of problems. ... Now our future has turned into a threat. ... We are living in a dark time.”
Francesco Delzio is external relations manager for the Italian motorbike and motorcycle conglomerate Piaggio, whose best-known brand is Vespa. From the world of Italian commerce, he joined Benasayag’s assessment. “We do live in a dark time,” he said. “We are witnessing the first generation that knows it will not be better off than the last.”
The blunt pessimism at one of the Day Two sessions at Pio Manzu went on for more than two hours, and it was in striking contrast to anything you’d hear in the U.S., even in private, even today. Americans have a faith in tomorrow, whether today is sunny or stormy. Americans may view intangibles and institutions as in bad shape — the economy, Congress, the presidency, Wall Street, the path of the nation. But we have confidence in our own ability to do better, by the application of hard work, if nothing else.
I was so astonished at the unrelenting blanket of pessimism at the session featuring Benasayag and Delzio, that during the questions, I rose to point out the difference in perspective I was hearing between Europe and the U.S. Americans, I said, don’t underestimate the seriousness of the problems — we can see our retirement receding every day. But we also don’t regard the future as “a threat.” And the financial crisis cannot un-do the technology revolution of the last 15 years, that still opens up vistas of opportunity, opportunities that are more democratic than ever before.
My reaction was met with silence from the panelists and the audience of 200. Then the moderator, Francesco Morace, director of Italy’s “Future Concept Lab,” a Fast-Company-style consumer research outfit, tossed me a rhetorical life-ring. “Optimism too is a form of intelligence,” he said.
I think he’s right. But in the context, Morace’s comment had the air of an adult reassuring a child that yes, mud pies too are cuisine.
Stay tuned for more updates from Rimini in the days to come...
We’ve all got work-related stuff in a little pile waiting for that moment when we have time to stop, think and pay attention — the magazine articles to tackle, connections to pursue, ideas to expand on, skills to improve, all those things that might blossom into something great, but that are not urgent.
At Toyota, they’ve found the time to pay attention to those things. It’s called the economic downturn.
Toyota has a long-standing commitment not to layoff fulltime U.S. production workers; but it also is suffering a dramatic slowing of car sales in the U.S. because American consumers are (wisely) deciding now is not a great time to splurge on a new car.
Toyota’s U.S. sales in September were down one-third from a year ago, a stunning fall for a company that manufactures cars just-in-time.
So at Toyota’s idle U.S. factories, according to this recent Wall Street Journal story, workers are still working — they are looking for ways to solve problems they don’t have time to solve when they are making one car every 27 seconds in normal times. They are learning new skills and brushing up on skills that working the assembly line corrodes.
What the WSJ story makes vividly clear is a miniature of the story I did two years ago about how Toyota infuses innovation into its everyday work.
Toyota’s quality, its consistency, its history of making cars better and better, is not a quirk or an accident. It’s at the core of the company’s philosophy, and it’s the key job of it’s assembly line workers.
So even when the factory is idle, the hands and brains at Toyota are not. The company is getting ready for the moment when the demand for cars comes roaring back. Toyota is preparing the next wave of innovation — right there in the factory floor, using workers that U.S. companies (including Toyota’s competitors) would layoff, or just send home with pay.
The most creative companies appreciate that it’s never a bad time to innovate — even in the worst of times.
