Themes for Day Two -- David Hawk -- June 4, 2003, 9 a.m.

Symposium: "A New Base for Corporate Relations: From Strategic Deceit to Trustworthy Action", Nokia House, Espoo Finland, Tuesday, June 3, 2003.

This digest was created in real-time during the meeting, based on the speaker's presentation(s) and comments from the audience. These should not be viewed as official transcripts of the meeting, but only as an interpretation by a single individual. Lapses, grammatical errors, and typing mistakes may not have been corrected. Questions about content should be directed to the originator. These notes have been contributed by David Ing (daviding@systemicbusiness.org) at the IBM Advanced Business Institute ( http://www.ibm.com/abi ).

[David Hawk]

In addition to yesterday's topics, today …

Would like to add back, from the systems course:  the non-rational

• Are innovation-oriented relationships non-rational?
• Symmetric / asymmetric
• Dependence / independence / interdependence
• Evaluative theme:  evaluation of relationship
• Increasingly reverting to "doing the right thing"
• Not as ambiguous as people would like to argue.

Project for the U.S. government about 8 years.

Someone had read David's dissertation, which was about governance

• If the problem is well-stated, they're easy
• If they're hard, they're governance issues
• Had argued that environmental programs would make things worse.
• Dissertation was causing EPA to ban him
• In the 1990s, EPA requested a self-organized, anarchic approach
• Energy-Star:  not paid to manufacturers
• Used in building houses
• No incentives, it's just a better product
• No rules, except it had to pass the text
• No protocol, except had to pass the test

Photograph:  Efficiency is not effectiveness

• Workers walking on AC ducts

Photograph: Technology overcomes trust

• General Electric plastic house
• GE was running this division
• Agenda to create vinyl siding, because they didn't really want to build a plastic house.
• They didn't do research; the suppliers did research.
• GE laughed to the bank

Photograph:  The potentials of deceit

• No plastic in the house:  just a wood frame house

Photograph:  Strategic success

• GE was successful, plastic

Photograph: Successfully doing the wrong thing

• Now, plastic fences

Photograph:  Winning the battle, losing the war via technical success

• Nestehaus didn't recognize GE wasn't going to create a plastic house.
• They built a 100% plastic house
• You can't breath in it!

Photograph:  Out in the cold with the truth

• The Finns made a plstic house that GE never intended to

Photograph:  Right relations are essential to doing the right thing

• Merchal-Hoose, southern France, builder of Ikea furniture and building houses
• High-tech, sophisticated research to make a traditional house
• 6 people build 4 houses per day, and no wood touches hands

Photograph:  Effective efficiency:

• Criterion:  how to save wood
• Silly, because Scandinavian is covered with wood
• It's labour that is expensive.
• Saving resources, using human labour to do it.
• Same number of employees before automation as after automation, just doing something different.
• Fully integrated firm: glass, furniture, cabinets, automation that makes the other things (because no one else will)
• At the end of the day, if they brought in a sketch of the house in the morning, they could take it home at night.
• Different way to shape the relationship agenda

The world of the non-rational:

• Most of the time, in Ph.D. classes, we talk about rationality.
• Go home at night, "please darling, be rationale".
• About 10% of exaggerated reality is based on rationality
• So what is the rest of the stuff?  The non-rationale.
• Those who depend on the rationale create the non-rational.
• We should learn to embrace the non-rationale.
• It would be more fun.
• It would be more inclusive.

Marianne's presentation on portfolio:  goes from rational to non-rational

• Includes poetics, aesthetics, religion, politics
• How to shift this discussion of relationships towards non-rational is a major effort
• Doing the right thing - then not so hard to move into the non-rational

List of 17 terms:

• Which concepts were important in the last decade, which are important to the present, and which are crucial to the next decade

Yesterday, nice discourse for the last hour

TEKES is special compared to others in the world

• Combination of NSF and NIST, but more successful, in terms of limited resources giving incredible work in infrastructure:  educated people
• In 1994, presented to senators in Washington, in TEKES
• Dutch are interested in TEKES; so are Austrians

Science depends on candor, openness and transparency