Thanks to Sam, Laura, Huiren, and Ron, and others for picking up the
conversation and making various interesting connections between nations and
organizations about "open". I just did a CEO interview the other day where
the guy spoke passionately about their commitment to diversity--not so much
ethnic/color--but "diversity of thought", and argued how that helps drive
their company's innovation.  But he was sharing more of a belief system
than a scientific explanation.

To me, this kind of "diversity" is a cousin of "open"--and I say again,
until the open org network gets serious about measuring/explaining, in some
objective way, how diversity/open-ness/meritocracy and all the related
qualities actually improve performance, we will remain just
well-intentioned choir members sharing opinions about the best way to
practice the religion  😇

On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 10:49 AM, Sam Knuth <[email protected]> wrote:

> Thanks Laura - on the grow vs. shrink and die piece, I don't disagree with
> you at all. What I mean is that within the system we have of publicly
> traded companies (speaking of our organization specifically), that's the
> paradigm that is established. I think we could have a very interesting (and
> long!) discussion on this topic
>
> -Sam
>
> On Fri, Mar 24, 2017 at 9:40 AM, Laura Hilliger <[email protected]>
> wrote:
>
>> Interesting discussion. I think this:
>>
>> "The driving truth is that if we don't grow, we will shrink and die.”
>>
>> and this
>>
>> "The average rate of GDP growth in countries with shrinking working-age
>> populations is *only* 1.5%.” (Emphasis mine)
>>
>> are misnomers. This idea “growth is good" is aggressively promoted
>> because the economic systems that support it (e.g. systems based on
>> consumerism), depend on growth as a metric for success. What it doesn’t
>> take into account is the happiness and well-being of the people inside the
>> system. It’s been generally established that countries with lower GDP have
>> equal or higher levels of happiness compared with countries with high GDP.
>> If we had data(!) we could start looking at this at an organizational level.
>>
>> Greenpeace is doing a research and strategy around mindsets that are
>> prevalent in our society. The “infinite growth is possible and good” mind
>> set is one that the ecological movement is desperately trying to change as
>> the growth-driven consumerism is the root cause of almost all environmental
>> issues. Maybe it’s better to say “If we don’t change, we will shrink and
>> die.” Even that might depend – if you think about tribal cultures that
>> stayed the same way for hundreds and hundreds of years, only to die out
>> when change was introduced.
>>
>> None of this is a dichotomy, of course. We’re a group of people who are
>> hyper aware of the nuance (this pleases me :)
>>
>> Rands wrote an article in 2014 that I’ve shared a thousand times. It’s
>> specifically about cultural identity, the shifting of culture when new
>> people are introduced, and the fear that can elicit – He called it “Old
>> Guard, New Guard”.
>>
>> http://randsinrepose.com/archives/the-old-guard/
>>
>> —laura
>>
>> Laura Hilliger
>> Zythepsary (part of the We Are Open Co-op <http://weareopen.coop>)
>> @epilepticrabbit <http://twitter.com/epilepticrabbit>
>>
>>
>>
>> On Mar 24, 2017, at 12:44 PM, Sam Knuth <[email protected]> wrote:
>>
>> Thank you, Brook for keeping us engaged with deep topics!
>>
>> I like the comparison/contrast of our work on "open" culture with what's
>> happening in the global political climate right now. I'm surprised I hadn't
>> made this connection myself now that I think about it. I see a lot of
>> parallels. Working in an organization that has been "open" since its
>> founding, it does become part of the identity of the people working in the
>> organization. But, as the organization grows, and welcomes more and more
>> new people ("immigrants" - never made that analogy before), we see a lot of
>> fears among some that our culture will change or will become "like them"
>> instead of "them" becoming "like us". Other people welcome the newcomers
>> and embrace what we can learn from them, accepting that how we've always
>> done things might not be the best way. The driving truth is that if we
>> don't grow, we will shrink and die. In a company, it's easier to convince
>> people of this truth, and people can more easily leave if they really don't
>> like the direction we're heading (whereas as much as liberal American's
>> joke about moving to Canada, doing so is actually quite difficult).
>>
>> As I'm writing this and thinking about the comparison, I'm seeing a lot
>> of similar challenges but not easy answers or ways to apply our learnings
>> to broader society or public policy at a national level. My personal
>> feeling here is that looking at this kind of data doesn't sway people.
>> Companies, I think, are much more receptive to convincing data than
>> citizens. It's more about how people feel in relation to deeply ingrained
>> cultural identity. Those feelings are so strong that they result in the
>> election of leaders who take an extreme stance on one end of the spectrum
>> or the other.
>>
>> Great food for thought!
>>
>> Sam
>>
>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 10:01 AM, Brook Manville <
>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>
>>> Dear Open enthusiasts....recent opinion piece in WSJ by columnist Bret
>>> Stephens caught my eye (below)--talking about immigration, open borders,
>>> greater diversity and innovation; and imply such things should be more part
>>> of today's policy debates (but aren't). There are some "meta" themes about
>>> "open" at the national level that might deserve more attention among us. At
>>> a minimum, it makes for some interesting compare and contrast discussion,
>>> e.g. how much of the culture-building implied by best open organizations
>>> should be/could be applied to a nation's public policy? What is the data
>>> about innovation and other measures of "good" between companies that are
>>> more open versus those that are less? etc...Regards
>>>
>>> Other People’s Babies’If the U.S. slipped into demographic decline like
>>> Japan, it would tear itself apart.
>>> [image: Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with President Trump in West
>>> Palm Beach, Fla., Feb. 10.]
>>> Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe with President Trump in West Palm
>>> Beach, Fla., Feb. 10. PHOTO: ASSOCIATED PRESS
>>> <https://www.wsj.com/articles/other-peoples-babies-1490050955>
>>> By
>>> BRET STEPHENS
>>> March 20, 2017 7:02 p.m. ET
>>> 786 COMMENTS
>>> <https://www.wsj.com/articles/other-peoples-babies-1490050955#livefyre-toggle-SB10780801779306074119304583034393448048174>
>>>
>>> *Tokyo*
>>>
>>> Japan is an excellent place to test the proposition that countries do
>>> better with low levels of immigration. In a land of 127 million people,
>>> there are just over two million foreign residents, and only a third of them
>>> are here for the long term. The number of illegal immigrants, which peaked
>>> at a modest 300,000 in the early 1990s, is down by 80%.
>>>
>>> As for refugees, in 2016, Tokyo entertained 10,000 requests
>>> <http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20170211/p2g/00m/0dm/008000c> for
>>> asylum. It accepted a grand total of 28. Steve Bannon would smile.
>>>
>>>
>>> The result, say immigration restrictionists, is plain to see. Japan’s
>>> crime and drug-use rates are famously low. Life expectancy is famously
>>> high. Japanese students put their American peers to shame on international
>>> tests. The unemployment rate clocks in at 3.1%. All this is supposed to be
>>> a function of a homogenous society with a high degree of cultural
>>> cohesion—the antithesis of cacophonous, multiethnic America.
>>>
>>> Just one problem: The Japanese have lost their appetite for
>>> reproduction. To steal a line from Steve King, the GOP congressman from
>>> Iowa, the only way they can save their civilization is with “somebody
>>> else’s babies.”
>>>
>>> Japan’s population shrank by nearly a million between 2010 and 2015, the
>>> first absolute decline since census-taking began in the 1920s. On current
>>> trend <http://www.ipss.go.jp/site-ad/index_english/esuikei/gh2401e.asp> the
>>> population will fall to 97 million by the middle of the century. Barely 10%
>>> of Japanese will be children. The rest of the population will divide almost
>>> evenly between working-age adults and the elderly.
>>>
>>> Imagine yourself as a 35-year-old Japanese salary man. You can expect
>>> that an ever-larger share of your paycheck will go to the government to
>>> fund the pensions and health care of your parents—who, at 70, can
>>> reasonably expect to live another 10 or 15 years, and who aren’t likely to
>>> vote for politicians promising to strip their entitlements.
>>>
>>> Being Japanese, you were raised to make financial sacrifices for your
>>> elders, even if it means not having children of your own. Besides, it’s
>>> hard to want children with the economy in such bad shape. As Morgan
>>> Stanley <http://quotes.wsj.com/MS>’s Ruchir Sharma has noted
>>> <https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/world/2016-02-15/demographics-stagnation>,
>>> lousy demographics mean a lousy economy: The average rate of GDP growth in
>>> countries with shrinking working-age populations is only 1.5%. In 2016,
>>> Japan’s growth rate was 1%—and that was a relatively good year by recent
>>> standards.
>>>
>>> What if the government paid you to have babies? Alas, along with
>>> millions of your countrymen, you suffer from what the Japanese call
>>> <https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/oct/20/young-people-japan-stopped-having-sex>
>>>  “celibacy
>>> syndrome” and aren’t interested in sex, never mind procreation. You’re also
>>> unhappy: In 2016, Japan ranked 53rd on the U.N.’s World Happiness Report, a
>>> notch above Kazakhstan but below El Salvador and Uzbekistan.
>>>
>>> So Japan is in trouble, and the government knows it. Prime
>>> Minister Shinzo Abe has tinkered with formulas to bring in lower-skilled
>>> temporary workers for housecleaning and farm jobs, and he has promoted
>>> various tax breaks and subsidies to ease the burden of raising children and
>>> caring for aging parents.
>>>
>>> But whatever their other benefits, “pro-family” policies won’t reverse
>>> the demographic trend. Only large-scale immigration can do that, and the
>>> Japanese won’t countenance it. The flip side of cohesion is exclusion. The
>>> consequence of exclusion is decline.
>>>
>>> Which brings us back to Mr. King and the U.S. immigration debates. A
>>> decade ago, America’s fertility rate, at 2.12 children for every woman, was
>>> just above the replacement rate. That meant there could be modest
>>> population growth without immigration. But the fertility rate has since
>>> fallen: It’s now below replacement and at an all-time low
>>> <http://blogs.wsj.com/economics/2016/06/07/behind-the-ongoing-u-s-baby-bust-in-5-charts/>
>>> .
>>>
>>> Without immigration, our demographic destiny would become Japanese. But
>>> our culture wouldn’t, leaving us with the worst of both worlds: economic
>>> stagnation without social stability. Multiethnic America would tear itself
>>> to pieces fighting over redistribution rights to the shrinking national pie.
>>>
>>> This doesn’t have to be our fate. Though it may be news to Mr. King,
>>> immigrants aren’t a threat to American civilization. They are our
>>> civilization—bearers of a forward-looking notion of identity based on what
>>> people wish to become, not who they once were. Among those immigrants are
>>> 30% of all American Nobel Prize winners and the founders of 90 of our
>>> Fortune 500 companies—a figure that more than doubles when you include
>>> companies founded by the children of immigrants. If immigration means
>>> change, it forces dynamism. America is literally unimaginable without it.
>>>
>>> Every virtue has its defect and vice versa. The Japanese are in the
>>> process of discovering that the social values that once helped launch their
>>> development—loyalty, self-sacrifice, harmony—now inhibit it. Americans may
>>> need reminding that the culture of openness about which conservatives so
>>> often complain is our abiding strength. Openness to different ideas,
>>> foreign goods and new people. And their babies—who, whatever else Mr. King
>>> might think, are also made in God’s image.
>>>
>>> *Write [email protected] <[email protected]>.*
>>>
>>> On Thu, Mar 23, 2017 at 8:10 AM, Bryan Behrenshausen <
>>> [email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>>> ### Editor's Note ###
>>>>
>>>> Hi, friends! It's been another exciting, whirlwind week here in OpenOrg
>>>> Land. Yesterday, we announced the next book in the Open Organization
>>>> book series—this one devoted to open principles in the IT organization.
>>>> We're building it the open source way, and (if you missed the
>>>> announcement) you can see the links below for more details about getting
>>>> involved.
>>>>
>>>> Today we're publishing the second half of Ajinkya Pawar's two-part
>>>> series on open agencies. In this article, Ajinkya lays out a concrete
>>>> and specific plan for creating the agency of the future.
>>>>
>>>> –B
>>>>
>>>> ### New Today ###
>>>>
>>>> Ajinkya Pawar: What does an ad agency's source code look like?
>>>>
>>>> https://opensource.com/open-organization/17/3/how-build-open-ad-agency
>>>>
>>>> red.ht/2o855Xy
>>>>
>>>> Sample social media:
>>>>
>>>> If an ad agency is to go open source, then what's its source code?
>>>> @thejinxedone red.ht/2o855Xy #TheOpenOrg
>>>>
>>>> .@thejinxedone explains exactly how to build an open ad agency. What are
>>>> you waiting for? red.ht/2o855Xy #TheOpenOrg
>>>>
>>>> .@thejinxedone with five benefits to turning your ad agency into
>>>> #TheOpenOrg: red.ht/2o855Xy
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> ### Previously Published ###
>>>>
>>>> Bryan Behrenshausen: "Help us write the next IT culture book"
>>>>
>>>> https://opensource.com/open-organization/17/3/announcing-it-
>>>> culture-book
>>>>
>>>> red.ht/2nmnfYB
>>>>
>>>> First day page views: 157
>>>>
>>>> Sample social media:
>>>>
>>>> Help us  write the next great book on IT culture—in the open:
>>>> red.ht/2nmnfYB #TheOpenOrg
>>>>
>>>> We're writing a book at the intersection of #TheOpenOrg and #IT culture.
>>>> You can help: red.ht/2nmnfYB
>>>>
>>>> The next book in #TheOpenOrg book series is under active development.
>>>> Pull requests welcome: red.ht/2nmnfYB
>>>>
>>>> =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
>>>>
>>>> Simon Phipps: "7 ways to discuss legal matters with an open community"
>>>>
>>>> https://opensource.com/open-organization/17/3/legal-matters-community
>>>>
>>>> First day page views: 131
>>>>
>>>> ### Site Stats ###
>>>>
>>>> Page views yesterday: 753
>>>> Total page views for the month: 12,213
>>>> Page views from newsletter: 106
>>>>
>>>> Leaders Manual downloads: 5
>>>> Leaders Manual downloads for the month: 71
>>>>
>>>> Catalyst-In-Chief downloads: 4
>>>> Total Catalyst-In-Chief downloads for the month: 30
>>>>
>>>> Field Guide downloads: 2
>>>> Total Field Guide downloads for the month: 37
>>>>
>>>> ### Social Media Stats ###
>>>>
>>>> @TheOpenOrg Twitter followers: 3,918 (+1)
>>>> @JWhitehurst Twitter followers: 15,204 (+2)
>>>> Facebook likes: 526 (+0)
>>>>
>>>> ### Full Daily Stats ###
>>>>
>>>> https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/196RzNrhAiHRBcZHtrDYY
>>>> Ky0I9m8Bqa67K9OOPbDxuME/edit?pli=1#gid=46325027
>>>>
>>>> _______________________________________________
>>>> Openorg-list mailing list
>>>> [email protected]
>>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/openorg-list
>>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> --
>>> *Brook Manville*
>>> *Principal, Brook Manville LLC*
>>>
>>> *http://www.brookmanville.com/ <http://www.brookmanville.com/>*
>>> *Twitter* <https://twitter.com/>
>>> *@brookmanville*
>>> *blogging at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookmanville/
>>> <http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookmanville/>*
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> _______________________________________________
>>> Openorg-list mailing list
>>> [email protected]
>>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/openorg-list
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Sam Knuth
>> Director, Customer Content Services
>> Red Hat, Inc
>> Mobile: +1 612-840-1785 <(612)%20840-1785>
>> _______________________________________________
>> Openorg-list mailing list
>> [email protected]
>> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/openorg-list
>>
>>
>>
>
>
> --
> Sam Knuth
> Director, Customer Content Services
> Red Hat, Inc
> Mobile: +1 612-840-1785 <(612)%20840-1785>
>



-- 
*Brook Manville*
*Principal, Brook Manville LLC*

*http://www.brookmanville.com/ <http://www.brookmanville.com/>*
*Twitter* <https://twitter.com/>
*@brookmanville*
*blogging at: http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookmanville/
<http://www.forbes.com/sites/brookmanville/>*
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