horsepigcow

Baghdad (International) Green Zone by James Gordon

Does this sound familiar?

Jane works for a company that is fairly successful. The product it produces is beer and has moved from being a local favorite to a regional favorite to a favorite in pubs across the entire U.S. Jane’s role is customer service and she takes calls from, mostly, happy customers every day, thanking her for producing a really great beer with a great taste and a solid heartfelt brand. One Monday morning, the companies executives round up all of the employees for a big meeting and tell them that, because of the great success thusfar, the board has decided to go more nationally aggressive with the company. The company is getting a boost in funding and will be hiring a whole bunch of new people to handle the expansion. Jane is excited. More customers equals more great phonecalls for her.

Jane is frustrated, and, as things get worse and worse, she starts to hate the job that she once loved. She feels powerless to help the customers who are calling her daily unhappy – she doesn’t know what is going on, and when she does (as far as the quality rumors go), she can’t say anything. Then the decision comes to ‘tighten the belts’ of the company as sales are waning. Who do they cut first? Jane’s team. She is left with one staff member. Even the quality of Jane’s customer service plummets as she can’t handle the volume of calls…and when she does, she is powerless to help the customers. She is called into the office of the VP Marketing again. This time the news is really bad. They’ve decided to outsource their customer service and, other than handling the transition, Jane is no longer needed. The poor performance of her department just doesn’t warrant keeping it local.

This is a classic story that I’ve heard from many companies over the years, but other than a different idea of what is important (what you measure, matters), I just thought it was the way most businesses handled themselves.

It wasn’t until I read Naomi Klein’s latest work on Disaster Capitalism that it occurred to me that what happens in this country with the social system is tightly connected to what happens to the parts of a business like customer service, that are seen as ‘extraneous’.

In her writing, she discusses the growth of Green Zones – the ‘free market’ influx of private companies coming in to solve public services for a profitable venture – while the Red Zones – the public services that remain in place to serve those who cannot afford to pay for the Green Zones that are underfunded and forgotten until they are enough of a problem to wipe out altogether (housing projects, for example) – are used as an example to demonize the public system and further grow Green Zones.

This happens in business like the above examples. The Green Zones are the profit centers of the company and the Red Zones are the cost centers of the company – the cost centers, of course, support the growth of the profit centers (providing customer service, marketing, support staff, quality control, etc), but on the books are seen as pure loss leaders. So, when a company needs to cut back costs…those centers are hit, not the ‘profit’ centers like sales. After enough cutbacks, the performance of the cost centers suffers, which gives enough validation to outsource or get rid of them altogether. Because the sales team is showing numbers (even though those numbers would not exist if it weren’t for the corporate Red Zones supporting them), they are shown as an example of what works in the company.

Now, I don’t know if Klein would want me to twist her metaphor to support my thesis, but I do believe it is the core of what is failing with business today. The Yin and Yang of it need to be kept in place and both cost and profit centers rely on one other to exist and flourish. Jane’s story above ends in her getting a new job that she can love again and her old company struggling to stay afloat, not understanding why things went so badly after the expansion…maybe even returning to their roots years later and re-gaining their customer’s trust.

In the public sphere, we must be wary of Green Zones and the creation of Red Zones, but we must also be aware of it in terms of our professional sphere. Is your company creating a Green Zone/Red Zone atmosphere? I urge you to read Klein’s work either way and tell me if you see the parallel yourself.

Details:

HeroCamp
(wiki)
October 23-26, 2008
Caroline Collective, 4820 Caroline Street, Houston, TX
Cost: free (but we’re looking for sponsors to keep it that way!)

REWARDS = massive!

Yay! Totally stoked that Rebooting America is now available for sale, an anthology I worked on with the good peeps at the Personal Democracy Forum. Rebooting includes forty-four essays by political and digital luminaries including Craig Newmark (of craigslist), Esther Dyson, Joe Trippi, Newt Gingrich and many others — including my slightly provocative essay, “Who Needs Elected Officials Anyway?“! Each essay has a unique central idea but all are infused with the hopes of reenergizing, reorganizing, and reorienting our government for the Internet Age.

Rebooting America is more than a book, it is an “open source” experiment in new media publishing underwritten by the Schumann Center for Media and Democracy. Copies of the book are available as .pdfs for download for free. Every essay has been posted online with an invitation for readers to comment.

However, I’m hoping that you’ll consider buying a paperback edition to support this open model. Rebooting America is available today online for viewing and purchase.

Collaboration 2.0 from BLANKSPACES on Vimeo.

If you need to work in LA, you need to stop by BLANKSPACES to do so. In fact, I need to get to LA, just to meet these people!

p.s. You can see more of their awesome work HERE.

Understandably, I received a wee bit of pushback on my post on incentives because I didn’t clarify what I meant by incentives. While reading the latest issue of Good Magazine, it became utterly clear that there are incentives offered up towards reaching positive goals that are incredibly damaging.

In the feature article entitled School Wars, Gary Stager describes the birth of ‘No Child Left Behind’ (NCLB):

(George) Bush (Sr.) thought business leaders might be able to help fix public schools by running them more like businesses. So in 1989, he asked the Business Roundtable (300 CEOs and governors) to try to reform education, since governors and CEOs—administrators all—share similar temperaments and a desire to impose top-down policies. Armed with corporate war chests and support from governors, the Roundtable’s influence met little resistance.

Uninterested in the complexities associated with teaching and learning, the Business Roundtable demanded that state legislatures impose “outcome-based education,” “high expectations for all children,” “rewards and penalties for individual schools,” and “greater school-based decision making.” In order to enforce and measure these voluminous imperatives, standardized testing would be required.

The way that NCLB works is this: there are standardized tests that schools and teachers are incentivized to do well on. The incentives trickle down. If a school’s test scores are poor, their funding is in jeopardy. If a school’s test scores are high, they get more funding. If a school has more funding, the teachers get paid more. If a school has a cut in funding, teachers may lose their jobs and classroom sizes go up. And the incentives for students? Not great, really, other than if you don’t pass by your final year, you don’t graduate. Students who fail the test in earlier grades get extra attention, helping them pass the test by their graduating year.

So, yes, these are incentives meant to improve quality of education. However, the incentives do the opposite. As Stager states, “It’s hard to argue against raising educational standards, but imposing uniform curricula and teaching practices leads to a paradoxical lowering of standards.” NCLB exemplifies the type of incentivizing that does way more damage than would doing nothing at all.

Although it is personally baffling that anyone thought this idea would lead to a stronger system of education, I see where the designers behind NCLB could have imagined this would work logically. Standardized testing allows for a uniform metric of success. Rewarding for higher test scores should incentivize teachers to make smarter students. If A=B and B=C, then A must equal C. Right? Of course, if we were dealing with machine produced calculations. But we aren’t. We are dealing with a diversity of learning styles, socio-economic realities, interests, hopes and dreams and an ever-changing economy where the standardized tests just aren’t matching up to reality. And being the mother of a child who is being taught to those tests is really eye-opening.

Of course, there needs to be a bit of a measuring stick to determine the success of individual programs, but going back to what you measure matters, I’d propose a better measurement to be a decrease in drop-outs and a higher level of engagement (made up of metrics like kids getting involved in extra-curricular activities, collaborative things like fundraisers, student plays, science fairs, student websites and yearbooks, parents getting involved and engagement with the wider community).

I would also change the incentives for schools and teachers. Decreasing funding for a school in crisis doesn’t seem to fit the situation. I know it works in business – a department is slacking off…kill the funds – but a learning environment is different. I am only guessing, but I assume that the schools that lose funding are those in areas that need it the most. These are the schools with kids from poor families whose parents aren’t there (or aren’t able to be there) to sit and help their kids with their homework. These schools need more funding, not less. Meanwhile, as the article reports, people who can afford to, remove their children from these schools to home school or send to private schools, leaving a raging Red Zone (Naomi Klein’s work on disaster capitalism).

Incentivizing performance with money leads to “juking the stats” (a term used in The Wire to describe manipulation of stats to reflect the desired outcome) because, for some schools, it’s the only chance they have for survival. NCLB disregards the fact that all schools aren’t created equal – there isn’t a level playing field to measure from. For any critical measurement, within science AND business, the conditions or environment between test subjects need to be controlled and, if they are different, the conditions need to be taken into account. So ‘what is measured’ is not the only part of the equation that is flawed, but the results of that measurement is also flawed.

Therefore, A=B C=D E=F, which cannot logically lead to A being equivalent to anything else but B. And the equations are seemingly endless because I have only talked about one particular dimension of the diversity here.

So incentivizing, just like any other tool, has a deeply negative side to it and needs to be connected to a diversity of factors in order to lead to positive ends.