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The Chinese Enigma

On October 31, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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October 31, 2011

China’s mass of contradictions may even be enigmatic to Chinese leaders. Chinese government secrecy inhibits fact checking. It is riding a growth tiger and must eventually dismount, but like all of us, appears fearful of being chewed up when it gets off.

Export earnings finance most of China’s 9% compound annual [...]

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Compressed on Spaceship Earth

On October 13, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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October 13, 2011

Concern is rising that the economy will never revert to a pattern resembling the past, but enter a New Reality. It’s trying to re-inflate, but only huffs and puffs financial bubbles instead. Looking at the world as physical systems rather than financial ones offers clues. Limits are pushing us toward a zero [...]

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Water, Water…

On October 13, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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October 13, 2011

In the last 40 years we discovered water in space. We expect to find much more water deep on the moon, Mars, and elsewhere. Water on Asteroid 24 Themis closely matches our ocean water. Scientists speculate that much of earth’s water wafted in from comets [...]

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Low Load Energy

On September 27, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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September 27, 2011

The Fukushima disaster cut Japan’s generating capacity. This immediately prompted ideas to cut the load on their grid. Many ideas are modern updates of a 200-year old one, a self-winding watch that powers itself at the point of use. For instance, inventors like Kohei Hayamizu are concocting systems to generate [...]

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Transformative Wing Walking

On September 27, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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September 27, 2011

An old management adage called the “law” of wing walking is, “Don’t let go of anything before you have hold of something else.”  Some wing walkers just shut their eyes and kept a tight grip. A few jumped from one plane to another.

Since very few of us wing walk, this old [...]

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Striking Against Ourselves

On September 8, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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September 8, 2011

The Compression Institute is crawling toward developing a movement unlike any known precedent. Organizing ourselves for vigorous learning within some legal framework is, from a human view, a bigger challenge than the global messes we seek to address. At any age, stepping up to a very different view of our purpose and [...]

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Insidious Toxins

On September 8, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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September 8, 2011

Environmental toxins are more complex than any busy person can be expected to follow. Even biological specialists unable to grasp the scope of these risks tend to issue messages that are contradictory generalizations from limited observations. That’s one form of the reductionist thinking plaguing the modern world because all of us have [...]

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Compression Institute Update

On August 26, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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Aug. 25, 2011

The Institute has been incorporated in Kentucky with the intent of qualifying as a 501(C)3 organization. We intend to abide by the spirit of B-Corporations, now legally recognized by five states as an entity legally dedicated to serving all stakeholders, not always the investors first. As a 501)C)3, that aspect [...]

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Valuations vs. Values

On August 26, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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August 25, 2011

This post was sparked by an exchange with Tom Hachiya on a Wall Street Journal article in which Mark Andreesson (Silicon Valley venture capitalist) said that he’s betting on software to power new expansion of the American economy.

Without question software keeps seeping further into our lives. We [...]

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Economics of Learning

On August 12, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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August 12, 2011

How can service companies increase effectiveness? Today we jump on techniques, like killer apps, as a hot market, but whether software saves resources or wastes them depends on its role within a total system. Think big. For instance, ask why the 1970s dream of paperless offices failed. Global [...]

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7 Billion and Counting

On August 12, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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August 12, 2011

Demographers are statistically minded folk who count people and project population numbers. A cheery lot, they ignore politics, wars, shortages, and environmental issues. They track birth and death rates, life spans, ages, fertility rates, education, income levels, health advances, and where people live (urban or rural); then fearlessly project the future [...]

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Footprints and Effectiveness

On July 28, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Compression Thinking Progress

July 28, 2011

The diagram depicts a key challenge of Compression Thinking, using a simple framework to factor our huge global challenges into things that a work organization must do to contribute to global impact. In most cases, substantial change will require operating very differently. The risks of changing a successful business model usually terrify [...]

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Green Goo; Yellow Sea

On July 28, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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July 28, 2011

You have to know your algae. They exist in great variety from single cells to giant kelp. The mere sight of pond scum clouding clear water in summer displeases most of us, but algae blooms expanding all over the world are also a perverse resource “footprint” of the [...]

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Compression Thinking Groups

On July 14, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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July 14, 2011

Linking a working organization’s future goals to a big global challenge is not easy, but every discussion of the possibilities for Compression Thinking Groups digs deeper into how to bring this closer to reality. Discussions in Cardiff, Wales were no exception.

Several exercises tasked people from real companies to project how their [...]

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The Quality of Life Conundrum

On July 14, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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July 14, 2011

When talking up Compression Thinking at the Lean Enterprise Research Center in Cardiff, Wales, one set of questions there differed from discussions in the United States: what is implied by “quality of life?”

Compression Thinking hinges together two opposing ideas:

Since we do not have an infinite supply of natural resources, our [...]
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Structuring Compression Thinking

On June 30, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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June 30, 2011

Some of the advisory group for the Compression Institute met last weekend. A mission statement has not been hammered out and wordsmith hardened, but it’s something like, “forming learning action groups to make Compression Thinking a common practice.”

The learning groups will focus on operational-sized working organizations. We won’t work big policy [...]

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Of Jellyfish and Cooling Water

On June 30, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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June 30, 2011

In Scotland the Torness nuclear generating units have been shut down until at least July 5 to clean out jellyfish clogging the intake filters for cooling water. In France, as in the summer of 2009, unofficial channels report that nuke generators are going through rolling shutdowns because a [...]

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“Seeing” World Food Scarcity

On June 10, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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June 10, 2011

How we view global food supplies parallels how we see many issues of Compression. How do you see global food problems? Using what evidence? How does that skew the further information you seek? This loop is sometimes called a ladder of inference.

For decades, environmental forecasters like Read Full Article →

Compression Thinking Groups

On June 10, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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June 10, 2011

Compression Thinking involves more than techniques. It shifts the values, and the valuation system, used to guide all kinds of working organizations, not just commercial ones. Bending our ideas of the criteria that represent success is apt to be emotional learning as well as intellectual. To be effective, everyone involved in an [...]

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Learning Systems for Learning Organizations

On May 27, 2011 By David Veech
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David Veech, May 26, 2011

The Compression Institute is recommending that organizations take aggressive steps to become vigorous learning organizations.  We make this recommendation because we lack perfect information. We can’t perfectly predict the future. Therefore an organization’s best hope for weathering whatever storms may come is the collective ingenuity and creativity of its people [...]

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Out of Our Reductionism

On May 27, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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May 27, 2011

“Reductionism,” just now edging into management literature, is too new to have begun degrading, like “linear thinking” for example. That buzzword meant to explain something using a simple model, and linear is simple. However, overtaken by buzzword decay, “linear thinking” is now derogatorily used to imply that someone’s logic is ridiculous.

But [...]

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Behavioral Progress Traps

On May 13, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
Trap

May 13, 2011

The concept of a progress trap embellishes the idea of unintended consequences. A 2004 book by Ronald Wright attracted attention to the phrase “progress trap,” so that today a Google search yields a variety of examples. All demonstrate human inability to avert long-term consequences of actions that begin as [...]

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Questions from CEOs

On May 13, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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May 13, 2011

The Compression Institute is dedicated to making ideas related to Compression viable in real organizations, including commercial ones. So it will address issues as seen by CEOs. To see some typical CEO questions and comment on then go to the Institute page.

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Compression Thinking Strategy

On April 26, 2011 By Robert W. "Doc" Hall
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April 26, 2011

Although the Compression Institute is breathing life, it’s not on a fast track. We humans cannot quickly revise the criteria by which we judge work organizations’ success. Every aspect of our lives is touched. Even the language of the past is misleading when used to describe where we need to go.  Although [...]

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