Musings & Meanderings

The starting premise for these first thoughts is:
As community organization and behavior differs between that in a small village or town and that in high density urban settings, so does urban community differ from virtual community.

Community behavior can be divided between the individual and the contextual. The differences between venues are primarily contextually driven. As we see through city planning, the context provided generates adaptive behavioral changes, yet the fundamental individual, and therefore communal and civic behavior does not change substantively. It merely adapts to constraints or opportunities made more or less readily available.

Urban dwellers, in general, enjoy a higher degree of both autonomy and privacy than village dwellers. This results in more independence, freedom and opportunity. It also results in more social isolation, less communal interdependence and therefore support, more anonymity and more criminal behavior.

The extent to which conscientious, responsible, and civil behavior is exhibited by the denizens of the virtual world is actually quite remarkable. The perils of anonymity and disassociation, as evidenced by the advantage taken of their increased availability on the internet by malicious hackers and criminals, are heightened, of course. The opportunities for contributive, constructive, and conscientious interaction, equally heightened, are taken on in a responsible manner by the majority of ‘virtual citizens’ today. Identifying (an ongoing process) the nature of the substantive contextual differences, I look, as always, for the planners and builders who lead community growth. In this the differences are much more pronounced, not as much in terms of who these individuals are as in terms of the social fabric and the attendant dynamics.

Urban development relies on balancing a dynamic that includes lifestyle and value conscious residents, profit driven developers, traffic focused planners, vote driven politicians, civic minded citizens, and ecologically minded activists. In my personal experience of this process, although many individuals may recognize all these various motivations and agendas, few comprehend more than a basic summary of any position other than their own. The results are derived primarily out of negotiations between parties with apparently conflicting interests. In many cases there are more losers than winners, and urban re-development from which almost everyone benefits (and no one truly loses) is the exception rather than the rule.

On the internet, there is a founding development philosophy that is based on organic growth, human enabled but not specifically human directed. In my opinion, as healthy a philosophy as that was and is, there is a distinct need in this new society for more pro-active building, involvement and guidance from the best of us.

We have here the blessing of a free economy, where we can exchange ideas, information, goods and services, and free platforms where we can connect and socialize, albeit to a fairly limited extent so far. These free platforms are increasingly media sponsored, and the ongoing development of the medium is increasingly profit driven. At this point, the free vs paid argument has created an unfortunate conflict, cleaving the yin yang balance as strongly as Democrat vs Republican, or socialist vs capitalist, or liberal vs. conservative. This is not to say that we shouldn’t have differences of opinion and engage in spirited debate, which is a cornerstone of free society, but only that the debate itself is a thing distinct from the creation and availability of the commons where it takes place.

In a small town or village, open spaces, places for our children to play or for an open air concert to take place, usually appear to have been created by consensus, but in reality were mandated by traditional societal custom. Their development was typically led by the ‘town fathers’.

In cities, government takes the primary urban planning role by laying out master plans which delineate uses, densities, etc. Real estate developers push those envelopes, but they are naturally (being profit driven) primarily market driven. No real estate developer wants to build a 50 story complex of buildings where there is no traffic, population mass, or transportation access. The typical development process involves a quid pro quo, where, for example, roads, parks, land for schools, etc. are part of the developer’s cost of all those houses in the new subdivision.

On the web, we are individually self-governing. This is unprecedented in a highly populated setting. The early growth of the web saw a disproportionate number of porn sites and other unpleasant stuff, but then ‘new worlds’, through history, have often been settled in early days by criminals, carpetbaggers and the like. Today, as the population here continues to surge, the percentage of responsible citizens does as well.

We would do well, I believe, to think more toward building virtual networks that function in many ways like the best cities. To that end, a wider understanding of the interdependent organisms that are communities, as well as a fuller recognition of the requirements of self-government, can only benefit us all. Look at the ways in which community theory becomes practice on Wikipedia or eBay as well as the ways it might be applied in future.

The low barriers to business entry here have encouraged tremendous innovation and many great products, but the advances of technological complexity have also simultaneously narrowed the pool of larger scale innovators. There is a huge imbalance between the constituents as regards the development process. The core community does choose, every day, whether to address that directly or simply to leave it to market forces.

As populated as this place is becoming, it is still in some ways a giant shanty town. What amazing opportunities are here to be seized or not. Many of the opportunities are beyond the ability of any one individual to take on, but not beyond the ability of expanded communities.

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There is a lot online, both scholarly and conversational, but here are a couple of links for anyone completely new to human community theory:

This is just a timeline in pdf form:
HECOL 200 - Review of Historical and Contemporary Theories of Community
(HECOL is Human Ecology at the University of Alberta)

A summary of the Four Elemental Forms in the structure of social life in Alan Fiske’s Relational Model Theory.

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This past week, I started re-reading a book I discovered over 20 years ago. By the time I found Death and Life of Great American Cities by Jane Jacobs (1916-2006), I was well and truly enraptured by the 3 dimensional mosaic of which great cities are composed, and was delighted to find a point of view so in sync with my own. This book, parts of which were first published as essays in the late 1950s, deals with cities as organic entities composed of areas and neighborhoods which thrive or decline based as much on human community dynamics as on their physical environs. Although the focus is on studying ‘healthy’ and ‘unhealthy’ neighborhoods for the purpose of informing urban planners, the book is full of observations about community needs, desires, and behavior that should, I think, make it of interest to most community theorists.

Two things. Reality and perception.

Every single person has strengths and weaknesses. Those who excel are stronger than others in at least one performance aspect, and those we take as mentors or leaders generally outperform everyone else on many counts. Appearances will only take you so far, it is ability and skill on which you go the distance and, especially, stay there. For most of my life, until recently, I believed that perception and spin were nothing but an extra edge, and did not give handicaps or weaknesses much thought until recently.

Being highly competitive, I always play to win, and playing every card I’m dealt to its highest advantage is a given to me. Weaknesses must be fully assessed and covered, and strengths properly exploited. The winning hand is as much about how you play the cards as about which ones you are dealt, and a slew of high cards or trump make a single weak card of little consequence. End of analogy: the little guy playing against the house or a stacked deck isn’t relevant here.

The most successful of us are, among other things, the best at:

1. Identifying our weaker areas
2. Understanding exactly what dangers result and how to avoid them
3. Compensating through alliances with others whose skills and talents are complementary
4. Concealing our weaknesses
5. Leading with our strengths

Having had the privilege of working with and knowing many self made men, I can say that every one that I observed applied these 5 criteria. These people divide roughly into 3 categories, those who made it and never fell, those who fell from a lofty height and climbed back up, and those who fell and never managed the full climb again. The difference in perception of weakness among the 3 groups at any given stage is dramatic. The reality is that #4 in the list above can, all by itself, create failure. This plays out in a way that is utterly primal. Still, a seriously wounded animal can not only still win a fight, but can become supernaturally stronger and more ferocious. Some of that is pure adrenaline, a body’s natural narcotic as well as fuel, but the greater part of it is simply how much the fight matters, or what the stakes are.

Humans, though, are a lot more complex than animals. Common wisdom tells us that the player who has least to lose has an advantage because of being willing to risk more. That easily explains why there are many 20 year old entrepreneurs (who do not yet have spouses, children, and mortgages) for every 40 year old one. It doesn’t explain, though, how to get in the ring, keep getting back in after losing, and stay there. More importantly, it doesn’t explain who the prize fighters are, or how to recognize whether you, or others, are one.

Here’s an example where handicaps, including age, didn’t matter:
“I was 52 years old. I had diabetes and incipient arthritis. I had lost my gall bladder and most of my thyroid gland in earlier campaigns, but I was convinced that the best was ahead of me.” Ray Kroc, on the founding of McDonalds Corporation

This was an entrepreneur who understood perception and spin to the max. He was a consummate salesman whose greatest sale, it’s been said, was the purchase of the original restaurants. I did not meet this man personally, but would make a bet that one of his self acknowledged weaknesses was a penchant for risk. Was he, perhaps, over compensating in the rigid, old fashioned management style he employed in building his final empire, and if so, did that over compensation turn into a bastion of strength?

Leaders, whether successful entrepreneurs, businessmen, or politicians, boast among their number a disproportionate percentage of manic depressives (now called bi-polar disorder) and borderline (BPD) personalities. Although the personal styles they present to the world can vary widely, can as easily present as brute strength and charisma or as suave and sophisticated, they are all, underneath, powerful alpha creatures. Most learn quickly that much can be achieved via perception and psychology, once primacy has been established. There are also plenty of normal guys who originally entered the fray with plenty of ability and ambition. A majority of them elect to semi-retire by or before middle age, and most, given a trust level, will confide the event that made them withdraw from the ring. The sentence I’ve heard most frequently in describing the turning point was, “I realized I didn’t have the stomach for it.”. At a higher trust level, and providing you know all the players, you might hear a specific story of betrayal.

The alpha fighters I am describing, often have what should be really serious weaknesses.

Weaknesses that have to do with literacy, or numbers, or money management. I’ve frequently marveled at the fact that there are invariably at least several, and sometimes a lot more, people around such an individual, who contribute to covering and compensating. This would argue that the serious weaknesses should become widely known, yet they do not. I hardly think that all enablers in such relationships are simply co-dependent and dysfunctional. What does become clear with experience and observation, is that the ability, scope, and skills of these individuals are such that even serious weaknesses are outweighed.

In the case of those who succeed, sustain no serious falls, and go the distance, the compensation mechanisms become as smooth and finely tuned over the decades as a hand built exotic car. The presentation dazzles, the engine purrs, and all is right with the world. Steve Wynn had already lost most of his vision when he lost the Mirage and started on the Bellagio, long before the recent painting accident. Many people, likely in the thousands, had knowledge of this, yet would tell you how incredibly smart the man is without a thought of mentioning the loss of vision.

Those who are truly determined and have outstanding ability are usually spurred to greater determination and performance by handicaps. This can sound perverse to some, but it really isn’t at all. If you have the personal power and drive and ability to achieve, the fire and passion to grab life by the short hairs and give it your all, then the never-ending contest itself, with both its losses and gains, is your motivation.

There is plenty of writing and advice on business and entrepreneurial success. If you aren’t out getting an MBA first (no determinant of success in itself), study and familiarize yourself with the materials relevant to your business activity anyway. How much you learn through studying, and how much through firsthand experience, though, is not the deciding factor in whether you want to and can, get and stay in the ring. This type of reading, a blog called Leaders on Leadership, is just as important to understanding the challenges and how to use your own abilities in terms of combining reality and perception.

We live to develop and exercise our talents and abilities to their fullest, and strive for happiness and success (in or out of the ring). Knowing our weaknesses and addressing them fully is the one critical factor far less spoken of or written about. Perception of strength or weakness is equally critical.

One of the most powerful individuals I met over the years, Edward J. DeBartolo Sr. (you used the full moniker until granted the right to address him by his given name), was a fairly small man physically. Few people, however, could stare back into those piercing eagle eyes for long, or stand up to the iron will. Even at the age of 90, this man still answered his business phone beginning at approximately 5 am, every single day.

If the fierce intensity of such a gaze is revealed to and turned on you, there’s only one involuntary response that signals your place in the ring. That response is a thrill of excitement and anticipation in the knowledge that you also will do whatever it takes to achieve your goals and stay there.

Those closest to you will know who you really are, but in business you deal with hundreds and sometimes thousands of individuals who will stubbornly see you as the first impressions you offer them. Making good ones may not matter substantially if you’re in the position to continue and perform brilliantly, but occasionally it will matter, and the rest of the time it’s like a free opportunity to put some extra money in the bank. It is also a gesture of respect, and that is always a good way to begin.

Visionaries and independent thinkers are found in every societal segment, but I’m focusing this post on the business world, which is where I first learned to recognize lone voices.

Most conversation is a lot of noise. The further inside you are, in circles of influence where pundits and the powerful enjoy up to the minute intelligence and sophisticated analysis, the louder the noise. Sure, it can be more ‘interesting’, or at least diverting, noise in those circles, but noise it remains.

Spend a few years in the ivory towers or even just the fast lane and you’ll see the epitome of viral spreading of information. The web version pales, although the mechanics are the same.

The smartest businessmen and their attendant analysts are highly discerning, constantly sorting through the clamor and making many fine distinctions between fact, spin, and rumor, in order to anticipate the consequences. A businessman and a true entrepreneur, however, are two completely different animals.

Businessmen manage money. Their motivation is to both protect it and make it grow. Innovation is not their thing. Of course the biggest returns are found on the leading edge, hence the awkward flirtation between money and ideas. Even more central to that flirtation is the fact that the innovation that hits the bullseye, that becomes the next big thing, will be hands down the sexiest girl at the dance. The guy that gets her will sit at the head table and be feted as brilliant.

True entrepreneurs don’t generally care much for businessmen, not least because their own visions are foreign, outside conventional view, and therefore often hard to convey. The extent of affluence in our time, together with technology, has created a breed of quasi entrepreneur, individuals whose raison d’etre is to plug in on one side to emerging trends and on the other to aggressive investors. This breed exists to sell out. They’re the loudest proponents of the money mantra that everyone is for sale.

The lone voice belongs to the independent thinker, and being one requires a much broader spectrum of motivation than money alone can provide.

My first strong memory of a lone voice dates to 1980. It belonged to local a real estate developer who had built an empire on the absolute best of old fashioned values, and also always made my (and most people’s) top ten in terms of class and integrity. His name is Eph (Ephraim) Diamond.

In the 50s, Eph and 2 partners created a residential development company called Cadillac, developing housing at a time of 3% interest rates and 30 year mortgages. It was also a time when long term bank lending at under prime was the norm rather than the exception. In the 60s, Cadillac merged with Fairview, which had originally been a builder of shopping centers, but was by then focused on urban commercial development. The combination, at that time, was in itself also remarkable. Think Sun merging with eBay. Cadillac Fairview went public around the time of the second oil crisis in ‘79, as markets headed into what would come to be called stagflation (high inflation plus high unemployment), with Eph as chairman.

In 1980, when interest rates hit and passed 20%, the ‘conversation’ or noise in the business world was so loud as to be almost deafening. Real estate development at that time was still dominated by private interests, a reality that would change dramatically over the following decade. A large number of the developers, in various major urban centers, were Jewish and of the builders Italian. (The first came from the history of private lending and the second from a wave of 20th century immigration to North America that settled in the construction business.) So the development industry’s contribution to the raucous noise on the high interest rates was particularly colorful, with Orthodox and Conservative members of the community seeking and transmitting the educated opinions of their rabbis on usury, opinions that even found their way into proposed laws in Ottawa and Washington.

Thousands of voices chattered at hyperspeed in an alarmed quest for revision of all future business planning based on this financial apocalypse. Eph, meanwhile, had come to his own conclusion, which he would state calmly to anyone who asked him. He said that the high interest rates were a temporary and unsustainable phenomenon, and that we would all see 6% (although not 3%) again in our lifetimes. No one agreed with him at the time.

This was the voice of an independent thinker. Large scale real estate developers, by the nature of their business, think in decades not quarters. Are they smarter than everyone else? Do they always get it right? Hell, no. As a matter of fact they are, for the most part, close to extinct today, replaced by an evolved hybrid in response to institutional investment rather than private style lending and the last of merchant banking.

The point of my story is about whether we hear and consider a lone voice amid the noise. Our economic dynamics change, but human nature doesn’t. Not everything said by every lone voice is prophetic or correct, but a much wider perspective can be gained by stepping back from the wave of noise, in order to hear ourselves, and others, think.

Heard a lone voice lately?

How many people do you know that you would trust as business partners without a written agreement? My own definition of trust for this question includes being confident of a level of loyalty that is heightened and reinforced when your back is turned.

The real estate developers I met and learned from when I started out in business were old school entrepreneurs who led the North American post war building boom. The heyday of their youth was the 1960s. Some cut their losses in the 73-74 recession and gave up mainlining risk and growth for a somewhat more leisurely lifestyle, but for most the challenge of winning, building, and acquiring could not be set aside any more than drawing breath.

A majority of these developers had a European or Russian heritage, many of the developers Jewish and much of the companion construction business dominated by those of Italian ancestry. Whether they were first generation, arriving after WWII, or even second or third, they all derived their bases for trustworthiness from relatively insular communities and old fashioned values. The communities remained insular for generations to a great extent because of our WASP dominated class system. The father of an ex and late partner of mine worked as a waiter on the top floor of the Park Plaza hotel in the 50s and 60s, and would have forfeited his job if his employers had found out that he was Jewish.

Sure, there is unethical and dishonest behavior to be found in any society, but overall those smaller societal systems deal with it pretty well through time honored methods of community, reputation, respect, and peer groups. I watch with interest how such societal constructs might be re-developed within new peer groups in a flat world and without the very effective checks and balances at work constantly in a small physical community.

Those old time entrepreneurs are mostly gone from the business landscape. It has been a couple of decades since I saw a true partnership formed based on notes on a cocktail napkin and a meaningful handshake. I could write several posts on the reasons, but will just pick a few of the obvious for now …blame it on the lawyers, on the stockies, on those who leverage money.

In light of this background, my current experience is interesting. As many people as I’ve met and worked with in dozens of professions over the years, there are a few, met recently, that I recognize as people I would trust in the old way, based on communication leading to agreement on a common goal and sealed with a handshake. (lawyers documenting the thing after the fact being secondary) They are developers and geeks. This era’s dreamers and visionaries and entrepreneurs.

I’m starting to believe these new relationships can grow into something that’s worth more than just making money together. How far can that go toward the continued forming of new types of virtual core communities? So far, the virtual communities that are deep enough to establish that kind of reputation and trust among peers are pretty limited. My own place, the place I’m working toward in that landscape, is within broadening the number and scope of those overlapping circles in non-tech areas. To move forward on that, I’ve had to back into the core, and am very encouraged by who and what I’ve encountered so far.

This article in the NY Times would indicate that I’d be moving further ahead much faster in a different location, except for one thing. The core groups in the worlds I’m building for are in NY, London, continental Europe and Tokyo. I’m in Toronto, which is a secondary locale, yet connected enough, in the same way that Miami and Chicago are. If the fastest brains aren’t available to build platforms and bridges for non-business and non-tech interests, will the development of the web simply lag further and further behind for these interests?

Doing some work on specific ways to combine social and commercial uses in a web project yesterday sent me into making comparisons to real estate development yet again.

Mixed use is a term used by urban planners to identify zoning that permits a combination of both commercial and residential uses. As a modern concept, it came into fashion in response to problems of scale inadvertently created as a result of booming population, prosperity and growth following WWII. Huge concrete towers and canyons, especially of office space (dead at night), and subsidized housing (inadvertently planned ghettoes) exacerbated many urban problems.

Combining businesses with homes in zoning for development was previously done on a more grass roots human level, and the traditional arrangement of businesses on major streets backed by residential enclaves behind them worked perfectly well in the old small town model, but didn’t translate well with economies of scale or high density development.

Toronto has avoided many of the urban decay problems faced by North American cities largely due to one man. David Crombie, for whom I have tremendous personal respect and admiration, was elected to our City Council in 1970, and became Mayor in 1972, serving 3 terms before leaving for Federal politics. He was known in Toronto as ‘the Tiny Perfect Mayor’, and could have continued in or returned to that office for many years afterward almost effortlessly based on his deserved popularity.

One of his first acts as mayor, however, stunning the local financial and development community, was to announce a total moratorium on development. His intent was to call a ‘time out’, reassess, and introduce the concept of mixed use. Once the money men had finished hyperventilating and dismounted from their ‘end of the world’ soapboxes, everyone naturally went back to work, planning and building for profit, and learning to adapt to the new zoning rules.

The first large mixed use development, ManuLife Center, was not an unqualified success. In 20/20 hindsight, it is obvious that the layout of the complex, in attempting to insulate each of the 3 use elements (office, retail, and residential) from one another, undermined the theoretic principle of interactivity on which mixed use was based. Planning successful major urban real estate developments is as much about understanding and directing traffic flow as anything else, and the abrupt delineations between use areas in the ManuLife project translated into dead ends that halted traffic.

Looking at Toronto today, though, especially now that individual home office use in urban areas is a common reality, we can recognize the great contribution David made to our city in the area of urban development. We never did build another St. James Town, for example.

How does all this relate to a web project?

The barriers we maintain in our society, between personal space, marketplaces, and business are based on a balance between the benefits and hindrances that each offers the other. Some of these considerations cease to exist when physical contact is removed, but we are also creatures of habit, so our behavior patterns are not going to change overnight. Despite the fact that the virtual world can and will offer seamless integration of uses, to our great benefit, we still plan today’s successful site for the way users will actually behave today. These are also difficult new concepts to conceptualize to the average person, who wants the elevator pitch as much as VC investors do.

What is this new site for?

A. To share your pictures with family and with old and new friends. Got it!

B. To enable personal, hobbyist, commercial trading (and more) activities in hub communities of like-minded people. Huh?

Re-reading B above, I see in my memory the baffled looks on real estate developers’ faces in the 1970s, whose conceptions of urban landscapes then did not envisage, for example, today’s St. Lawrence neighborhood, although David did.

The idealistic vision central to the concept of mixed use in urban planning, however, is achievable in the virtual world of the future in a way that is hasn’t been in the bricks and mortar world. Even better, or perhaps essential, is that via this new world, mixed use can be developed in a user interactive organic manner.

How cool is that?