Reconsidering workplace loyalty in an increasingly gig economy driven workplace context 18
This is the 18th installment to what has become a short series on the changing dynamics, and the changing expectations of the workplace and of all of our roles in it. See Business Strategy and Operations – 6, postings 1055 and loosely following for Parts 1-17, where I have been briefly sketching out how employment and even employability itself have fundamentally changed and for many now in an increasingly important gig economy context.
I have been discussing workplace negotiations in this series, and achieving mutually beneficial negotiated agreements as to terms and conditions of employment between employees: gig workers included, and employers. And to bring this initial orienting note up to date here as I continue that discussion, I have been discussing this type of negotiation in general and in some more-specific detail and essentially entirely in terms of a single basic assumption based criterion being met: that both sides are at least willing to meet and to negotiate and even if both sides start out seeing they’re arriving at mutual agreement to be challenging at best. And that has led me to an alternative possibility that always has to be considered, and with its extreme represented by the well known Plan B option of finding a best alternative to negotiated agreement.
In keeping with that possibility, I concluded Part 17 with this end note, as offered in anticipation of this posting:
• That I would discuss the issues of negotiating with businesses that refuse to acknowledge the merits of those who would be sit at the other side of the table there, and that challenge collective bargaining with them per se, and that seek to divide and conquer through piecemeal negotiations and delays as their only concession there, when negotiations might be required.
I added that this type of challenge can arise in contexts that go way beyond the scope of businesses that only want to recognize local single work site unionization efforts to the degree that they would allow or support any such employee organizing efforts. And I said that I would discuss approaches for dealing with such divide and conquer strategies in general in the next installment to this series, and more particularly where a business actively seeks to divide “regular” employees from gig worker employees in order to limit what they have to offer to anyone there.
I begin addressing all of this here by citing a crucially important due diligence issue that the representatives of a possible employee side to such negotiations need to carry out. There are legal mandates in place in the United States and in a variety of other nations that explicitly give employees a right to organize and to collectively bargain with employers. And when such laws are in place, employers cannot simply deny efforts to unionize and certainly if the employees who would take this step follow the legally defined guidelines in place for that, and with regards to any limits that they might face when for example seeking to organize on an employer’s property, or during their regular work hours.
If employees and their representatives follow the letter of the law here, then employers have to be willing to meet with them if they don’t want to put themselves in a position of violating such laws, and in ways that would limit and harm their position moving forward – and both in those negotiations as they take place and in the public eye.
So the refusal to negotiate of my above bullet point can in practice become more of a dislike of it. But that still leaves us with the divide and conquer approaches that hostile employing businesses can and at times do employ.
Large corporations that do not want to collectively bargain with a single overall union that would represent all of their employees in all of their outlets and offices, can preemptively prepare for such possibilities by setting themselves up so that individuals are not direct employees of the parent organization – just of the local office or outlet that they actually work at. This type of challenge to companywide unionization has become common recently, recurringly appearing in the news. But for purposes of this discussion, I would focus on a second divide and conquer approach: that of declaring that not all employees are in fact employees at all and even where they all work essentially full time for a same single employer. And to bring this into explicit focus here, consider full time, in-house employees who are identified as such for business and payroll tax and other purposes, and part time and gig workers who are viewed as being contract workers and self-employed.
Businesses that move as many of their work positions from in-house to gig as possible, usually see this in terms of not having to pay for sick time or vacation time, or health insurance or other benefits for them, that they might be required to offer their in-house employees. And in this context, they would not likely agree to negotiate collectively with all of their employees: in-house and gig workers together as a single organized group.
My goal for this series installment has been to lay out the basic issues at stake here in organized detail. I am going to continue from here in the next installment to discuss negotiating approaches that might be considered for closing or even precluding these types of gaps.
Meanwhile, you can find this series at Business Strategy and Operations – 6, and also at Page 4 to my Guide to Effective Job Search and Career Development, where it is included there with its supplemental postings.
Looking beyond our current global crises and their specifics – 57
This is my 57th installment to a series in which I discuss the turning point challenges and crises that are coming to define our emerging 21st century, and our long-term future. See United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) for Parts 1-56 of this.
I offered a briefly stated list of ten topic points in Part 31 that I presented as “mapping out some of the more detailed requirements of an overall resolution of this combined global challenge.” I have offered at least initial responses to the first six of them since then. And I have been addressing the seventh of them in Parts 40 through 56, leading up to here:
7. We need to encourage and reward efforts that would help us to achieve more just and inclusive societies where this will have to be grounded in inclusion that breaks and ends our ongoing zero-sum, use-versus-them divides.
I have been discussing the World Health Organization as a specific agency of the United Nations in this context in Parts 47-56, as a particularly important case in point example of what should be one mission defined component in a larger overall system here. And that line of discussion led me to this set of more subsidiary topics points:
1. What an organization such as the World Health Organization might be able to do here for its specific contributions to addressing these now four scenarios and more,
2. Its possible role in developing and carrying out larger necessary remediative efforts that would address global public health challenging scenarios in general,
3. And for how it would work with other types of organizations and agencies: locally and globally in collectively carrying out any and all of such actions,
4. And ideally, even in the face of the emergence of disruptively new and unexpected types of public health crisis scenarios.
5. And looking further ahead, I will offer some thoughts on the larger, more comprehensive system of interconnected agencies that would be called for here, in addressing the healthcare and public health and other challenges that I have been writing about here, and certainly since Part 47 – but also throughout this series.
And to bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I have been discussing the first of those points in Part 54. And my goal for this posting is to more directly begin discussing the above subtopic Point 2 as well. And I begin addressing it here by noting that I have already effectively begun doing so in Part 56 where I offered a set of Point 1 to Point 2 transitional thoughts.
Specialized organizational entities such as the World Health Organization do not and cannot successfully function or even exist as if in a vacuum. They depend upon and in turn support larger organizational systems. And to highlight that, I return to the first of what eventually became four scenarios by which novel dangerous pathogens can and do zoonotically transfer from wild animal species to humans, becoming disease threats there, as initially offered here in Part 49:
a) Diseases that cross over from wild animal sources to humans, as people encroach further and further into their remaining wild habitats, killing and consuming “bush meat” by whatever name, as that can be found there.
This is an area of concern that very obviously calls for significant levels of participation from an agency such as the WHO. But it is at least as obvious that it represents a source of challenge that no public health agency could address on its own. It is one that no such agency should try to address in that way.
My focus in this posting centers on that organization, but I will address the complex of issues raised in the above paragraph from a wider perspective. And I begin doing so by pointing out that human disease risk is only one pressingly important aspect of that point and even as stated here.
• Wanton and uncontrolled destruction of wild habitats: the context that Scenario-a most often plays out in, essentially automatically means massively scaled levels of species extinction and a loss of value to both humanity and to the world – and one that future generations will not be able to recoup or reverse.
• But more immediately and directly and certainly from a human perspective this threat to biodiversity with its habitat destruction directly threatens human communities too. Just consider by way of example, the impact that loss of tidal wetlands has when hurricane tidal surges are no longer weakened and attenuated, and limited for the damage that they can cause by these protective barriers. And with global warming, hurricanes are becoming more powerful and damaging, they are developing through longer annual seasons for them and they are moving further north, causing significant levels of damage in places that have never historically experienced such harm and certainly on anything like a regularly recurring basis. What used to be once in a hundred year storms are coming way more often than that. And that change in frequency is becoming the new norm for essentially all types of significantly adverse weather-related events.
How can a public health focused agency such as the WHO contribute to the development and enactment of responses to these challenges? It can add its mission focused contribution to arguing a case for real remediative change and certainly where our current crises impact on public health issues, as one of their adverse consequences. And its input can help to shape and plan such remediations that will address public health concerns too.
So the public health challenges of the here repeated Scenario-a are only one part of this overall challenge. But arguing their importance and acting to remediate them can be an important part of larger, coordinated decisions and actions. I will delve more fully into consideration of that wider context when discussing the above repeated subtopic Point 3. From a WHO-centric perspective, this means other necessarily involved agencies that would collectively address the larger challenge of Scenario-a, supportively helping the WHO in this to work for their organizational mission defined parts of all of this. And from a Point 3 perspective, this would be reciprocated across all such involved agencies and with wider overall support included as needed.
And with that, I am going to turn to and address subtopic Point 3 starting in the next installment to this series, adding to my Point 2 discussion as begun here as needed for that. Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Macroeconomics and Business and its Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 continuations. And you can also find this and related material at my directory: United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID).
Meaning in information theory 24
This is my 24th installment to a short series on the meaning of one of the most commonly cited and used of all concepts, that nevertheless remains largely undefined and certainly in an information theory context. That body of theory focuses more on the volume of information that might arise in any given context, its storage and transmission and reception, and its fidelity through all of this, with its specific meaning held as being irrelevant there. So my goal here is to at least shed some light on what would enter into that epistemological gap. See Section X: Some Thoughts Concerning the Nature of Meaning, as can be found at Reexamining the Fundamentals 2 for Parts 1-23 of this.
I have at least briefly discussed a relatively wide range of issues that would enter into bringing meaning into modern information theory, with thoughts as to what meaning itself means in this context, and how to quantify it there. I have also discussed the relative meanings of meaning per se and of knowledge. But I have primarily offered that collective line of discussion for a specific reason, and one that is becoming more and more important from a practical real world perspective, and seemingly every day now. And I began addressing that complex of issues: my source of motivation for offering this series at all, when I began discussing artificial intelligence agents and how they parse reality and the data that they obtain that would frame such understandings, in ways that can and do differ from how human minds do this – and with differing but also meaningfully relevant results.
Meaning was initially left out of information theory because it was, and still is messy as a concept and both in theory and in application. And as long as the information flows that had to be understood and managed, were only being created by and organized by, and received and used by a single type of intelligence: human minds, that exclusion did not matter. But we are living in a very different world now, and one where fundamentally differing types of mind: artificial as well as human, are already beginning to arrive at different meanings and even types of meaning from each other and even when starting out with the same raw data. And it is becoming clear that the best meanings and in many contexts, will come as syntheses of these varying forms of insight.
We are already beginning to see positive fruits coming from this and certainly when addressing scientific and biomedical problems. But we have only seen a beginning there. I expect to return to this area of consideration in future postings, and either with updates to this series, or in a new series to come. And I finish this posting and this series itself, at least for now, with one final thought.
• I have proposed integrating meaning and the study of its issues and its open questions into information theory here, as a perhaps most obvious way to connect this into our overall understandings of information and of communications. It has to be more than just a stand-alone curiosity if it is to offer any real value, and such studies are needed now – and in forms that are strategically, tactically and operationally practical. I have focused in general principles here, but the next step of making use of all of this, is at least as important. That is where a next step in this overall narrative should focus.
Meanwhile, you can find this series and related postings at Macroeconomics and Business and its Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 continuations. And also see postings and series as can be found at my Reexamining the Fundamentals directory and its Page 2 continuation, with this included there in its Section X.
Looking beyond our current global crises and their specifics – 56
This is my 56th installment to a series in which I discuss the turning point challenges and crises that are coming to define our emerging 21st century, and our long-term future. See United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID) for Parts 1-55 of this.
I offered a briefly stated list of ten topic points in Part 31 that I presented as “mapping out some of the more detailed requirements of an overall resolution of this combined global challenge.” I have offered at least initial responses to the first six of them since then. And I have been addressing the seventh of them in Parts 40 through 55, leading up to here:
7. We need to encourage and reward efforts that would help us to achieve more just and inclusive societies where this will have to be grounded in inclusion that breaks and ends our ongoing zero-sum, use-versus-them divides.
I have been discussing the World Health Organization as a specific agency of the United Nations in this context in Parts 47-55, as a particularly important case in point example of what should be one mission defined component in a larger overall system here. And that line of discussion led me to this set of more subsidiary topics points:
1. What an organization such as the World Health Organization might be able to do here for its specific contributions to addressing these now four scenarios and more,
2. Its possible role in developing and carrying out larger necessary remediative efforts that would address global public health challenging scenarios in general,
3. And for how it would work with other types of organizations and agencies: locally and globally in collectively carrying out any and all of such actions,
4. And ideally, even in the face of the emergence of disruptively new and unexpected types of public health crisis scenarios.
5. And looking further ahead, I will offer some thoughts on the larger, more comprehensive system of interconnected agencies that would be called for here, in addressing the healthcare and public health and other challenges that I have been writing about here, and certainly since Part 47 – but also throughout this series.
And to bring this initial orienting note up to date here, I began discussing the first of those points in Part 54, and I continued to do so in Part 55. But I did so and certainly in Part 55 in the context of more explicitly putting the above Point 1 in context relative to the other four points of that list.
I will return to that contextual discussion as an at-least partial roadmap as I proceed to discuss Points 2 to 5 and their issues. But before doing so and as a goal for this installment, I am going to complete an at-least first take response to Point 1. And I begin doing so by noting that I focused on information gathering, organizing and sharing in Part 55 and primarily on epidemiological data at that. Though I add here that this only represents a part of the data that an agency such as the WHO needs to collect, organize and share. Public health systems related information has to be just as actively gathered in, analyzed and shared regarding the capabilities and limitations, and areas of need of the local and national public healthcare agencies and systems that it works with too. And the WHO should be offering realistic advice on how to remediate such gaps and deficiencies, as well as offering specialized aid in actually addressing them where that is needed. And that brings me to the to-address point that I offered at the end of Part 55, and that presents the topic of this posting:
• But gathering in and validating and sharing this information can only be a start here.
I could simply offer some thoughts here on what the World Health Organization should do there, in actively being part of the solution to the public health problems that we face, as they increasingly become globally impacting. And I will focus on that more organizationally parochial a perspective here. But realistically, actually carrying any of that out will require coordinated support that goes way beyond what any one specialized agency can provide. I offered the more wide ranging portion of Part 55 that I did there, with this in mind.
With that noted, I begin discussing what an agency such as the WHO can do, beyond just passively gathering in and then sharing outside sourced data. And I begin by laying out some of the pieces of a sometimes piece-to-piece conflicting dynamically changing puzzle:
• Experience and best practices that are developed on the basis of them can be invaluable, and even fundamentally necessary for affordable, implementable success. And this certainly applies where challenges in one place recapitulate at least in key parts, challenges already faced elsewhere, where learning curve advantages can be transferred over.
• But new instances of old challenges can and do bring disruptively novel and unexpected complications with them, when simply trying to apply a pre-tested and used solution to a new place and new context.
• And the above two points leave out what might be the most important consideration of all. Outsiders cannot simply walk into a nation, or into a local community and run roughshod over it, imposing what would be seen there as imposed change. National and local involvement are essential there, as are local and national buy-in. And I add that this is the only way that the unexpected and novel challenges of the second of these points can be identified, and certainly if they are to be responded to in anything like a proactive manner. The alternative is too likely to include at least elements of initial-try failure, and with all of the resistance and anger that that would bring to any Plan B retry and particularly if the initial at least partly failed Plan A was seen as simply being imposed.
• So active collaboration is essential in all of this, and between local and national, and the internationally scaled operations of an organization such as the WHO.
This, among other things, is also where interagency and other organizational collaborations become essential, as the nations, and the more local regions within then that are in the most need of such aid are often already burdened with the challenge of resistance to change and to outside influence, and along partisan political and other lines. And that brings me directly to the above Point 2 of my five subtopic list. I am going to at least start addressing it in the next installment to this series.
Meanwhile, you can find this and related material at Macroeconomics and Business and its Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 continuations. And you can also find this and related material at my directory: United Nations Global Alliance for ICT and Development (UN-GAID).
Pure research, applied research and development, and business models 39
This is my 39th installment to a series in which I discuss contexts and circumstances – and business models and their execution, where it would be cost-effective and prudent for a business to actively participate in applied and even pure research as a means of creating its own next-step future (see Business Strategy and Operations – 4 and its Page 5 and Page 6 continuations, postings 664 and loosely following for Parts 1-38.)
I have discussed in this series, the roles of and the at-least potential value of leavening research into a business, and from strategic, tactical and operational perspectives. And I have attempted to bring this into focus in Part 37 where I briefly discussed how Kodak became largely marginalized from how it failed to effectively evolve from what research it did enter into, that could have provided it with a more competitive future. And I continued that line of discussion in Part 38 with a corresponding discussion of how IBM has remained cutting edge and competitively relevant from how it has actively, creatively pursued the New.
So research can be the essential ingredient in creating a viable path forward for a business, and certainly where it faces pressures of creatively evolving competition, and pressures for change and with demands for the New from its markets. And it is in this context and the context of this series as a whole up to here, that I return to the questions of what types of research, a business should invest in. I have posited possible responses to that in this series, in terms of pure and applied research, where applied is primarily going to lead a business to evolutionary refinements, rather than the disruptively new, and pure research holds potential for both. But in this context, I would stress the fact that this is where New: the disruptively novel and unexpected that can become a real game changer will come from, if it is to arise at all.
I include serendipitous discoveries that can arise in what starts out as applied research there too. If the focus there remains applied and with its here-and-now, short term goals perspective, then it is likely that that unexpected finding will simply be set aside, at least for “now.”
Even there, those largely inexplicable, unexpected findings are only likely to emerge as recognized discoveries if they are followed through upon and explored, as more open ended, pure research endeavors – and with the open minds called for there.
Applied research, while valuable and even essential, starts out with established goals in mind, and it pursues them single mindedly. Pure research starts out with an open mind and with an openness to the new and novel and unexpected.
I have raised the issues of costs and investments here, where applied can be a lot more cost-effective and inexpensive, and certainly short-term than pure research is. Pure research is a long-term investment, by its very nature. And it is just the first of a gauntlet of long term investment issues where it is entered into. The next, equally challenging steps that follow it arise where New is found, and it is still in its embryonic phase, and a decision has to be made to actually develop it into marketable product offerings.
I have written in this blog of failures to follow through there, even when the embryonic beginnings of what would turn out to be multi-billion dollar per year industries are developed. Xerox PARC and its inventors created the foundations of entire industries … that other businesses developed and profited from, as its parent company failed to follow through on those opportunities in-house. For a brief summary of that story see Keeping Innovation Fresh – 2: Xerox PARC and Menlo Park and its Part 3 continuation.
Research does not always pay off with a return on investment to match what is spent for it. Research, and pure research in particular always involves risk. But the more competitive the business sector and industry that a business operates in and the more that competition is based on creative change in what is offered and how, the more important this investment becomes. “Safe” can literally become a comfortable path to extinction.
And with this note I end this series, at least for now, though I will return to this complex of issues in future postings and series too.
Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Business Strategy and Operations – 6, and also at Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 of that directory.
Thinking through business and marketplace ecosystems and related constructs 23
This is my 23rd installment to a series on business and marketplace ecosystems, that seeks to go beyond simply applying that term as a loosely considered metaphor. And I argue a case here that the understandings and even the basic dynamics of ecosystems, and of niches and niche spaces and more, as initially conceived and developed in a biological systems context, apply directly and with just as much relevance to a business and economics context too. See Business Strategy and Operations – 6, postings 1022 and loosely following for Parts 1-22 of this.
I have posed and begun directly discussing a set of three topics points in this series, that I repeat here as a group for smother continuity of narrative as I continue this overall line of enquiry:
1. Overall and when considered across a wide and even inclusive range of local niche spaces, is there room for more distinct species when there are a multitude of seemingly independent “islands,” each with their own local niche space, or when there is a single vast if varied niche space and a single “continent” if you will?
2. What does this mean in a business systems and a business ecosystem context?
3. And in a biological systems context, is human driven globalization starting to empirically test out and answer that first (e.g. Point 1) question too? And what can we see and learn for how the dynamics of this are shaping and will continue to shape and reshape, and expand or limit the scale and complexity and diversity of our local, regional and global business and marketplace ecosystems (in a Point 2 context)?
And to bring this initial orienting note up to date for where I am in that overall narrative, I am currently discussing the second of those main topics points. And I have been doing so at least in part, by addressing a set of more subsidiary topics points that I would argue enter into and inform it. I am currently discussing them, and rephrasing and expanding on it as I continue to address it, it now reads as:
• Consideration of what a static model understanding of all of this means in the light of this business and market ecosystems context. And how would this understanding consequentially change when a more dynamic modeling approach is considered?
I added at the end of Part 22 that I would continue its line of discussion here by address the issues of change and of opportunity – and the issues of carrying through on transitions where needed, and when the businesses involved actually find themselves significantly competing for sales online, which I have assumed up to here but that needs further addressing. And in anticipation of that discussion to come, I added that I will address how online competes with bricks and mortar in retail sales too, as much as it does with online itself. And looking further ahead, the third and final subtopic point is intended to bring this developing narrative back into a main topics Point 2 focus and hopefully a somewhat conclusive one where that reads:
• And then, of course, I will apply this to the specific question raised in Point 2, for its impact in shaping overall possible ecosystem complexity here.
And I begin discussing the issues for this installment as noted above, by returning to some of the fundamentals already discussed in this series, and the question of what an ecosystem niche is in a business context. I focused on businesses that might be competing with each other and even directly so, in Part 22, and on overlaps in what they would bring to market and competitively so. But let’s consider their niches and the levels of competitive overlapping in them a bit differently here.
Let’s say, as a point of argument that two businesses: call then A and B sell essentially identical inventories of products and at very similar prices, and with items offered of quite comparable quality and design appeal. But let’s assume that A has a website that is entirely written in American English, and just that. And B has an online presence that is entirely in French, and A and B market entirely to an American and a French audience respectively.
Online at least in principle, means global. But that presumption can be more fantasy than reality and for a wide variety of reasons. In this case, while there might be some potential overlap in these businesses’ target markets, that will likely be small. And this is not the only possible overall marketplace partitioning that could keep these two businesses and other pairs like them from actually significantly competing for sales with each other at all.
What have I done here? I have brought into question, the basic premise of the to-address point that I began this posting with. I took the basic presumed point of conflict that I focused upon in Part 22 out of the constraints that led to it. But that said, the line of argument and the options of Point 22 can and often do apply in fact. So the question of “carrying through transitions where needed,” to quote myself from earlier in this posting, is as much a question of really thinking through the full range of niche defining parameters and constraints faced, in your own business and in possible competitors, and looking for ways to be unique there, bypassing the challenges of direct head to head competition were possible.
And this means expanding the complexity and the potential diversity of the niche spaces and ecosystems that this would all play out in. I return to my discussion of Darwin’s finches, of Part 21 with that. When that first primordial finch arriver made its way to the Galapagos Islands, its appears to have created a new niche for itself. And its descendents look to have followed suit in that. So there is precedent for this in biological ecosystems too. And we see evidence that at the very least is strongly suggestive of that when an invasive species seems to just fit in, without significantly challenging any other species already there.
• So this line of discussion is about nuanced transitions, that might not be obvious up-front for what is even really needed let alone for how best to carry them out.
I am going to continue this line of discussion in the next installment to this series where I will take an entirely different approach to reconsidering the to-address point from Part 22 that I offered here: the issues of long tails in niche specialization, and the potential that the internet creates for more specialized businesses to survive and even thrive, and certainly if they can develop a more expansive market for themselves – that is also differentiating from their competitors. I have already touched upon this set of issues here. I will more fully explore it. And in anticipation of that line of discussion to come, this will mean reconsidering business agility and resiliency in the face of challenge and change, and the selective pressures that they create.
And then, looking ahead, I will address how online competes with bricks and mortar in retail sales too, as much as it does with online itself, as cited above. And looking further ahead, I will similarly address the third and final subtopic point, and then the third and last of the main topics points that I have been delving into here.
Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Business Strategy and Operations – 6, and also at Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 of that directory.
China, the United States and the world, and the challenge of an emerging global COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic – 310
This is my 342nd posting to specifically address the COVID-19 pandemic that we now face and that by now has found its way into essentially every nation on Earth, and into every facet of our lives. And it is also the 310th installment to this specific series on that. And I finally find myself writing the last regular posting to this series with this too. I had not decided to end this with this series here and now, and even when writing Part 309 and with that going live on February 28, 2023. But I have decided to conclude this here and certainly as an ongoing endeavor, and on two notes.
The first is one of irony, with my picking up on a word in the ongoing title to this series that should have become outdated for it a long time ago, but that never quite has: emerging. The world is, and has been talking about this pandemic ending, yet I have continued to add that word into the title of every new installment to it. And it is a particularly appropriate word to include in the title of this installment, even as I end this series with it. Why? The debate over the origin of the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 has heated up yet again, with the public release of a report from the United States Department of Energy that is identified by that agency as being of low reliability, that argues the case that COVID-19 is the result of a laboratory leak – an accidental pathogen release from a supposedly secure virology research facility in Wuhan, China.
For references on this development, see:
• US Agency Says COVID-19 May Have Leaked From Lab – here’s what to know, which I quote from with:
• “The US Department of Energy says that covid-19 most likely originated from an unintentional laboratory leak in China, according to a classified document. However, it has not released evidence supporting the claim.”
It is important to note that this report was, and as of this writing (on March 2, 2023) still is classified and not available to the public – even as its admittedly tenuous conclusions have been released and with all of their more incendiary possibilities. And the only thing that that has accomplished is to completely avoidably increase the tensions between China and the United States at a time of already present discord between them.
Effort is being made to declassify and to make public this report so the public can make up its own mind on it and its merits – and with “the public” there including foreign nationals and the world at large as well as American citizens. In that regard, see:
• Comer Says He’ll Try to Get DOE COVID Report Declassified, which I quote from with:
• “House Oversight Committee chair James Comer said Monday he’ll try to get a Department of Energy assessment declassified and made public after it reportedly concluded that COVID-19 may have originated from a lab leak in China.”
But to stress a point just made here:
• New COVID Lab Leak Assessment Reignites Furor Over Pandemic Origins.
The US DOE itself has reviewed this report as being of low reliability: low credibility. So the release of its purported findings without any corroborating material that should be in that report to back them, up has to be seen as an act of sheer political partisanship at its worst.
Bottom line, we still do not know precisely how COVID-19 first emerged as a human disease. And we probably never will. But we are likely to manage and maintain our ongoing ignorance of the actual truth there, just as we have up to now and with “breakthroughs” like this one playing way too much of a role in shaping the dialog for that.
That was the first note that I said that I would end this series on. Here is the closely related second of them. And I can summarize it with a dozen words: pandemics have messy uncertain beginnings and they have messy uncertain endings too. That is in fact, in many respects a summary of this entire series from its beginning up to here.
I admit it. I like action movies, or at least some of them. And I have seen and enjoyed movies such as The Andromeda Strain and Outbreak. I enjoyed watching Outbreak with its Col. Sam Daniels MD (Dustim Hoffman) and his team as they seek to take control over a disease outbreak in a small isolated American town before Maj. Gen. Donald McClintock (Donald Sutherland) could blow that town into flaming dust with the largest non-nuclear bomb ever built – as an alternative way to end that outbreak and I add hide that it had happened, and its source.
Daniels/Hoffman won and McClintock/Sutherland lost. The town was saved with an instantaneously developed and produced and distributed new vaccine. And the credits rolled, with everyone watching enjoying the afterglow of lifesaving, hero prevailing success. But this movie ended of course, with the unstated underlying message that a next and potentially worse such pathogen might emerge too, and in a more densely populated place such as a major city, and in one that is a major travel hub and even a globally connecting one. And the alien monster microbes did not go away at the end of The Andromeda Strain. The only victory there was one of averting an immediate worldwide life ending crisis, when the heroes of this film successfully blocking a first “let’s just nuke it” response demanded by their higher-ups when they were faced with its arrival. But even there, and in all such movies for that matter, when an at-least potentially global pandemic arises, its story line is closed off cleanly and on an at least relatively positive note.
Real epidemics and pandemics, and certainly real global pandemics do not and will not end that way – no comfortingly defined conclusions can be expected as the closing credits begin to flow up the screen. These events do not actually definitely end as such, at some particular date and time. They become endemic Here before they do There, and that supposedly post-pandemic Here can still have a flare-up of such a disease too … until pandemic becomes endemic, however that is now going to be defined, everywhere and for a significant amount of time. But ….
As a heuristic definition there, I suggest that pandemic transitions into being endemic when a sufficient percentage of a population, with a sufficiently large collective voice, declare that they are so sick and tired of it being a pandemic that they have decided that just it isn’t one anymore. And that time has passed and in much and even most of the world.
So I end this installment and this series with two questions, coming out of COVID-19 itself and coming out of my discussion of influenza here as well: the 1918 Great Influenza Pandemic and our ongoing endemic experience with that disease:
• What have we actually learned from any of this, that will help us to face and deal with the next pandemic to come? And there will be one, and all but certainly in less than a century this time.
• And are we any better prepared for the next one than we were for the 1918 flu pandemic or for COVID-19? And for any reader who would point to the rapid development of mRNA viruses and antiviral drugs as a response to COVID-19, as a sign of learning curve excellence and preparedness, remember that much of the world still has to see any real benefits from any of that. And stockpiled masks and other personally protective equipment and other quick response preparation resources that are assembled as a crisis fades age out and expire for use, or they are used up without being replaced – and there is historical precedent for this. That happened going into COVID-19 from earlier scares. It will happen again.
So what have we really learned of any lasting and transferrable value from all of this, and how and where are we better prepared for a next such crisis, than we were going into that this time? We will find out.
Meanwhile, you can find this and my earlier COVID-19 related postings to this series at Macroeconomics and Business 2 and its Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 continuations, as postings 365 and following
Addendum Note
I initially planned on ending this posting with that. Then I thought through a fresh from the presses news story that came out as I have thought through and written this installment. And it is one that embodies all that I write of here, as a final message-confirming data point. China has just experienced what might very well be the most devastating surge of new COVID-19 cases and of new deaths from it of that entire pandemic. It is still facing the direct consequences of this disaster. And yet:
• China Moves to Erase the Vestiges of ‘Zero Covid’ to Deter Dissent, which I quote from with:
• “The ruling Communist Party is waging an ambitious propaganda campaign to rewrite the public’s memory of its handling of the pandemic, which included some of the harshest restrictions in the world.”
Xi Jinping and his government and Party are actively working to erase COVID-19 from the collective Chinese memory, and certainly for their role in it. And they follow a rich tradition in this, as first set in response to Mao Zedong and his excesses, where the Communist Party and government of an earlier generation there obliterated the allowed memory of Mao’s Great Leap Forward and of his Cultural Revolution and of more from memory. So history repeats itself.
Business transitions and emerging increases in both old and new business process problems, as need for change approaches 33
I have been recurringly discussing business transitions in this blog, as fundamental business changes and for how a need for them can arise when considered from a more strategic perspective. And I have continued that ongoing narrative in this series where I address the issues of how a need for such change arises when all of this is considered from a more operational and tactical perspective. See Business Strategy and Operations – 5 and its Page 6 continuation, postings 958 and loosely following for Parts 1-32.
I focused in Part 32 on the issues of perspective and of how different stakeholders at a business might see and understand challenges faced there in different ways. And this can affect their understandings of where and how those challenges have arisen, how best to address them, and with what priorities. These same basic issues, I add, apply to novel and unexpected opportunities too, as different stakeholders can view their impact and value very differently from each other depending on their particular areas of professional responsibility and on their own personal backgrounds, personalities and work histories.
I offered this all in terms of the disruptively novel and unexpected. And just as importantly, I suggested in Part 32 in the context of adverse developments, that “this does not necessarily apply to the routine or to the locally-only affecting.” And then at the end of that installment, I said that I would take that line of discussion at least somewhat out of the abstract with a specific example.
I will offer such an example, but before doing so I am going to step back in this developing narrative to more explicitly address and even challenge the suggestion that I just repeated above. And I do so because it has a range of possible scenario types hidden within it, that do not necessarily belong together. And to clarify that, I offer these possibilities:
1. Situations where largely locally conducted process and task flows are in fact stably reliable and robust for their continuing to function under normally expected workplace conditions, and where transient breakdowns at the very least would not create wider ranging challenges or failures, from for example task completion dependencies. Minor challenges there, that can be worked around would fit with the “does not necessarily apply” of the above suggestion. This might even fit into a more strongly stated “does not apply at all” there scenario.
2. But what of “local-only” processes and task flows that have been in effect evolving toward failure, by they’re becoming less and less robust, agile, and effective and for whatever reasons? Think of the first of these two scenarios as one that might simply continue on as-is, but that might develop into a much more problematical as identified here.
The emergence of single point of failure risk obviously enters into the second of those two scenarios. Task processes can continue to work, and with more and more critically called for band aids and work-arounds keeping them performing – until those fixes can no longer suffice and at least consistently and reliably so.
What I have done here, in the context of this series, is to more fully expand out where the diversity of perspective and of experience noted in Part 32 becomes essentially applicable. Proactively, and as a matter of tracking and evaluating business performance, it can mean reducing the likelihood of unnoticed emergent challenges from developing into tipping point failures. Reactively and as a matter of picking up the pieces from them when they do occur, and from rebuilding from them, this wider awareness can help accelerate remediation and lower its costs. Quite simply, bringing the right stakeholders into business planning and performance review processes, with their varying perspectives and understandings can lead to greater business agility. And when problems do develop, this can lead to finding and enacting better immediate work-arounds for interim recovery, while longer term resolutions are planned out and put into effect. And bringing in the right people there can mean developing better such long-term remediations, from the perspective of the business as a whole.
And with that added into this narrative, I will take that line of discussion at least somewhat out of the abstract with a specific business example. In anticipation of that discussion to come, I will also touch upon the issues and possibilities of being more responsive to positive change opportunities too.
Meanwhile, you can find this and related postings and series at Business Strategy and Operations – 6, and also at Page 1, Page 2, Page 3, Page 4 and Page 5 of that directory.
Timothy Platt
Platt Perspective on Business and Technology 
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