Archive forwriting
Electron-democracy
Late last year, one of the executives asked me to help write a paper on the future of energy.
McKinsey & Company have now published it. 
Other authors in the series include:
- Nobel Laureate and US Energy Secretary Steven Chu (“Time to fix the wiring”)
- Intel co-founder Andy Grove (“An electric plan for energy resilience”)
- peak oil titan Colin Campbell (“The end of the oil age”)
Cooler still, as this unPhotoshopped screengrab shows, we’ve got the top spot in the Energy section!! (For now.)
Even cooler still, McKinsey had originally intended to circulate the essay collection at the World Economic Forum at Davos. (Ultimately they published a subset, and ours didn’t make the cut.) So I came within an editor’s whim of being able to put “…his work has been circulated at the World Economic Forum at Davos…” on my resume!
A long-form version of the essay will be made publicly available soon; I’ll link to that in due course.
Meanwhile, I think I’ll take a few more days off blogging to bask in the quietly ecstatic glow.
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(click to enlarge)
Obama speech contest
Climate Progress had a speechlet competition to the effect of “write the energy section of Obama’s inaugural address”.
Naturally, I entered. __(’Read the rest of this entry »’)
Nov 21 update (backfill)
In the next few weeks I plan to transpose periodic e-mail updates to friends, into the blog, of which this is one.
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Updates were sporadic in the past month while I was focussed on my latest writing project, which I’ll discuss further on its publication in January. Take that, forty-three theatres (and counting) who’ve rejected my samurai theatre play! Given the one production, that makes my script-pitching “batting average” about… 0.023. 
Sadly, my Shakespearean epic was about as poorly-fit for the modern theatre market, as Big Three automaker SUV’s were for rising gas price environment. And now that the economy is tumbling, it’s even less likely that theatres will lay out the cash for a production with a 19th-century-Russian-novel-esque cast list. Economic turmoil means less discretionary spending, which hits the arts. As they say, “artists always suffer”… which, if Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, blink) is to be believed, might drive them to spend the ~10,000 hours required to master their skill, and gain later success. I’m inferring this from reviews of his new book Outliers, because I haven’t bought it yet. As noted two sentences ago, economic turmoil means less discretionary spending, etc.
The monetary upheaval is having some astounding domino effects. For one, reduced cash flows mean automakers might not have the money to develop more fuel efficient vehicles. Toyota’s even considering delaying the opening a manufacturing plant originally intended to augment Prius production!
Much-revered (and with good reason) Toyota has opened a huge number of factories in the past five or so years, so this’ll be the first time they deal with a slowdown, with a substantial portion of their workforce. Since much of their success derives from a steady stream of incremental improvements from the bottom up, it will be interesting to see if they can preserve that collaborative spirit in their newer factories, where corporate culture hasn’t become ingrained. (Wal-Mart gets a lot less attention for doing essentially the same thing; store managers have typically had a lot of freedom to explore their brainstorms for shaving fractions of pennies off unit costs. It’s tough to build an evil empire on the genius of only one man… )