Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols opens with 44 aphorisms. Four “Questions of Conscience” as an illustration of my favourite 2008 thoughts I wrote this year:

You run ahead?  Are you doing it as a shepherd?  Or as an exception?  A third case would be the fugitive. First question of conscience.

Sichuan Earthquake:

Billions of Yuan were donated just after the terrifying event. For the first time, this money came not only from government support, traditionally compelled to protect its citizens from cradle to grave but from private donors for the majority, companies include. Sign that an emerging middle class, less controlled, is cultivating a more self conscious public opinion independent from the State. Sign also that information is less controlled by the system, more twittered, flowing through alternative canals, and more directly impacting the local Chinese awareness.

For me, the Wenchuan event is the turning-point in the start of reform mindsets that are overly focussed on economic development. More energy will be put into changing society. Disasters do not lead to improvements in themselves, but they can raise awareness and encourage reform.

Are you genuine?  Or merely an actor?  A representative?  Or that which is represented?  In the end, perhaps, you are merely a copy of an actor.  Second question of conscience.

Financial Crisis will get the banks into their genuine jobs: assessing risks and financing activities.

The logic of capitalism remains the same: Those who take the biggest risks should be the controlling owners and receive the residual profits for reasons of both ethics and competitiveness.
But today individual shareholders are so diversified that they rarely bear substantial risk in the individual firms in which they invest. If one of the countless businesses in which you invest through your pension plan or mutual funds loses 50% of its market cap, there is a good chance you won’t know about it.

In today’s firm, labour and real risk takers bears the most risk and provides the competitive advantage. Labour and entrepreneurial capitalism, therefore should make the decisions and get the residuals.

Are you one who looks on?  Or one who lends a hand?  Or one who looks away and walks off.  Third question of conscience.

Obama election:  means that Steven Chu is the head of the Green New Deal that America and the world need. GM can be bailed out, yet what they need is to build green cars.

Will we see innovation coming out of Detroit? In 1908, the Ford Model-T got better mileage — 25 miles per gallon — than many Ford, G.M. and Chrysler models made in 2008. But don’t be surprised when if innovation comes out of somewhere else. It can be done and it will be done. Who will win the battle for Car 2.0?

For example, from Tel Aviv, The Better Place electric car charging system involves generating electrons from as much renewable energy — such as wind and solar — as possible and then feeding those clean electrons into a national electric car charging infrastructure. G.M. sells cars. Better Place is selling mobility miles.

Do you want to walk along?  Or walk ahead?  Or walk by yourself?  One must know what one wants and that one wants.  Fourth question of conscience.

China Olympics: prove to the world that it’s the nation of the 21^st century.

It was a night made of red and mystic yellow. An extraordinary and profound clamour from Beijinger hearts succeeded to the hypnotic opening ceremony. This night of 8^th of August, 2008, Beijing is holding in its arms joy that doesn’t need any heirs or children. Joy that just want to be itself, it wants eternity, it wants the eternal return.

China enters now a trying year of anniversaries: the 50th of the suppression of an uprising in Tibet; the 20^th of the quashing of the Tiananmen Square protests; the 60th of the founding of the People’s Republic itself. It may be worth remembering that the winter of 1978-79 saw not only a party Central Committee plenum but also the “Democracy Wall” movement in Beijing. It was a brief flowering of the freedom of expression, quite remarkable after the xenophobic isolation of the Cultural Revolution. China still needs it the “fifth modernisation” as Wei Jingsheng, the most famous wall-writers called the movement.

Faudra t-il détruire les paysages magnifiques du plus grand lac d’eau de mer asséché du monde, le Salar de Uyuni, pour construire les batteries Li Ion des voitures vertes ?

Les plus grandes réserves de lithium se concentrent dans le triangle des Andes: Bolivie, Argentine, Chili. Or le lithium carbonate est l’élément le plus important pour les batteries qui sont dans nos portables, nos PC et demain sous les capots de nos véhicules électriques.

Avant de parler de géopolitique de Lithium, de tirer la sonnette d’alarme sempiternelle des réserves fossiles limitées, il faut faire considérer ces éléments:

- Le besoin en lithium par batterie reste tout de même limité
- D’autres technologies pourraient venir remplacer les batteries Li Ion horizon 2020-2030.
- La hausse du prix du lithium combinée aux exigences en terme de recyclabilité des voitures pourraient entraîner l’émergence d’une filière de recyclage.
- D’autres gisements et ressources non conventionnelles peuvent apparaître, notamment au Tibet, aux Etats Unis, en Australie, etc. Encore faut-il s’assurer d’une extraction qui fait sens économiquement.

Voir ici, là et encore là.

We know that pressure on talent hunting and management is increasing in the world. Every developed economy encourages investments in R&D and universities infrastructure to keep an advance on emerging countries and to enter into the “Knowledge society” age. Does the future of capitalism revolves around these two colliding trends : competitive laborism and knowledge society?

Extract from a recent HBR article by Michael Yaziji :

The leaders of publicly traded companies are beholden to the capital markets. Just consider the relentless pressure to meet the quarterly numbers. There once was a solid logic to this arrangement, but it no longer holds. The very logic that originally gave rise to free-market, competitive capitalism now supports free-market, competitive laborism—a system in which those who work for a firm reap most of the residual returns and have the greatest decision-making authority within it. This arrangement makes sense in terms of ethics and competitiveness.

Two hundred years ago, an individual investor might take the bulk of his assets and plunk it down in a factory. The factory would hire day laborers and pay them a day’s wage. Who took the biggest risk in this enterprise and therefore ethically had a claim to any residual profits? The guy who put down the capital. And who had the biggest incentive to ensure the success of the factory? Capital. And who had the best information about the business and the greatest power to ensure the effective implementation of decisions about its operations? Capital. That’s the logic of capitalism: Those who take the biggest risks should be the controlling owners and receive the residual profits for reasons of both ethics and competitiveness.
Times have changed. Today individual shareholders are so diversified that they rarely bear substantial risk in the individual firms in which they invest. If one of the countless businesses in which you invest through your pension plan or mutual funds loses 50% of its market cap, there is a good chance you won’t know about it. (Do you even know the names of all the companies you invest in?)
But what if the firm you work for lost half its market cap? You’d be pretty anxious. In the company where you work, you’ve made large investments that you can’t diversify away, such as learning the business, building relationships, and creating a reputation. Today the big risk taker is labor, not capital. The same logic of ethics and competitiveness that once supported shareholder value maximization now leads to the conclusion that firms should focus on maximizing returns for labor.
This isn’t an argument for a wholesale shifting of profits from capital to the talent working for a firm. To stay in business, after all, firms need to give market rates of return to all those who provide critical inputs—labor, capital, customers, and so on. If a firm doesn’t give a risk-adjusted rate of return to investors, it won’t be able to attract and retain capital and will fail. Likewise, a firm must provide a market rate of return to labor, in the form of competitive employment contracts and working conditions. Finally, a firm must deliver an attractive value proposition to customers or it will not sell its products. But after all stakeholders providing critical input receive their market rates of return, laborism theory says that labor should get the bulk of the residuals.
If those with the greatest risk are most motivated to ensure that a firm remains competitive, then we expect that companies with a primarily laborist governance structure will tend to have an advantage. This thinking jibes with many executives’ gut sense that strategic decisions driven by the short-term demands of the capital markets don’t optimize long-term competitiveness. In fact, many highly successful legal and consulting firms are structured so that profits and decision-making authority are distributed to the partners, a subset of labor. Similarly, many leading German and Japanese companies are directed by boards that represent both labor and capital.
Interestingly, competitive laborism theory also aligns with the mainstream strategic thinking that says that only firms with unique and valuable resources or capabilities will gain and maintain competitive advantage. Capital is a fungible, nondifferentiating resource that rarely provides a competitive edge. Today it’s labor’s generation and use of knowledge that is the greatest source of advantage for most firms. It makes perfect sense that those contributing the most valuable resource—labor—should make the decisions and have the rights to residual returns.