Hey, y’all. Every once in a while I try to send an edition of my weekly Wise Economy Telescope to people who are subscribed for the free version of the Wise Fool, the Wise Economy Workshop’s newsletter.
Why?
There’s an enormous amount of information out there that’s showing us what this emerging Fusion Economy is going to demand from our communities (and from us as volunteers or professionals). But those data points are mostly hidden in the articles that you’re likely to miss in your daily browsing.
So I find and unpack those for you every week, which means that you can think ahead about what you and your community can be doing to thrive in the face of Big Change.
Paid subscribers also get:
A monthly Ask Me Anything session,
The quarterly AccelerateUS Journal, and
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Subscriptions are a measly $5/month, but you can get the full Wise Economy Substack experience for 20% off — only $4/month! — with this link.
I’m also giving a free 6 months’ subscription to anyone who invites a new paid subscriber — and you can give them the same link to make it an even better deal!
So I hope you’ll become a paid subscriber. The biggest challenges to thriving in the Fusion Economy have to do with our thinking and our ability to change, and feeding those skills has never mattered more.
Thanks. Enjoy, and let me know what you think!
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I’ve got some stories this week that particularly illustrate how the future is pretty much in our lap right now. From the youngest generation’s navigation of a textbook VUCA employment landscape, to borrowing humans (wait… that doesn’t sound right…) there’s some interesting stuff below.
Gen Z Entrepreneurship
This surprised me a little, even though I live more of my life in Gen Z world than I ever expected:
According to a recent survey conducted by EY Ripples and JA Worldwide of 6,000 active and former JA Worldwide participants born between 1997 and 2007, 53% hope to run their own business within the next ten years. That proportion increases to 65% for those who have already entered the workforce.
This extremely favorable view of entrepreneurship is the result of a confluence of push and pull factors. On the one hand, the traditional pathway to career success—namely higher education and climbing the corporate ladder—has never felt more out of reach or less certain. At the same time, startup costs are plummeting, the pool of resources entrepreneurs can tap into is ballooning, and casual experimentation with entrepreneurship has never been easier.
“The results of the survey show that this generation yearns for careers that enable ‘original thought and ideas,’ which ranked higher than any other characteristic for Gen Z in describing elements of their ideal career,” explains Asheesh Advani, the CEO of JA Worldwide. “Entrepreneurship delivers on this promise of creative control.”
You should read the whole article, but there’s a good deal to unpack in even just this selection.
First, there seems to be a strong sense of independence and DIY (the next section of the article cites that as a key generational characteristic), which is in part born out of a sense of not being able to trust conventional institutions, like big businesses. And the importance of being able to contribute “original thought and ideas” - without them being ignored or pooh-poohed, I might add - tells us a lot about what they are prioritizing.
Second, the approach that this survey appears to indicate to entrepreneurship, vs. working for others, is… more of a Yes-And than an Either-Or. That is, having a corporate job does not prevent me from having a side gig, or making a living through multiple part time gigs. That fits with the Continuum characteristics we’ve observed in the emerging Fusion Economy. It’s much more about a person crafting a unique direction that feels right and fits with their reality than about committing to an Organization Man path.
There’s a potential downside, however, for people who are trying to grow local economies: growing a scaleable company that becomes an employer might be less on the minds of these founders than conventional VC-style entrepreneurship approaches assume. “Lazer focus” on building the business might not be so much of a priority for these founders, since that would require giving up their other options. That, in turn, means that self-employment, and even part-time businesses, may need to receive more attention from economic development and entrepreneurship agencies (right now they’re usually ignored by those organizations). And I think it means that our economic development and entrepreneurship support organizations will have to rethink their definition of a “worthwhile” business — and redesign their services to better fit this opportunity.
Third, this priority represents a huge sleeper challenge for hundreds of your community’s current anchor businesses. Outside of a few Fortune 100 companies that have been investing in this transition for a decade or more, I see very few employer businesses (think under 5,000 employees, but I’ve seen the same in much larger companies) treating their employees like they want to be treated. Even among those that trumpet their committment to innovation, the right to “original thoughts and ideas” is ignored for all but a small elite, and when someone is brave enough to raise one, middle management and corporate structures are usually designed to shut it down. There’s a powerful story about this in Undercurrent #3 of The Local Economy Revolution Has Arrived — you can listen to me read it here. But the takeaway here is that the struggle to find and keep talent is going to demand something profoundly different from the way we do it today.
This generation, as well as the Millenials and whoever is coming up next, will force us to deeply redesign both our business-supporting public policy, and our businesses themselves. And I don’t think we’re ready for either of those challenges, at all.
I’m thinking that part of what economic development and entrepreneurship agencies should be doing is helping existing businesses change their operations to make them more appealing to the Talent they need. What do you think?
New perspectives on transparency, engagement & incentive management practices
I don’t get into the incentives debates much anymore because I feel like the important points have been made…. even though the acting on those learnings has been pretty lousy in most quarters. But this summary of a couple of studies in Ellen Harpel’s Smart Incentives newsletter opened a whole new dimension for me. In writing about a study on the role of transparency in incentives, she notes:
Transparency here does not mean basic information disclosure but incorporates open systems and processes in which community members can participate and influence decisions that will affect them.
As Ellen notes, this is hugely important for community acceptance — and it aligns with the Fusion Economy demand for transparency, and the Future-Ready necesity of including the widest range of perspectives possible to actually find the good solution that the conventional leaders have failed to come up with to date. Avoiding transparency will only get harder and harder as these trends come to the forefront in the next few years.
As she points out, engaging the community in making the decisions about what to incentivize and how makes the difference between incentives that build the community’s strength and resilience, and incentives that drown the community in conflict, debt, poor employment and more.
Now, I know it’s easy for people who deal with these issues, especially economic developers, to say that the public never shows up when they ask for feedback, or that they don’t really understand the situation. I would argue that they probably understand some things that we don’t, and that they have learned from our predecessors that it’s not worth it to come, because they won’t be heard. If you want to get deeper into the mismatch between how we conventionally do public participation, and our communities are demanding, check out my 2015 book, Crowdsourcing Wisdom.
What do you think? How do you think we can make incentives more transparent — and thus less controversial?
Good Ideas: Human Library
I’ve found that one of the most important ways to become Future-Ready is to learn to understand and build empathy with people who are different from ourselves. The Fusion Economy is demanding that skill of all of us, so it’s to our benefit to expand our horizons now.
A Denmark-based organization called the Human Library holds events that allow people to “check out” someone who is different from them for a 30 minute conversation. People who make themselves available for check out may be refugees, disabled, ethnic minorities, LGBTQIA+ or others that are “often subjected to prejudice, stigmatization or discrimination because of their lifestyle, diagnosis, belief, disability, social status, ethnic origin etc.” There are ground rules for both “Book” and “Reader,” and either can walk away if they don’t like what’s going on.
The Human Library organization has been in operation since 2000, and dozens of public and university libraries in the US and Canada are part of the initiative. Check out humanlibrary.org to learn more.
Updates from the Wise Economy network
Trep House has begun the process of pitching to potential partners and sponsors. The new deck is here. If you’re interested in bringing Trep House to your community, or sponsoring our events or our most deserving members, let’s talk.
I know I mentioned this last week, but I’m really delighted so far with the new video series, Know Better, Do Better produced with the support of the American Independent Business Alliance. If you have not caught the first episode, featuring digital wizard Nahamani Yisrael, queue ‘er up! Or listen — it’s the newest item on the Building a Wise Local Economy podcast, available at Soundcloud or on whatever platform you use to get your podcasts.
I’ll be in the New Orleans area next week doing a strategy development for mitigation of the impacts of a new port terminal on a historically Black community for the International Economic Development Council. Yes, NOLA in August. I’m a genius. I will be sharing livestream video on YouTube, Facebook and LinkedIn whenever I’m able and have something potentially useful to say, and/or I’m not a frizzified sweat-soaked train wreck. I’ll also have some observations here next week. But next week’s edition might be a couple of days late. I’ll do my best.
We’ve been doing this weekly newsletter and the other Substack benefits for a few months now, and I hope you’re enjoying the content. But I think it would be more fun if we can get more people subscribed and get more live events going. So, let’s try a promotion!
If you invite others to subscribe to this newsletter, I’ll give you 6 months free subscription for every new subscriber who names you. How’s that for a good deal? And on top of that, they can get 20% off the annual subscription with this link: http://wiseeconomy.substack.com/c5258534
Your support has been invaluable to getting this initiative started. I literally can’t do it without you. And now that I think we’ve got the flow, it's time to connect more people to Future-Ready thinking and doing.
Della