November 27, 2011
Back to the Future – Return of the Extended Family Household
The US housing market is still moribund. New single family home sales were only 323,000 last year, the lowest since records began being kept by the Commerce Department. On top of that, the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey reports that 2010 household formations, at about 981,000, were still significantly below the 2004 high of 1.48 million. Both numbers represent troubling news for home builders.
However, according to a recent article in BusinessWeek, some builders may have found a profitable new niche in an otherwise bleak market – the multi-generational home. These are residences that cater to families where multiple generations are living under one roof. Pulte, the nation’s largest builder by revenue, is offering new homes with stand-alone smaller units or the option of converting garages to “casitas,” the Spanish word for small houses. Other Pulte features to accommodate extended families include ground-floor master bedrooms for elderly family members who can’t climb stairs.
The reason builders see this as a new opportunity is evident from the numbers in a recent study by the Pew Research Center, The Return of the Multi-Generational Family Household. Multi-generational living arrangements were common up until the 1950’s, then declined. Since the 1980’s, however, such households have grown steadily, and in 2010 it is estimated that 51 million American households (16.7% of total households) were in this category.
The economic and social factors cited in the Pew study are informative:
- Both men and women are marrying at a later age, 28 and 26, respectively. This is about 5 years later than in 1970. For these 20-somethings, home may be the best living situation in a down economy where it is difficult to find a job or launch a career.
- Immigration also is a big factor. First- and second-generation immigrants are the most likely to live with extended families.
- The Great Recession, in particular, has hastened the return of the extended family. Adult children may need to move back in with their parents for economic reasons.
- Older family members are moving in with their Baby Boomer children due to ill health, widowhood or financial necessity (e.g., declining health coverage due to cutbacks in Medicare programs).
These trends illustrate the shifting context in which the American dream is played out. The extended family residence is just one more way that Americans are dealing with the Great Recession. Whatever the economic and social fallout from this new family togetherness, the builders will happily oblige by filling our need with the latest version of the mother-in-law apartment.
November 25, 2011
The Penn State Scandal – An Ethical Meltdown
There are many dimensions to leadership. One of those is an ethical dimension, which often remains unacknowledged until circumstances conspire to bring it into full public view. Consider the Penn State sex abuse scandal which exploded into our national consciousness on November 5, 2011. It is instructive because it shows how, within an institutional setting, ethical lapses can cascade, wreaking destruction like the waves of a tsunami tearing through a coastal city.
Like so many stories of child abuse, the Penn State scandal has a long timeline. The alleged abuse of young boys by former football Defensive Coordinator Jerry Sandusky began in 1994 and continued at least until 2008. After numerous complaints over a ten year period, investigations into Sandusky’s behavior began in November, 2008, and resulted in a Grand Jury report which led to his arrest on November 5, 2011.
Sandusky, 67, coached at Penn State for more than 30 years. From 1977 until his retirement last year, Sandusky had also run a foster home in State College, Pa., for troubled children called The Second Mile. Sandusky founded the organization in 1977 as a group home for troubled boys, accepting children who would benefit from positive human interaction. The charity has expanded into a statewide charity with eight chapters across Pennsylvania. Many of Sandusky’s alleged victims were boys from The Second Mile.
The buildup to Sandusky’s ultimate arrest may have been slow, but the consequences following the release of the Grand Jury report have been swift and stunning to those who were unaware of what had been taking place over the years.
In the space of a few weeks, Joe Paterno, a college football legend with more wins than any other coach in history, was fired. Tim Curley, the university’s Athletic Director resigned and was charged with perjury and failing to report suspected abuse. Gary Schultz, VP for Business and Finance resigned and was indicted for perjury and failure to report suspected abuse. Graham Spanier, President of the university was fired along with Paterno by the university’s Board of Trustees. And Jack Raykovitz, CEO of The Second Mile, was forced to resign leaving the future of the charity in doubt.
As in many such cases, there were opportunities to stop the abuse early on, but in each instance, allegations were not referred to the police. Instead, those responsible for handling the matter chose to conduct internal inquiries. This leaves a strong impression that the need to protect the victims was a lower priority than the desire to protect the institutions where the abuse took place. In the fallout that has already occurred and will continue for years to come, the institutions have been irreparably damaged.
All the individuals involved in the scandal claimed they were doing the appropriate thing, but in each case there was an ethical lapse. Joe Paterno’s case is instructive. He is easily the highest profile figure in the scandal, and came under intense pressure for his alleged primary role in the abuse scandal. He was reportedly the first to know about the alleged abuse. As Time correspondent Nick Carbone noted in a recent article:
Paterno hasn’t been charged, and the Grand Jury investigation notes that Paterno appropriately reported the abuse to a higher level, alerting Penn State Athletic Director Tim Curley about the incident. “Joe Paterno was a witness who cooperated and testified before the Grand Jury,” said Nils Frederiksen, a spokesman for the state Attorney General’s office. “He’s not a suspect.” Pennsylvania state Police Commissioner Frank Noonan also said that Paterno fulfilled his legal requirement to report the matter upon referring it to Curley.
But meeting the legal requirement is not enough in such situations; there is a more demanding moral and ethical requirement to which we are held in such cases. Meeting the legal requirement is insufficient. It is equivalent to standing by while the wrongdoing continues.
There is a lesson from the Penn State scandal for administrators, executives, and others in positions of responsibility who face similar situations. Looking the other way or passing the buck are not acceptable options. The human drive for justice and the righting of wrongs is ultimately more powerful than the money, prestige or influence of any institution or the bonds of longtime personal allegiances.
November 7, 2011
Cognitive Surplus – A Potent New Force for Social Change
The rapid growth of the Internet and the low cost of collaborative technology (e.g., Facebook and other social media) offers us an extraordinary new opportunity to apply our creative energies to the world’s problems. Clay Shirky, social media commentator and author of Here Comes Everybody, has written a book, Cognitive Surplus, which explores the implications of this.
Shirky defines cognitive surplus as the free time we have available to us. It grew out of the forty hour work week. In the second half of the last century, this cognitive surplus had few outlets and was channeled mainly into consumption. Most of our free time went into watching television. Media production costs were high; as a result, what got produced and how it got distributed was the province of experts. We were consumers, an audience, a collection of target markets.
Today the Internet and social media have given us new ways to connect and apply our creativity that are not constrained by geography or economics. Online collaborative communities can organize around the need to solve specific problems. These range from the social to the scientific. These communities tap into and are driven by the generosity and intrinsic motivations of the individuals who participate. As Shirky points out, these communities are not chaotic; members establish their own rules and governance.
The emergence of these online communities offers the tantalizing prospect of directly funneling time, talent, and energy toward the solution of social and political problems in a way that bypasses institutional inertia and politics. What’s exciting about the emergence of low cost online tools for collaboration is that they provide us with both awareness and the power to act; we become both audience and actor. For would-be social entrepreneurs who want to tap into the cognitive surplus, Shirky provides some guiding principles for successful communities, based on his study of these communities. These were nicely summarized by Valeria Maltoni over at Conversation Agent:
- Start small — See if it works, first. And the best way not to have an idea killed prematurely is by testing a small version of it, then bring results to the table.
- Ask “why?” — It’s still surprising how this is often overlooked. Why would people do this, whatever this is that you want them to do, over something else? Why will they choose you/this system?
- Behavior follows opportunity — Can you design a system that provides opportunity people understand and find valuable?
- Default to social — Social value is stronger than personal value, so allowing people to see what others are sharing and bookmarking is a better setting to encourage adoption.
- A hundred users are harder than a dozen and harder than a thousand — The middle ground between large and small can be confusing for users trying to figure out how to interact with each other.
- People differ. More people differ more — As in they will have different behaviors, things they like to do, etc., so think about tiering levels of involvement.
- Intimacy doesn’t scale — You either have large groups all paying attention to one thing, or people split into smaller active groups.
- Support a supportive culture — This taps into people’s sense of fairness.
- The faster you learn, the faster you’ll be able to adapt — And the best way to learn is by watching how people behave using the tools at hand.
- Success causes more problems than failure — Planning down to the details and potential problems you will have is a poor substitute for experience; planning won’t teach you how to solve the problem that arises while you do.
- Clarity is violence — This point is about putting process in front of experience and before its time; regulate something too soon, and you won’t know what you’re regulating.
- Try anything. Try everything — The applications are many and there is no “one-size-fits-all” approach that works in every instance.
You would be forgiven for questioning whether our cognitive surplus will actually be applied in this manner. After all, consider that Angry Birds, a popular game for smart phones, consumes 1.2 billion hours of that surplus each year. But in fact, when the surplus is so large worldwide, it doesn’t take much of a shift to make a huge difference. Using data from ComScore, Adam Hevenor created a table (see below) which shows the difference that applying just 1% of our collective average time online toward socially meaningful activities would make.
With such a potential reserve of creative energy, the prognosis for the beneficial use of our cognitive surplus is hopeful; the impact could be astounding.