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January 31, 2006

Peace be unto those who brand the networks of Messrs DeSkilling 

Come the man come the hour- with the Enron trial and debates around Mr Skilling and his alumni at Enron, Andersen and McKinsey to link but three, it seemed time for KMEurope - Beyond's main knowledge of management weblog - to ask you to help us by nominating case openings through which we can see the networks of Messrs DeSkilling

The first badwilled one I accidentally started mapping began in 1998:

Case 3 Mr Maxwell

Ironically for a mathematician, whose only work is to try to help people and organsiations value deep trust and action learnings multipiers for sustaining human progress -peoples economics mapped through the exponential wealth our open human collaborations can compound and network, my worst ever career move began in 1988-1989. This was when:-

I joined a big 5 accountant because foolishly I believed they want to build on my experience of modelling local markets worldwide, the leadership (future history ) scenarios of networking and globalisation models that my father and I co-authored on a 1984 future history to 2020, and the entrreneurial revolution circles we have been hosting, 2006 being the 30th birthday party circles of my dad's publication of Entrepreneurial Revolution in The Economist.
I had left a company I loved working for doing deep market modelling work in over 30 countries the day Robert Maxwell bought a controlling share in it. A few weeks earlier after the youthful exuberance 8 years of working night and day on jobs that at the timed seemed to be about helping to innovate stuff people urgently needed, I had been promoted as a director of the company I left but I was unaware that French law permitted 2 boards one of whome did the Maxwell deal before I even heard of it. So I needed a new job and innocently assumed that globalsiation accounting for markets might be important for mathematical transparency especillay knowing how revolutionary service and network economy scenarios looked liked being. I was about my fifth day in this Big 5 accountant as senior consultant for valuing intangibles of brand amd markets, that I got a very ominous signal. I had been invited as part of my first 10 days initiation to have a cup of tea with the senior partner of our division. There jutting out of the front of his desk was a framed letter from Robert Maxwell: I recommmend Big 5 firm XXX because they always do exactly what I tell them to do.

Of course at the time, all I knew I disliked was the sort of ruin of deeply contextual market research (which needed a lot of iteratuive human questioning and not just number crunching to get at any expoentail dynamic more interactive than linera separation). This ruin of the mathematics of hi-trust market relationship info was coming in because collecting more and more data was the big money spinner the more the data collection companies and computer salesfolk teamed up. A couple of years later Max jumped off his yacht when it was found that he had doubly gambled - both doing a sort of CEO's Nick Leeson or covering one bad bet with another over a compound period of time and by playing with the company's pension funds. It amazes me that given such a clear early warning case of what can go wrong with global auditing when it is subservient to the big boss client, that for almost a decade and a half now pensioners rights haven got better in most democratic countries, nor has governance of intangibles valuation judged by transparent mathematical maps of what future exponentials global market sectors are compounding. But then Macs like I are just humble mathematicians -seeking to value space, resolve conflicts befopre they destroy trust and deeply purposeful relationship systems, and empower people who have a deep passion for contextual knowledge and helping others to web a difference around it can ask open questions without fear or favour - not a smart Max

I guess this is not just my cv but archetypal of any transparency mapmaker: if you know of project work for Macs not Max, our webs and networks love to hear from you at wcbn007@easynet.co.uk
Chris Macrae , World Class Business/Brand Networks
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2006- Our 6 monthly report from Beyond Transparency Readers Chapter of Beyond-Branding Book

The Unseen Wealth Crises of such badwill-led empires as Enron and Anderson have not yet been fixed. However what has happened is recognition that the world needs a new organisational typology - citizen orgs (or some such synonym). Before everyone jumps on the co-brandwagon or rebrands themselves as an organisation all citizens can trust, we have an opportunity to charter or certify how true citizen orgs are uniquely governed to transparency compound the interests of all they make service promises to or whose societal resources they use. Join us here http:/civil-society.blogspot.com These are exciting times if you connect this with the 6 transparency and Beyond leaders and their 16 dvds which you can sample here or find out more about at CS-blog. The DVDs include what World Social Forum founder's lifelong interest is - Beyond Corporate Social Responsibility, and how the world's leading transparency network is fighting corruption in 80 countries. Meanwhile, I am exploring with anyone who wishes to sail into a perfect storm how to go beyond economics. I will be surveying shareholders of The Economist (where my dad Norman Macrae worked through his lifetime as economics and future systems editor) to see if anyone still wants to live up to Scottish founder James Wilson's 1840s mission for The Economist and the truth school of economic journalism he developed as one of the 19th C world champions for social entrepreneurship. Do contact us if you have a collaboration idea to map on how to explore Beyond Economics
C.M.Macrae.72@cantab.net (CM1) and N.A.Macrae.42@cantab.net (NM1) ... aSIN: association Sustainability Investment Networks http://www.bbc.co.uk/dna/actionnetwork/A4205819  
If any single person has done (knowingly or unknowingly) more to kill off trust in the profession of global branding than Ken Lay who died today, then I'd sure like to be aware of whom you think that is.

Let's list some of the achievements of badwill branding's greatest executional mix:

Sustainability of our species depends on goodwill networks winning out the war over badwill networks. Enron's branding's crimes were so vast (but in his time so praised) that thousands of CEOs have been infected, through a plague of global consultants who never had any idea of beyond branding's exponentially real consequences

so we greenwash corporate responsibility tables - Enron had PR'd its way to near the top to the day before its reputation died

so we write up inspiring values and vision statements and laugh at the suckers who thought we ever intended to do anything but the exact opposite

so we compound through 80 quarters of spreadsheet mischief from a small company to a top 20 economy in the world, and 7th largest US corporate economy; we destroy every assumption of truth on which free market economics is based. We pervert capitalism until it rivals extreme communism in its dumbing down control of a nation by a few.

The branded hate propagated by Kenny Boy (and those boardrooms admiring his image) started the tailspin in the external value of the nation brand USA to be worth much less than half what it was in 1990. Who abroad knows where trust begins and ends with anything big and American any longer? This is exactly the opposite faith to what made so much of the world grateful to America for the rest of its 20th Century. It is as if Enron's cancerously fictitious values have now infected America's biggset organisational values worldwide. That's quite a chnage in fortune for one man to preside over, but it is just one more signal of how everything is becoming interconnected in the way we choose to design globalsiation.

Enron's fictitious example of compound growth gets honest CEOS in other companies sacked for not performing up to our numbers; along the way we pervert almost every type of profession

we sell billion dollar projects in developing countries by boasting that US aid is conditional and will be withdrawn if you do not buy enron; many of these projects have now become white elephants; billion dollar waste projects concering poor countries' utilities cost many thousands of lives; if anyone does not see Enron as one of the primary root causes of tensions between East and West, they need to have their analytical heads examined

What the world needs now is to turn the corner; to have zero tolerance for another Lay in any of the baordrooms of the Global 5000 corporations. Even as irreversible loss of sustainability of our species is inconveniently within sight, the world's largest governments have done nothing to resolve the Unseen Wealth accounting crisis. In an interview with the EU's number 1 funder of Unseen Wealth research in 2003, he gave me his brutally frank assessment- Chris it would take 3 Enrons in one year to wake the EU's politicians up because this is a technical subject that is not on the radar of public discontent. 23 years into opening spaces for man's greatest communications crisis, it has boils down to this.

Still you who read this are, I presume, a practitioner or opinion leader on branding. The loss of sustainability due to Unseen Wealth and the mathematical errors compounded by brand valuation are on the same storyboard. As Arthur Andersen found out if only leaders had known that risks to goodwill are multiplicative they'd proactively take different actions. They would not serially abuse transparency, let alone human sustainability. If AA had understood that billions of dollars of business stakeholder value but zero social value results in a future of billions times 0 =0 then they would probably be alive today, and Enron would never have helped bring the sustainability of people into question

In pursuit of Her Majesty's question at the end of 2005 : is (globalsiation) turning humanity on itself? She/We should pick up the phone to Tony Blair and tell him to phone Mr Bush. Now that all your old energy advisers are no more GW, who actually advises you on energy? WE demand to know from every corner of this earth http://www.motherjones.com/news/special_reports/mojo_400/76_lay.html

Readers of BB will know that when it comes to Brand Transparency I have written more, provided more validated frameworks for brand valuation and conflict resolution than anyone in the branding world. But I am not the number 1 transparency expert in the world. He says that we (whatever our profession, design or leadership facilitation method) have one last 2 year window of opportunity to get globalisation starting to spin transparency. Read his lips on this 6 minute video http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-3407997752764644269 and if after that you want to join a network of 50 brand experts who write to ask Peter Eigen how can we help with transparency international write me at chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk

May our gods be with us in these perilous times - never have so many been owed so much by so few.  
Could Billanthropy Squared be a way to change sustainability and humanity of global media for ever?

Billanthropy is The Economist's brand of Bill Gate's Microsoft2.0 -the intended antidote to spreadsheeting the world into boxes, where the poorest always get to be the human remnants (a label I dislike that a personnel director of a Big 5 accounting firm used in presentations of how HR's main competence was firing the most innovative, because innovators take more than 90 days to pay back which doesnt match CEO's rewards any longer)

Its just that Billanthropy could end up being a bit top down unless civic society ensures it open sources - a business model Bill may not be world's most experienced at, though actually I am confident he will be. so what's the first step in Bill Squared?

I think I have innovated a way forward to get any deeply concerned virtual community to debate which Change The World (CTW) methods it values most, or even wholly knows of

if you have a minute to test browse, click here

I can't recall if you have to register before it will let you see; this is the community space where nearly 15000 people interested in exploring microfinace communicate thanks to the gracious hosting of Piere and Pam Omidyar

Naturally since they are among the most innovative CTW resources of 2006, this is also a no-cost marketing format that aims to get people to have a look at Ashoka's 16 global academy videos -or any other entrepreneurially revolutionary methods - and debate how they can be related to other significant happenings like how civil society can influence Billanthropy - the world's biggest philanthropist's web, or getting Blair's people's judges on the G8's promises to Africa connected everywhere humanitarians chatter. The latter is particularly urgent if we are to succeed in furthering Grajew's 2 aims on Africa as I understand them:

*make the world social forum in Kenya in January more exciting for economic reform than the world economic forum; not too difficult if we remember to politely ask schwab to collaborate
*up the annual ante for global corporates who do or dont join benchmarking syndicates on sustainability valuation

------
note: of course what can be laid out is constrained by the lowest common denominator of what virtual community software permits- so I realise the format isn't the prettiest in the world- but a question for you- what other virtual communities should this conversation format be tested in next?

cheers
chris macrae
301 881 1655  
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