Toxic Consumption — toys

An article this morning in the local paper — The Ottawa Citizen — caught my eye. You can read the article here;  it is planned as a three part series that looks at how illegal toxins (like lead) get into child’s toys….

Of course, there is nothing unique about toys and toxins — the article series itself looks to be specifically focused on the toy industry, supply chain management, and Health Canada regulations as they relate to the toy industry. However, for “toys” replace “food”, “automotive parts”, “cosmetics”, or just about any other product or service — they all have the same basic constructs as the toy industry which includes a global supply chain with myriad suppliers and sub-suppliers, paper-based inspection criteria and lots of self-regulation requirements, and strong profit motives which create incentives to “cut corners”.

More on this entry as the newspaper series continues…

BP: When a “wake-up call” probably isn’t

There is lots of discussion about how the current BP Gulf of Mexico situation is a “wake up call” for the government and for Big Oil. We said the same thing about the banks and the global economic meltdown of 2007/08.  It is not that I don’t think that we will evolve our regulations over the

More on the BP disaster

Just posted this comment to the Economist, after reading the latest article on the BP disaster and the mounting costs. The article is here; here is my posted comment:

Business reform, not (just) bank reform

Now that the economic meltdown of 2007-2009 is starting to shrink away in our rear-view mirror, all the talk through the US, the EU, the G20, and various other camps is centered on “bank reform”. Whether we’re talking about new taxes on them, regulation around capital limits, compensation caps or the like, we’re still only talking about the banks and regulating their “performance”.  While I certainly don’t disagree with the concept of reforming the banks, I think we aren’t looking holistically enough at what is really going on. We need “business reform”, not (just) bank reform.

Labour unrest… in China

A couple of news items struck me as note-worthy over the past couple of days. One was the rash of suicides at the Foxcomm plant in China (where they make iPhones for Apple), and the other was the recent strike by Honda workers in China over their wages.

Costs, the Market, and BP

One of my major beliefs (and the rationale behind much of the philosophy of the Business Detox Project) is that the world would be a much better place if we worked to price “externalities” into our market transactions. The current fiasco that is playing out in the Gulf of Mexico with BP provides a real-life case where we explore what this might look like.

Reform, withdraw, or “damn the torpedos, full speed ahead!”

In a recent blog entry “Money’s Hunger”, Guardian newspaper columnist George Monbiot ponders the quandry we’re in by asking: “Industrial civilisation is trashing the environment. Should we try to reform it or just watch it go down?” (his blog at www.monbiot.com is well worth reading on a regular basis).

Essentially, he challenges the underlying assumptions of the Dark Mountain Project, which an early entry in Wikipedia introduces as:  “Believing that ‘civilisation as we have known it is coming to an end; brought down by a rapidly changing climate, a cancerous economic system and the

A challenge with food labeling…

As one indicator of the challenge of having accurate and consumer-friendly (ie: useful to the lay person) labeling, the Canadian Food Inspection Agency is now consulting with various groups to

Results-Only Work (ROWE)

I heard an interesting interview on CBC radio a couple of days ago — it was a discussion of ROWE, which stands for Results Only Work Environment: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ROWE

In a nutshell, ROWE is attempting to break the concept of paying an hourly rate (or essentially

Some straightforward solutions

In earlier posts, I’ve laid out in some detail the “problems” that businesses generate in our society, which are both intended and unintended consequences of the construction of our market economy. The solutions to these challenges are straightforward, and based on directly addressing these three ironies that are at the heart of how businesses are engineered to function: