Looking Down Upon the World, London, England

A nice, but misguided, attempt to connect the principles behind Umair Haque’s Zombieconomy to our choices of how to travel, followed by a bit of a rant.

Lonely Planet, Zombie Travel:

For what shall it profit travellers, if they visit the whole world without experiencing it fully?

The Lonely Planet community has always been about Independent Travel. Our success is being able to empower curious people to get to the heart of a place, whether by getting around on public transport, getting beyond the tourist traps, supporting local businesses, or relating to the wonderful and the everyday in every destination. But a lot of travellers are unaware of the benefits of Independent Travel, and instead support Zombie Travel.

What is Zombie Travel?

It’s a part of the larger Zombieconomy. Harvard Business Review [actually, Umair Haque) describes the Zombieconomy as being ‘built on McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes’. In other words, it is the products and lifestyles that don’t add value to our lives. In fact, they take away value. They destroy our standard of living, the environment, and minority cultures, and distract us from adding real value to our lives.

Yes, but I have a quibble coming…

So Zombie Travel is the vacation spent all day, every day on the beach getting skin cancer, instead of learning even a little about the local culture and history; it is drinking at Irish pubs in France instead of finding a family run brasserie or cafe; it is staying only at cloned five-star international hotel chains, instead of trying a locally owned guesthouse; it is going on an air-conditioned coach tour of a city, rather than creating your own walking tour.

In short, Zombie Travel is typically luxury without value.

Yes, but no.

Zombie travel is travel without conscious thought.

The mistake: a misguided interpretation of Haque’s thoughts. The Zombieconomy is not created by the products themselves but the resource allocation processes that leads to short-sighted, misplaced production and consumption decisions based on perceived, “thin”, short-term value, neglecting real, “thick”, long-term value.

If someone truly values getting a suntan all day, or lounging in a Starbucks in Beijing, or eating at 7-11 in Japan, and makes those choices consciously, because they truly enjoy those experiences, than who are we to judge?

People are entitled to the right to experience a place and a destination in their own way, for their own reasons, safe from judgment. All travelers are created equal.

“McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes” are example of poor decisions, but they are not the root cause of the problem; the problem is how business and society accounts for and values the costs and benefits of our actions. Systems that take a limited, non-holistic view of costs and benefits create economic incentives that misallocate resources, attention, and actions, creating unending patterns of destructive behavior.

In short, “luxuries without value” aren’t an issue if people make conscious decisions based on a holistic accounting of their true value.

Focusing on “McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes” might be an easier way to communicate the idea, but it is still misleading; neglecting to focus on the root processes and causes of our mistakes dooms us to repeat our mistakes in new ways.

I tend to avoid Irish pubs in France, five-star hotels and air-conditioned coach tours, but for my own, personal, conscious reasons. In the end, the fruits of your life are the only validation you need.

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Updated 7.24.2009
A friend justifiably asked me today to explain myself better on one point:

“McMansions, Hummers, and $5 lattes” are example of poor decisions, but they are not the root cause of the problem; the problem is how business and society accounts for and values the costs and benefits of our actions.

Many of our decisions behind what we produce (companies) and consume (people) impact people not directly involved in the transaction, creating positive and negative externalities.

Systems that take a limited, non-holistic view of costs and benefits create economic incentives that misallocate resources, attention, and actions, creating unending patterns of destructive behavior.

Since prices do not reflect the full costs or benefits in production or consumption, either too little or too much of a good is produced and consumed in relation to the full benefit and cost to society. In essence, society bears some of the costs (or accrues some of the benefits) to individuals’ decisions. More holistic methods of accounting gives more complete information for people to evaluate what they consume, pay attention to (e.g. choice of media), and what they spend their time producing (e.g. jobs, careers).

How does behavior change? What will help or make us change our decisions?

• Account for the full costs and benefits of our actions,
• Structure that information for individuals, groups and society,
• Create systems that enable us to (and force us to) use that information as we weigh our decisions.

Systems shape our behavior by creating economic inventives for particular actions: for example, tax policy in the USA is a primary example of how the government subsidizes and taxes certain behaviors in an attempt to influence the decisions we make.

While our decisions about what we buy and produce change constantly, the incentives that frame those decisions are far less malleable; the fact that our decisions change does not guarantee that we’re actually any better. Without understanding the incentives shaping our behavior we are doomed to repeat the mistakes of our past.

Continuing with Umair101…

Video: Sander Duivestein, Penny For Your Thoughts with Umair Haque from the VINT Symposium.

Since I couldn’t find a transcript, I decided to do it myself; click here to view the video (embedding not allowed); or read my transcript below (all errors are mine, not Umair’s…)

Penny For Your Thoughts – Umair Haque from Sander Duivestein on Vimeo.

Umair Haque:

What’s really different about the world today is the fact that we’re much more interconnected. And when we’re more interconnected, we’re more interdependent.

And so the question is, in this radically interdependent world, how do we have to behave to create real value, to create authentic value. Because until we can answer that question, we’re going to see the crisis that we’ve got today, actually intensify. What it really is a kind of a crisis in the way that our organizations behave. So what that means is, we see across industries this pattern of kind of self-defeating, or self-destructive, or value-destructive behaviour, because they don’t know how to do, how to behave any other way.

And we don’t seem to be able to overcome that pattern; and so until we can overcome that pattern, I think that the crisis that we see today, even if we bail ourselves out of it, by bailing out the banks, by bailing out the automakers, the crisis will keep on repeating itself, across industries; it will keep on going on until we answer that problem, of very very self-destructing behavior; and so they’re kind of zombies.

They know that they have to behave differently to create real value, but they don’t know how to do that, because they haven’t been organized and built in a way to do it.

It’s kind of in their very DNA, because the question is not one of strategy, not one of competition but one of institutions. And unless you realize that institutions are what you have to change, you wind up as kind of as a zombie.

Why do we see these patterns of destructive behavior going on? I think the reason is actually very simple: capitalism in the way we built it today kind of undercounts costs and overcounts benefits. Many of the costs that we’re now becoming more and more familiar with – social costs, environmental costs, human costs, the costs of unfairness – and it overcounts benefits, that’s kind of a structural flaw, the heart of the way that we built capitalism itself. And what that translates into is that we see this pattern of behavior of where I strive to make myself better off but I’m indifferent to whether you are better off. And if I can do that, then the result is very, very small amounts of real value that are being created, and today we’re facing that fact.

The way that we should think about it in the 21st century is that we create the world through out action and through our behavior.

So the world is kind of a function of what we do. And when we act in one way, we create one kind of industry, one kind of environment, one kind of world; and when we act in another way, we can create a very different kind of environment, or industry, or world. And so I think the question of “how do we respond to the world”, we have to think about the fact that we are responsible for the actions that we take, because those actions then go on to create the kind of world that then comes back to effect us. And so the challenge in the 21st century is learning to create authentic value, real value.

So my question would be is how many of your innovations are really not innovations, how many are really unnovations.

So I think the most important question companies can ask themselves today is are we innovating, or are we doing exactly the opposite? Is what we are doing really an improvement?

(Hat tip to Jon Bischke for the pointer to the video.)

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More Umair101:

• Beyond the massconomy, humanity wins.
• A collection of my favorite posts and insights from Umair using delicious, tagged “umair101″. Tag your own links and insights with “umair101″ to help us get an understanding of which posts and insights were most “mind-blowing” to you.
• And, for a more curated and collaborative look at “Umair 101″ insights, check out the wiki on Core Edges and contribute with the posts and specific insights that were most important for you in understanding Umair Haque.

Starting with three connected insights from Umair Haque on humanity, redux…

Umair Haque, 2005, Is Content King?:

… eroded barriers to production … mean micromedia atomizes traditional value chains, exploding the content network at the edges, and massively creating new value…

Umair Haque, 2007, Research Note: The Death of 1%:

… assuming only x% of people will become active prosumers blinds us to a stark reality. That reality is this: almost everyone is a prosumer of something. Everyone has just a handful of things they really love. In the very near future, everyone will prosume the things they love. In this world, worrying about 1% or 10% audience/prosumer ratio is to utterly miss the deeper strategic lesson.

Umair Haque, 2006, Edge Patterns 7: Messy Beats Clean (Or, Why LinkedIn Will Never Be Myspace):

Today, streamlining is cheap, fast, and easy. … Which means today’s radical innovators are going in a very different direction. Fundamentally, deeply, in their very essence: they’re messy, not clean.

… In other words, in the post-network economy, (re)learning how to create value is going to be, in large part, about getting messy.

… Forget about economies and cost-cutting and trimming the fat – because that stuff’s a commodity. … What is a basis for advantage is exploding what was clean and streamlined yesterday: unlocking new possibilities for value creation which are messy because interactions at the edge are richer, deeper, riskier, and, ultimately, human.

But reading and accepting (or disagreeing) insights and lessons isn’t enough; think about how to apply them to your industry, business and life. Start asking questions rather than just looking for answers; start imagining, make a mess, start hacking, and above all, have fun. In a world beyond the massconomy organized by markets, networks and communities, “good beats evil”, love beats fear, and humanity “pays”.

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• I’ve been collecting some of my favorite posts and insights by Umair using delicious, tagged “umair101″; check it out if you’re interested in forward-thinking strategy, using core economic principles to construct strategies for a discontinuous future.
• For a more curated look at “Umair 101″ insights, check out the wiki on Core Edges with selections from (so far) Julien Le Nestour (@jnestour), Jake Kaldenbaugh, Ethan Bauley (@ethanbauley), Nicolas Gabard (@nicolasgabard) and Alexis Rodich…