Leadership & Business: Herds of Elephants

Interesting Innovations

Street Heat:
Ever burn your foot walking on hot asphalt in the summer? That’s because black absorbs heat—while white reflects it. Well, in case you haven’t noticed, modern cities are covered in the black stuff. Dutch construction firm Ooms is now heading its headquarters by running water pipes under the street. Some of them collect heat in the summer and run deep into the ground where they heat water via a heat exchanger. That heated water is stored for winter—a sort of battery, if you will. In fact to take it a step further, the water is returned to the ground after heating the building, by passing under the street again. The residual heat in the water, now only a few degrees above freezing, melts any snow or ice on the road surface. The water is then stored—used cold to cool the building—before being run under the asphalt again to prepare for winter. Brilliant!

Everyone understands the expression, “The elephant in the room.” The phrase is an idiom for something that is obvious, but mostly ignored. It refers to a situation in which there is an elephant in a room with people, which would be impossible to ignore; yet they choose to ignore it anyway.

In today’s world, we are facing the equivalent of a herd of elephants in the room. That is to say that there are many, many issues that politicians, economists, and even the population at-large simply choose to ignore. The reason, for the most part, is that none of us like to accept hopeless situations, and in many cases if the real issues were put on the table, a great sense of hopeless defeat might set in. So instead, our human psyche allows us to ignore the issue altogether.

Over the next few weeks I will talk about each elephant in the herd. Some elephants are bigger than others, but it doesn’t matter. All elephants are big. And we can’t afford to ignore any of them.

The most obvious elephant: Healthcare. What are we ignoring? We're ignoring the fact that healthcare rationing is reality. It happens today. It happens every day. It will happen tomorrow. Universal healthcare is inevitable. That doesn't make me a proponent. I'm not. But it is inevitable. Unfortunately, universal healthcare won’t solve any problems. It will just move the problems around.

Government deficits will continue to grow. Our government is a effectively a giant ponzi scheme, and all ponzi schemes ultimately fail. There are insufficient checks and balances in economics (the FED was an attempt). The founders didn’t envision such economic challenges. Legal challenges and tyranny, yes. But not such economic problems. Accordingly, our constitution doesn’t provide for checks and balances in economics and as a result, we can't avoid the ponzi scheme.

The next elephant: Immigration. (I’ve talked about this elephant before). Without immigration we can't solve most of our problems.

The last one: The recession (depression) has many years to go…

I'll describe each elephant in more detail. In the mean time, my advice is that everyone buy an elephant gun. Until we start shooting elephants, things are only goign to get worse.

Comments

Good kick-of for an interesting series of posts.
Will keep my eye on this!

Posted by: Vladimir Dzalbo | August 10, 2009 at 01:35 PM

Great Info! Thanks for the post!

Posted by: Jessica | October 08, 2009 at 01:29 PM

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