I’m a big fan of Dan Lyons. Like many, I read and enjoyed his blog, The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs. Lyons understood Jobs and Silicon Valley well enough to put himself in the CEO’s shoes, but didn’t deify the man the way fanboys tend to; he clearly respected Jobs, but didn’t take him (or himself) too seriously. It’s a shame that Jobs died, but doubly so for Lyons: it would have been in bad taste to channel Steve from beyond the grave. Every journalist needs to specialize in something, and Lyons’ lens through which to write about the world was taken off the table. So he needed something new. I couldn’t be happier with the direction he’s chosen.

The world is changing at a speed never before seen, and it’s getting faster. Technology is the driving force behind this change, and Silicon Valley is one of several hotspots where this technology is being built and transformed into businesses. Facebook has changed how people all over the world connect with one another, Kickstarter is fundamentally changing how a business can get off the ground, Path did something very bad by going out of their way to download people’s address books. We need real journalists and real watchdogs to report critically on these businesses, how they’re making money, and weighing in on whether those business models, revenue streams, and ethical decisions make sense.

TechCrunch, the de-facto homepage for “news” about tech, does absolutely none of this. Lyons gets full points for pointing out, Jon Stewart style, just how terrible the state of tech journalism is–if TechCrunch and the like are any indication.

I won’t spend too much time complaining about TechCrunch, it’s terrible and has been for a while. Clicking a link and seeing techcrunch.com resolve in the address bar is always unpleasant, and sometimes morbid curiosity keeps me around to see just how bad the article is going to be. Siegler’s posts probably being the worst–he can neither think nor write.

In terms of reading tech news, nothing makes me happier than seeing that the URL I’m loading resolves to bloomberg.com, you know, real journalists. But Lyons is a real journalist too, and his opinion pieces are well-reasoned and take a stab at the big picture. We badly need more of this. Tech is too important to be left to the bloggers.

The problem is of course money. So far journalism has failed to adapt to the internet. The intermediate solution, or rather the one that’s currently working online, is the Gawker/TechCrunch business model: you can monetize page impressions, so do whatever you need to to get them. The result is a fast and continuous stream of sensational drivel.

People take information for granted. There’s a reason why companies like Gartner and Forrester can charge companies tens of thousands of dollars a year for information and expertise: at its best, this research helps them make better decisions. With techblogs, we’re getting what we’re paying for.

This isn’t a problem unique to the Valley, and no one but The Economist is having much luck staying afloat. While I agree with Paul Graham’s call to Kill Hollywood, I think an even more important project is to Save Journalism. There’s a lot of benefit to those of us who care about tech, like getting access to high quality, reliable, considered analysis, and what works in tech may work for journalism in general.

Access to good information is a public good, we all have a role in making it available.

There’s a great TED talk by essayist and Philsopher Alain de Botton called Atheism 2.0. Setting aside the atheism content of the talk, there’s a tremendously powerful idea at the heart of this talk: religious organizations have been around for a very very long time, clearly they’re doing something right in terms of organizational design. Business could learn a lot by looking at the organization and behavioral structures that make up religions. As a quick way of making this point, there’s a reason that BusinessWeek wrote a long-form piece on how efficiently run the Mormon church is: seen as a business, the church of latter day saints is masterfully run.

If we look at all religions as businesses, they have a great cost structure: many incumbents own the property they operate out of, their core product is information, and their main costs are labour, educating new labour, and property maintenance. It’s probably not a stretch to say they have no money tied up in inventory. It’s probably also fair to say that newer churches spend a bit more lavishly on marketing, which just another name for R&D about how to get young people to join up. Organizationally, most religions are bureaucracies, as are most companies. It just so happens that a bureaucracy is a very efficient way to organize employees and direct their efforts towards one specific goal or another.

Their revenue structure is variable, ranging from optional donations to the 10% tithes that many faiths expect of their adherents. They also have the enviable status of being tax exempt, meaning that each dollar of revenue is a real dollar of profit. I would also not be surprised if churches were involved in financial services or investing in some low-risk capacity.

Churches offer people a good deal of value, and we’re now seeing competition as other vendors offer those same values in one capacity or another. Here’s an incomplete list along with some pseudo competitors.

Religions offer people a powerful message about what each of our places is in the world and helps us to feel better about it. So does Starbucks. For every sermon delivered on the good life, there are probably as many customers who fully buy into the marketed belief that by patronizing their local Starbucks and paying fair trade prices for coffee, they’re using their spot in the world to do some good. There’s a fantastic short video where Slavoj Žižek explains how this practice is morally bankrupt, and the economics aren’t favourable either. The fact is that by messing with prices fair trade causes food shortages in developing economies. This is not good. All the same, people clearly want a way to feel good about their place in the world and the impact they’re having on it.

Continuing with the Starbucks example (although Apple is another great candidate), religion gives people a sense of community. Companies are now looking at ways that they can build communities engage customers for the purposes of marketing, innovation, and research and development. My friend and colleague Mike Dover wrote the authoritative book on doing this online. Research and development is great, but if people are willing to buy into a likeminded community for both the big questions of existence and their personal philosophy on coffee, surely there’s some middle ground about other important personal issues. Even software design can do this, 37signals is open about their very specific beliefs around what software should do and how it should work, and they have a vibrant community of people who feel the same way.

Clearly there are benefits to getting people involved in a community like this, as people don’t go door to door explaining something to strangers if they don’t feel strongly about the content they’re sharing. These people are also unpaid, and in fact pay their local organizations in addition to taking on marketing costs. Think how many iPhones Apple has sold because of peer pressure alone.

One of the defining characteristics of modernity is a loss of the feeling of enchantment with the world. We see this everywhere: our smartphones are so magical that we’d have been burnt at the stake in past times simply for checking facebook on one in public, yet we’re entirely blasé about the incredible things they do for us.  For thousands of years, religion has catered to some core needs that people have, and religions are, for better or worse, losing their monopoly position as the vendor to supply those needs.

As we look forward to make new businesses, we should recognize this truth about the world, people don’t just want products that solve problems or make them feel good, we should be building companies that solve hard, personal problems, and make us feel good by doing real good. This there is tremendous opportunity here, both for society and business.

This week’s Facebook IPO is the start of something strange: soon everyday people will own parts of a company whose stated mission is to undermine their privacy. As a publicly held company, Facebook really only has two ways to boost their share price: add more users, or use data mining to make each user more profitable through advertising. They’ll be doing both.

At its core, Facebook is built on the assumption that people are willing to have their private lives intimately examined by marketers in order to talk to their friends online for “free.” Is this a valid assumption? Facebook is hoping it is.

Other businesses have come and gone because their core assumptions about the world were invalid or outdated. Kodak, Blockbuster, and (soon enough) The Yellow Pages were all companies that just couldn’t accept that the world was no longer what they believed it was. These once-vibrant companies started down a hill of decline because they didn’t ask and answer the hard questions at the heart of their businesses. Given the right moment each of them could have been saved—by Philosophers.

But first, some background.

For most of history, the future looked more or less exactly like the past. This is no longer the case. The world has seen as much change in the past 50 years as it did in the previous 500. Capitalism has an interesting side effect: progress. But all this scientific, technological, and social progress has a side effect of its own, complexity and confusion, which can easily lead to incorrect assumptions about the world. Said another way, all this change has made the world easier than ever to misunderstand. Businesses need to understand the world as it is, because capitalism rewards understanding.

This may sound abstract, but everything in the world started out as an idea: democracy, capitalism, even the computer you’re reading this on right now. Ideas are tools that we use to model the real world and structure events around principles that our minds can grasp. Businesses are ideas too—in a much more significant way than a balance sheet or shareholder report might suggest. And businesses, like all ideas, are built.

Like building a house, there are right and wrong ways to build an idea. A house needs to reflect facts about the real world to survive earthquakes, floods, and keep the people inside warm and alive. In the same way, an idea or business model needs to be consistent with itself and the world at large. And like a poorly built house, an idea that isn’t consistent with reality will collapse under its own weight. A successful business is built on the competent execution of good assumptions; it’s able to recognize and adapt to changes in the world.

For bad ideas and business models, it used to be that failure from inconsistencies took some time; competition was slow and expectations were low. But the speed of progress and the accompanying intensity of competition have put all business models—and all ideas—under tremendous pressure. Companies that make bad assumptions about the nature of the world are quickly punished for doing so. This is where Philosophers come in.

Far from being a bunch of crusty old men debating the minutiae of obscure terms, Philosophy is two things. First, it’s the process that structures serious attempts to understand reality—to create a consistent mental model of the world. Second, it’s the surviving record of those attempts. It’s a shame that when people think of the discipline it’s the second quality that comes to mind because the first one is exciting and essential: Philosophy is the set of tools that test ideas to make sure they’re properly built. These tools work very well; they gave us mathematics, economics, psychology, and of course science to name a few.

When a Philosopher sets about answering a question, they start at the start and nothing is off limits. This is a characteristic of those in the Liberal Arts, but given how seldom these skills are explicitly celebrated is it any wonder these students chronically undervalued—both by employers and often themselves? But with some slight tweaking each can offer much to the other. Businesses need to recognize that there are right and wrong ways of looking at the big picture, and Philosophers (and Sociologists, Historians, Political Scientists and others) need to recognize the merits of what they do—outside of the historical record.

Given the amount of time, energy, and money that’s needed to bring the ideas to life as companies and products, why not test-drive them first? Besides, the world is far too exciting a place to be run by only MBAs.

This is a repost of something I wrote for T4G’s Ideas & Insights. See the original here.