September 2013 During a recent conversation with some friends, a T.S. Eliot quote was paraphrased by a woman who has memorized many poems. I liked it so much I decided to look up the exact words. Here is what Eliot wrote as part of a larger poem, “Little Gidding”: At the source of the longest […]
August 2013 I’m hearing a lot of excited talk these days about conscious leadership, improving our consciousness at work and conscious capitalism. I cannot help but wonder how much of this excitement is over the conversation about consciousness, the talk, versus becoming more conscious, the walk. I saw lots of this in the 1980s when […]
July 2013 Probably as a result of writing last month’s Mini Keynote editorial about my new stand – participating only in “we conversations” – I have been sitting with this question: What are my payoffs in having people and ideals that I can be opposed to? Essentially, as soon as I engage in a “they […]
June 2013 The other day I received an announcement from one of the professional futurists associations to which I belong about a forthcoming event with a theme of “The Future of Europe.” I was struck immediately with the thought that titles such as this are outmoded. Einstein warned us that nationalism was an “infantile disease” […]
May 2013 Thomas Paine*, the father of modern democracy, told us “we have the power to start the world over again.” Indigenous shamans teach that “the world is as you dream it.” What thoughts do you have when you read these words? Do they evoke an exciting possibility or are they simply nice ideas, nice […]
April 2013 Most great revelations and paradigm shifters come from ideas, technologies and people from outside the set or system in which we operate. Since the system in which we work – the one in which we feel most familiar – generally consists of people who think like we do, large scale shifts in consciousness […]
March 2013 When we humans come together and organize ourselves for some purpose, we tend to agree about the context or mental framework containing that purpose. While in the best cases this agreement is explicit and conscious, agreement is often implicit and less than fully conscious. In the latter cases, people may start protecting the […]
February 2013 In July, I published a short piece in this newsletter about a book by Belgian banker Bernard Lietaer (see link here), someone I have known for several years who seems to see the insanity in this unsustainable system, based on flawed assumptions, we call the economy. I am now moved to […]
January 2013 Late last year Fortune magazine published an article by Michael Porter and Jan Rivkin entitled “How companies can get America’s edge back while advancing their own interests.”While focused on restoring U.S. competitiveness, the authors addressed a notion that American business might be shooting itself in the foot by seeking special treatment. In a […]
December 2012 Futurist and consultant Hardy Schloer wrote an article in the November 2012 issue of the Club of Amsterdam Journal that cited a time window he calls “The Consequence Era” to which I had a palpable response. Perhaps it was because our adolescent ways tend to ignore consequences, much like teenagers don’t think about […]