August 6, 1999
Newsbrief #1: The Berrett-Koehler Publishers newsletter At Work is featuring an article by John in its May/June 1999 issue, which has just come out. The title of the article is “Important Work or Self-Importance?”
Newsbrief #2: Reception to the July 16 posting of “The 21st Century Agenda for Business” on the Internet has been very encouraging with the number of co-signers increasing every day.
It’s time to stop pretending. It’s time to tell the truth and acknowledge that we humans – as a society – are acting as if the future doesn’t matter, that we have no influence in how it turns out.
And we have our scapegoats – the media, politicians, movies and, of course, business.
The truth is that – for the first time in human history – we can affect how the future turns out. We have a choice – a rather significant choice as far as our children, our grandchildren and their children are concerned.
We can either continue the pretense, making believe that we can’t affect the way things turn out, or we can accept our evolutionary destiny and proactively help create a better future.
The human being is hardly fully-evolved. I mean you can hardly think that this is our highest and best manifestation – that this is what God intended for us – resigned and cynical about the future, taking little consolations that make us feel better about the state of the world for a bit longer? Hardly.
The field of possibility exists now. Within this window of opportunity, we can co-create a future that is far more preferable than the inevitable future that awaits us if we continue our resigned acceptance of the growing trends of resource depletion, growing incivility, loss of community and economic imperialism.
Businesses that join in this co-creation will attract the most conscious people and become a partner with the rest of society in bringing about this better future. Businesses that persist in the old ways will go the way of the dinosaurs – becoming obsolete, dying slow deaths.
Which kind of company do you want to work for?
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*The title of this issue of Aha! is the same as John’s latest keynote address. To book John as a speaker, contact Kathy Kirkpatrick at 650-654-3884 in the U.S. or email her at kekirk@yahoo.com.
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John E. Renesch is a San Francisco writer, futurist, and business philosopher. To contact him call 415-437-6974. More information about him and his work can be found on the Web at John Renesch.
