Year: 2011

December 2011 A couple of years ago, just after receiving the Nobel Prize, Mohammad Yunus was speaking in Washington and I happened to catch in on C-Span TV. One thing he said has stuck with me ever since. He asserted that poverty was not a people problem; it was a systems problem. This seemed a […]

November 2011 There are many, many things forms of addiction – ranging from substances like alcohol, painkillers, heroin and other drugs to activities such as the Internet, gambling, television, sex and work, But little is said about the one of the biggest addictions for the Western world – compulsive thinking. My definition of an addiction […]

August 2011 The person who discovered it was the Sun, not the Earth, that was the center of our solar system was a mathematician, physician, scholar, translator, artist, cleric, jurist, governor, military leader, diplomat and economist who held astronomy as little more than his avocation! The creator of the most effective treatment for alcoholism was […]

July 2011 Now that the U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that corporations are even more like people than the law previously adjudicated, less-than-ethical business leaders can take even more advantage of the market, tilting the scales of fairness even further in their favor. Thus the gap between the richest one-percent and the rest of us […]

June 2011 The other evening at dinner, a friend was talking about her own process of self-discovery and used the phrase “getting to the bottom of myself.” I perked up and warmed to the phrase immediately, sensing some richness to be teased from it. So here goes! The process of self-discovery can be a lifetime […]

September 2011 The title of this article may seem strange since most of us in the West are not accustomed to living in fields. The picture that comes to mind is a field of crops or a sports field of play but not a place where people might live. I’m addressing a different kind of […]

May 2011 Excerpted from John’s forthcoming book, The Great Growing Up: Being Responsible for Humanity’s Future In my last book – Getting to the Better Future – I quote global thinker and philanthropist Lynne Twist on the subject of taking a stand. She says, “Taking a stand is a way of living and being that […]

April 2011 Most of us are familiar with bureaucracy. We run into it everyday when we interact with an organization, particularly governmental ones. My definition of bureaucracy is quite simple: it’s when a system puts greater importance on its internal policies and priorities than on its customers or constituents. In systems thinking, we call this […]

March 2011 Homogeneity of ideas, beliefs and traditions sure makes it easier to live together. It is easy to see why people who are somewhat alike tend to hang out together, be that a neighborhood, community, club or other social circle. But the world is not homogeneous. We differ from our global brothers and sisters […]