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 […]

February 2011 Last summer I learned of a book coauthored by a new acquaintance – Raj Sisodia. The book – Firms of Endearment (2007) – included a quote by Ryuzaburo Kaku, a Japanese visionary businessman I met in 1991 when he was at the helm of Canon, Inc. Kaku was a pioneer in the corporate […]

January 2011 [The following article was submitted to Ode Magazine but never published to the author’s knowledge] New times require new leaders. Old models and techniques are outmoded in these times of accelerated learning, widespread information, rapid change and compressing time windows. Hierarchy is outmoded. Continuing to think about leadership in terms of the past […]

December 2010 According to noted futurist Bob Johansen, who specializes in ten-year forecasts, the world is becoming more and more VUCA – his acronym for volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity. In his book Leaders Make the Future, Johansen makes the case that leaders need to learn how to effectively deal with these characteristics which will […]

November 2010 Most of our exposure to the birth of capitalism, at least for those of us with European origins, emanates from Adam Smith’s philosophies and writings, most notably his “invisible hand” metaphor which is so widely manipulated by the market fundamentalists. Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations is considered by many to be “the […]

October 2010 If you have ever lived through a time when some popular idea became outmoded and a new way of looking at things became accepted in its place, you have survived what academics call a “paradigm change” in worldview. Perhaps you are old enough to remember when driving home after having a few cocktails […]