CREDO
I believe human civilization is in its last century. While we have a
responsibility to do the best we can to make the world a better place
while we're here, and to help our descendants cope with the mess we are
leaving them, it is really too late for the world to be 'saved'.
I continue to hope that governments and corporations can be persuaded
to behave in a more altruistic and enlightened manner -- e.g. working
towards Sustainability
in a Generation. But whether they can or not, I think the
more important political, social and economic activities of the next
half-century will be grassroots, bottom-up actions: The creation of
sustainable intentional communities, sustainable natural enterprises,
and peer-to-peer collaborative information and education networks about
how to live sustainably. We will in effect be creating new,
self-managed political, social and economic systems to replace the
completely dysfunctional hierarchical systems that we currently live
under. This is consistent with Bucky Fuller's advice: "You never change
things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a
new model that makes the existing model obsolete."
I believe in creating these new bottom-up political, social and
economic systems despite the fact that I think it is too late to save
the world from the old ones. At best, what we will accomplish is to
have created some 'working models' that will be useful by
post-civilization society. That's not much, but it's better than doing
what we're doing now, or doing nothing at all.
ABOUT THIS BLOG
This
weblog is a journal of my search to find better ways to live, and make
a living, and a better understanding of how the world really works. It
has six converging, overlapping categories of essays, articles,
synopses and stories:
- Preparing
for civilization's end: Articles about sustainable living,
how our civilization emerged and why it is no longer
viable, what we can learn from nature and from history,
building community, activism, alternative economies, animal sentience
and how to prepare ourselves, and our children and grandchildren, for
civilization's twilight and aftermath.
- Working
smarter in the meantime: Articles about sustainable
business and how to find meaningful work in a world where most work is
not. And some useful ideas and tools from my own business experience to
make you more innovative, better at business research, more effective
at getting things done (and done well), more collaborative, more
appreciative of complexity, and more aware of what is really going on
and what is needed in the evolving economy.
- Using
weblogs and technology: Why blogs and other social
networking and collaborative learning tools are so important in a
networked non-hierarchical society, and how to use them more
effectively.
- Understanding
ourselves: Our culture, what drives us to do what we do,
feel what we feel and be what we are, and what we can learn from
science, the arts, holistic approaches to health,
great writing, and stories.
- How the
world really works: What the political and economic news
really means, the news you don't hear, how the political and economic
systems really work and why they're so dysfunctional, and the role that
the media, the education system and our frames of reference play in how
we understand the world.
- Stories:
My short stories, poetry, memoirs and other fiction writings that try
to imagine what is possible, and try to explain things that essays
cannot, in ways that essays cannot.
MY DISTINCTIVE COMPETENCIES (IN CASE YOU WANT TO HIRE ME)
My genius
-- what I do uniquely well, and love doing -- is imagining
possibilities. If you have a set of intractable business and/or social
problems, I can draw on 30+ years of business experience, an
extraordinary breadth of knowledge, an extremely creative yet pragmatic
mind, exceptional research and collaborative skill, and a knack for
taking an idea or solution from one discipline and seeing how it could
apply in an entirely different one, and come up with ideas, solutions
and approaches that will address these problems, better than anyone
else can do this. And then I can provide you with processes and tools
and coaching that will show you and your co-workers how to make this
continuous innovation process "part of the way we do things around
here".
My experience and understanding of complexity science and systems
thinking have also taught me what (including most 'conventional
wisdom') doesn't
work, and why, so I can help you avoid the mistakes all your
competitors have made and are still making. I'm up on the latest
business techniques and knowledge, from customer anthropology to
tapping the 'Wisdom of Crowds'.
I'm an expert on: Knowledge management (e.g. personal productivity
improvement, just-in-time knowledge canvassing, knowledge
harvesting, personal content management, the cost of not
knowing, adding meaning to information), business innovation,
all aspects of entrepreneurship (e.g. researching unmet needs, the
innovation process, finding partners and allies, organic financing,
viral marketing, building networks, strategic improvisation), social
networking, information architecture, the virtual
workplace, complexity management, cultural anthropology,
business valuation, business sustainability, collaboration strategies,
the future of business, the new economy, capturing employee and
customer intelligence, differentiation strategies, and personal
effectiveness coaching. I've written, lectured and presented at
conferences on most of these subjects. You can find many of my writings
on these subjects in the business
category of this blog.
E-mail
me for more information on my competencies, experience and credentials.
ABOUT ME: MY OBITUARY
[In the movie Serendipity , Jeremy Piven plays an
obituary writer for the New York Times, who is charged with having to
say something about friend John Cusack on the occasion of his wedding.
Inevitably, Piven's character frames the bio as an obit, making the
point that there is probably no better format to tell about one's life
in a few words. So herewith, my obituary, self-constructed. No
morbidness intended.]
Dave was born in 1951
in Leicester, England and grew up in Winnipeg, Canada, a shy, slow
learner who suddenly developed some social graces and language skills
at the age of 17, and in the process evolved from an incoherent and
withdrawn C student to a scholar with an overblown ego. He was then,
and remained throughout his life, defined by words that start with the
letter "I": immature, insensitive, inarticulate, and idealistic.
His immaturity caused him to be socially awkward, impatient, unfocused,
inattentive and sometimes too intense, but also made him irreverent,
open to new ideas, and imaginative. His insensitivity made him a poor
listener, left him with an unreliable memory, and caused him to
misunderstand most of what others said to him, thought about him, and
wanted from him, to his lifelong impoverishment. His inarticulateness
prevented him, usually, from gaining the recognition and achieving the
results he would otherwise have attained. His idealism made him
impractical and ultimately unhappy, but
also gave him vision, ambition and courage. He believed that
civilization culture damaged, alienated and psychologically imprisoned
everyone.
He was interested in and modestly knowledgeable about a vast array of
subjects, and that breadth combined with an unusual self-taught
creativity enabled him to see how ideas, information and innovations in
one discipline could be applied in interesting and sometimes exciting
ways in a completely different discipline, a skill that was
intermittently valued in both social and business circles. He did a
reasonably competent if somewhat disengaged job at
providing for his family and surfacing some useful and innovative ideas
in his career as Director of Entrepreneurial Services and Chief
Knowledge Officer for a big professional services
company. His collected stories, poetry, essays and other written works
can be found in his on-line journal How to Save the World and in his
eight published books:
- The
Only Life We Know, a prescient novel about the "strange,
diverse and surprisingly idyllic life on Earth after a future
eco-collapse" (he was off by 30 years in the date of the eco-collapse,
but his vision was remarkably accurate, considering it was written in
2007)
- Finding
Meaningful Work and The
Natural Enterprise, a two-volume work about establishing
your
own satisfying, socially and environmentally responsible business in
collaboration with people you really care about (2007 and 2008)
- The
Cost of Not Knowing, a book on the failures and promise of
Knowledge Management (2009)
- The
Generosity Economy, a book explaining how the faltering
market economy of the day was giving way to a new, collaborative
economy based on service instead of self-interest (2010)
- Working
Smarter, a book on improving your personal work
effectiveness (2012)
- A
Legacy for Your Children, a book explaining how to create
sustainable intentional communities, sustainable natural enterprises, and
peer-to-peer collaborative information and education networks about how
to live sustainably (written at the start of the Second Great
Depression in 2016)
- Learning from History in a Time
of Madness, a book written for "the generations after"
with ten lessons about the greatest mistakes made by civilized humans
(2024)
When he
was 55 he listed the following as his regrets in life to date: Spending
thirty years as a wage slave instead of living simpler; not making more
friends and lovers; not loving himself more and looking after himself
better; not spending more time in wilderness, in nature, with animals,
and in play; spending too much time in information and entertainment
activities that didn't matter; getting angry and upset with others, and
about events over which he had no control; eating meat; not creating a
natural enterprise with others; wearing clothes; and not learning to be
more self-sufficient. He made up for all these regrets in the final 20
years of his life, establishing the Sustainable Living
Collaborative in 2010 and helping to create many
of the models of community, enterprise and economy that our
post-civilization society was built on and has flourished because of.
In his latter years he lived in a lovely
community on protected wetlands in Caledon, just NW of Toronto. He was survived by his wife, her two extraordinary children (who he always said he was "privileged to have grown up with"), and two equally
extraordinary grand-daughters.
He credits his wife with making him everything he was.
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
