...and yet gasoline prices remain below May/07 levels and the stock market is near record high territory. Huh?
What I'm Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:
Coping With the Strategy Paradox:
I met recently with Michael Raynor, who wrote The Strategy Paradox.
He's now looking at what else we can do to deal with this paradox, and
he poked some holes in my argument that what we need is resilience, not
planning.
The Evolving Role of the Information Professional:
Since I listed the five major 'products' of my new employer, some
people have suggested that this list might define the new role of the
information professional in all sorts of organizations.
Why We Need a Public Persona:
The journey to know yourself is the first step towards understanding
how the world works and becoming truly yourself, which is necessary
before you can make the world a little better. As de Mello said, this
journey is mostly about getting rid of the everybody-else stuff that
has become attached to us as part of our social conditioning, and
getting rid of this stuff is perhaps what ee cummings meant when he
said the hardest thing is to be nobody-but-yourself when the world is
relentlessly trying to make you everybody-else. From birth, we pick up
all this everybody-else stuff that clings to us and changes us, muddies
us. We are rewarded by society for doing so. I find the 'figments of
reality' thesis helpful in this hard work -- realizing that our minds
are nothing more than problem-detection systems evolved by the organs
of our bodies for their purposes, not 'ours'. That 'we' are, each 'one'
of us, a collective, a complicity. What makes it so hard is that
becoming nobody-but-yourself opens you up to accusations of being
anti-social, weird, self-preoccupied, arrogant etc. So we end up, I
think, having to adopt a public persona that is, to some extent, not
genuine, not 'us' at all. That's hard. How can we make this public
persona as thin and transparent as possible? This is a follow-up to
last week's article on how how we look affects who we perceive
ourselves to be.
The Water Crisis:
The disappearance of fresh water is likely to be the first wave of the
future cascading crises of global warming. Ironically, the second wave
is likely to be floods.
Gangs and the Malleability of Human Ethics:
Observers of the now decade-long intractable genocides and civil wars
in Darfur, Somalia, Chad, Zaire and other African nations describe the
same gang phenomena repeated endlessly: Men horrifically tortured and
slaughtered, women systematically and repeatedly raped, children
kidnapped and forced into slavery and military duty, animals and other
resources stolen, and villages burned to the ground. What is it about
human nature that so many can perpetrate such atrocities for so long
without remorse?
Vignette #6
Blog-Hosted Conversation #3:
This week I'll be publishing my narrated, edited interview of Rob
Paterson, which I recorded last week, on a revolutionary overhaul of
the education system.
Possible Open Thread Question:
Can
you have an intimate loving totally-honest relationship, and become
best friends with, a member of the opposite sex, without the
relationship becoming sexual? |
12:19:09 PM 
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MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
