Every
once in awhile I feel the need to shake the casual journalistic
pretense of this blog and just talk out loud. If reading stream of
consciousness blogging is not your thing, you can skip this post -- you
won't miss anything important.
Although I'm a great fan of
Getting Things Done, lately I've fallen seriously behind. I want to
apologize to the 200 people whose e-mails (dating back to July) are now backed up in my "to
reply" queue, all of whom deserve, and will eventually get, a reply
that takes more than a few minutes to compose. The only way I could have shortened that queue would be to cut
back blogging, and I don't want to do that. I'm also more than two
weeks behind in responding to readers' remarks on the comments server.
And on top of that, my blogroll and table of contents have not been
updated in five months. And the promised debuts of Blog-Hosted Conversations and AHA! The Discovery & Learning Centre
are seriously behind schedule. Because my pinched nerve prevents me
from keyboarding for extended periods, it will take some time to work
through this backlog. Please be patient with me -- it will all get done
eventually.
You've probably noticed that I've been doing more
business-related blogging lately. My posts on politics have become less
frequent because I'm increasingly dubious that anything important can
be achieved through political means. My posts on environmental
philosophy have also become less frequent because I think I've said
just about all there is to say at a theoretical or philosophical level
-- it's really time to do something, in three arenas:
- Natural Enterprise
(self-publishing the book and then offering the course, with group
study instead of lectures, field visits instead of classroom time, and
successful launch of a natural enterprise worth 100% of your grade,
through one or more universities),
- Intentional Community
(either starting one, or at least getting out and visiting some, since
I don't think there's much more to say about the theory), and
- The Generosity Economy (writing and self-publishing the book, building on real-life success stories, showing the tie-in to Open Source Business and dealing with Complex Adaptive Environments,
and showing a viable transition path from where we are now to a
fully-functional economy where all the essentials of life are free,
where nobody owns the commons, and where everybody's time is valued
equally).
All three of these revolutionary ideas require that
(as Daniel Quinn puts it) we 'walk away' from the existing
dysfunctional and unsustainable economic, political and social
constructs of our world, and create an entirely new political,
economic, and social structure based on radically different principles.
As Bucky Fuller said: "You never change things by fighting the existing
reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing
model obsolete."
I confess I am still intrigued about the possibilities of drawing together several very modern business concepts:
- Social Networking,
- 'Personal Knowledge Management',
- Personal Productivity Improvement (including Getting Things Done),
- Wisdom of Crowds,
- Business Innovation,
- Effective Conversations,
- Narrative and Storytelling and
- True Collaboration.
and I was delighted by the response to my recent post on the Psychology of Information,
which described some of the cultural impediments to SN, PKM and
PPI. I'll be writing more on this and drawing these concepts, all of
which I have written extensively about over the past two years, into a
single integrated approach (tentative name: Working Smarter).
If I could find a company that really understood the potential and
value of 'working smarter' I wouldn't even be averse to going back to
work full time for a few years.
How to Save the World
is likely to be predominantly about the sixteen subjects in bold above
for the next while, with the odd article on culture and 'being human'
thrown in for good measure. Hope you'll stay around.
Computer-generated image from the movie Final Fantasy |
MADE IN CANADA
trust your
instincts 
