Secretary of State John Kerry on the Future of Civilization

At the recently concluded World Economic Forum in Davos, Secretary of State John Kerry stated that the major challenge we face is between "civilization"and "barbarism".

I would add that the best strategy for eliminating barbarism is for our civilization to consciously and overtly work to become one in which we all (the entire "human family") learn to live in harmony.

How to do that?  Start with studying the pioneering management work of Dr. W. Edwards Deming and the science-based, scenario planning work of Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller.  Then find a vehicle for introducing this pathbreaking vision into your company.

That's what I'm here to do.  If you want your company to offer both your current and future customers (and ultimately the public-at-large) an aspirational road map to a much better future, contact me.

Here is a taste of their work:

Dr. Deming on a transformed world in which "everyone wins". (4:19)

Dr. Fuller on an economic system based on abundance rather than scarcity. (2:21)

Getting Back In The Game

While one's personal and professional life may have it's ups and downs, the challenge of creating a more sustainable and prosperous world for all remains.

I have been on a break since late 2013 to get past a particularly bumpy part of the roller coast ride of life but am now getting back in the game.

I invite you all to read about the new Global Commission on Business and Sustainable Development, which had its public launch at the World Economic Forum in Davos this month.

Why does the CSR movement need another organization? Good question!  But with anything new comes new opportunities for fresh thinking.  I'll be reporting on what new thinking might be going on and what new thinking "could" go on soon.

Thanks for your interest!

"Stay tuned..."

Steve

Founder & Principal of Trimtab Management Systems To Speak and Lead Workshop at First Annual Fuller Future Festival

April 2, 2013

Steve Brant, the Founder & Principal of Trimtab Management Systems, is headed to Southern Illinois University at Carbondale to participate in the first annual Fuller Future Festival.  2013 marks the 30th anniversary of the passing of Dr. R. Buckminster Fuller, who pioneered what is today referred to as the sustainable development movement.

The festival's theme is "Livingry: Designing Peace".  And in keeping with that theme, Steve will be giving a speech entitled "Can We Design and Implement a Global Sociopolitical Economic Shift From a World at War to a World at Peace?"

But in keeping with Steve's and the festival's organizer's desire that this festival be a place where designing peace isn't just talked about but where that design begins to be realized, Steve will also be leading a workshop entitled "Designing, Building, and Launching a Trimtab for World Peace Based at Southern Illinois University: A Preliminary Exploration”.

Complete information about the festival can be found here.

 

The Revolution...Sorry, Transformation Starts Now!

Originally published in The Huffington Post on March 10, 2011

I predict the Naked Power Grab by the Republican party in Wisconsin will go down in history as the second "shot heard 'round the world" which began the second American Revolution. Except, if the Progressive Movement in America really wants to win this Revolution, it will not launch a revolution at all. It will launch a Transformation. The Transformation of America (and, ultimately, the world).

I insist that Progressives follow my reasoning, below, because -- in today's world -- the Freedom Fighters (i.e. us non-super rich, non-social Darwinist folks) are way outgunned in a traditional sense. In other words, there is no way Progressives can win a traditional, head-to-head confrontation with the Right.

Only asymmetrical warfare by Americans interested in Real Progress (i.e. progress that is Inclusive... even including the wealthy) will win this war.

And in my opinion, this warfare will have to be on the order of what Gandhi did. In other words, nothing violent that would give the rich and powerful cause to say they were justified -- as a worst case scenario might merit -- declaring Martial Law.

Rather than attempting to "storm the castles with torches," I foresee initially something on the order of massive numbers of people disengaging from (taking power away from) the system. No more buying anything made by corporations that support the behavior seen in Wisconsin might be a good beginning. Maybe a work stoppage nation-wide to begin giving ordinary people a sense of being connected... of having personal power because of those connections.

But this People Power must be channeled into doing more than what organizational development experts refer to as Stopping Bad Stuff. Ultimately, this power must be channeled into Starting Good, New Stuff.

This is pure systems thinking. You want to eliminate what doesn't work. But that doesn't get you to a new place. It gets you to a "less bad" place, but not a really new place.

Therefore, for this Revolution to play out successfully... for it to get America (and the world) to a truly Better Place... it cannot to be a Revolution at all. It must bring a truly new America into being. It must be a Transformation, not a Revolution.

Historically, people as diverse as Presidential Medal of Freedom winner, inventor/philosopher Buckminster Fuller and legendary management theorist and systems thinking pioneer W. Edwards Deming have publicly stated that a Transformation in American (and global) society is needed... a Transformation to a new world view based on the principles of abundance, not scarcity. This is the $64 Trillion question. Can America's Progressives learn that shifting from scarcity to abundance thinking is the name of the game here?

The war the Right is waging is based on the Darwinian/Malthusian based fear that there isn't enough in the world for everyone. As a result, the Right is organized around the aim of making sure that only those who are just like them "make it". And the rest of us be damned.

That scarcity-based world view has been scientifically demonstrated to be obsolete, but it's very rare that the public hears about this. The sustainability sciences have proved that it's possible to feed, clothe, house, and educate every man woman and child on Earth, but those in the know have yet to pull off the necessary marketing effort to make this historic breakthrough the Front Page News it deserves to be. (More on that in a future post.)

One key aspect of this science is tapping the free and unlimited supply of energy coming from the Sun. Plants already do this. Humanity can too.

It is this Transformation -- from scarcity to abundance thinking (with the resulting design, development, and implementation of a society based on that fundamental principle of abundance) that the Progressive movement in America should work towards.

Forget about the talk by many on the Left of a "limited resources" planet Earth. That view is because those people -- when thinking about our energy needs -- are, literally, only looking down... at the Earth. If they only looked up, they would see the Sun in all its free energy glory! (Sorry Jeffry Sachs. Your world view is actually obsolete. I highly recommend you study Bucky Fuller and Dr. Deming's work.)

This is the path that can lead Progressives to success over the forces on the Right. While the Right is fighting old, obsolete battles based on fear and division, Progressives will be building a hopeful, optimistic, and very appealing better world that will both create "heaven on Earth" and will take away the fear-based power the Right is currently using to drive its movement.

Eliminate fear, my fellow Progressives. That's what the people in Egypt did. And when they were no longer fearful of the power structure in their country, they were able to dismantle it and begin to build a much better country... one that will work for everyone in Egypt, not just the wealthy.

We American Progressives can do the same, except that America's position in the world will mean our work will eventually help fulfill an even greater human dream... of a WORLD (not just a country) that works for everyone!

Here's to winning the war by refusing to play on the Right's battlefield or using their rules!

Here's to winning the Revolution but not "revolting" but by "transforming" (building something better) instead!

****

A post-script from the world of business:

Business leaders such as Steve Jobs know this transformation principle very well. You put your competitors away not be fighting them head-to-head but by inventing something so new and exciting that you Win Through Innovation. The book Blue Ocean Strategy was a huge, global best seller in business circles, because it presented this approach as well: winning without fighting... by leaving your competitors in the dust by offering people something better that no competitor was offering.

I will be attending The Economist's conference on Innovation later this month in Berkeley. The conference program says "The summit will attract executives who believe in the power of innovation to transform our businesses, our lives and our planet."

I will be engaging people there on the challenge of transforming all of society... what Bucky Fuller and Dr. Deming advocated. And I have a public education plan I will discuss that could move this process into the civic conversation in a big way. It's based on the little known 1955 partnership between Walt Disney and Wernher von Braun which taught the American people that space travel was now scientifically possible.

Update from The Economist's Innovation Conference:

Through a process that required that I "campaign" for support from the other conference attendees, I got to lead a session on using innovation to create Global Peace and Prosperity. This was a real breakthrough in my experience of how people will respond positively when presented with this option as one of their "what to think about" choices!

Russell Ackoff, "Einstein of Problem Solving," Has Died

(Originally published in The Huffington Post on Sunday, November 1, 2009)

The world lost a very great man this past Thursday. So great, in fact, that the only person I can compare him to is Einstein. And that's because this man - Russell L. Ackoff, Professor Emeritus of The Wharton School - transformed the world of problem solving just as Albert Einstein transformed he world of science. Russ was my friend and mentor for the last 10 years and was 90 years old when he passed away from complications resulting from hip replacement surgery. His official obituary is here.

Why I compare Russ Ackoff to Albert Einstein

Before Einstein and his fellow physicists made their discoveries early in the 20th Century, the scientific world assumed that our universe was - essentially - a "giant clock". This mechanical view of the universe was made obsolete by the discovery of Quantum Mechanics, through which the universe was redefined as being an interrelated and interconnected series of waves... of patterns of energy. (I'm using short-hand language here.) The bottom line: computers could not exist without Quantum Mechanics, because its principles make possible how computer chips work.

Mechanical view of the universe... no computers. Quantum Mechanics... computers (and a whole lot more). It's that simple.

Well, before Russell Ackoff and his fellow organizational development theorists made their discoveries in the period following WWII, the management world assumed that solving the problem of how to make organizations work better required using Analysis: breaking the problem (the organization) up into its component parts... fixing those parts (including "those people") that were broken... and putting the organization back together, with the expectation that it would then work. This was also a "giant clock" philosophy.

This mechanical view of problem-solving was made obsolete by the development of Systems Thinking, through which making organizations work better was redefined in recognition of the role played by the design of the entire system. Synthesis - the thinking method involving seeing how different elements in a system interact with each other - replaced Analysis as the method of developing breakthrough operational improvements (otherwise known as Innovation).

Innovation comes from looking at whether an entire system can be transformed, not if certain parts of a system can be improved. You don't get from a car to an airplane by just looking at how the car's engine works.

The work of Russ Ackoff and his colleagues codified what had previously been done by people who were innovators naturally (inventors, for example). Previously, how these people thought was not a formally recognized thinking discipline.

Why All This Matters

If you don't think codifying the thinking used by inventors matters, here's why it does:

You may not get from a car to an airplane without thinking this way. But you won't get from a nation that is failing to solve the many crises it faces to a nation that is healthy and provides an environment in which its citizens can prosper without thinking this way either.

In fact, it is Einstein himself who once said..

"The specific problems we face cannot be solved using the same patterns of thought that were used to create them."

Russ loved that quote.

Currently - in the course of trying to solve its numerous, critical problems - America is tearing itself apart. And that is because - technically speaking - it is using Analytic Thinking in its efforts to do so. American needs to look at the larger system - in this case, the larger sociological culture - in which all of its separate problems exist. That is the only way America is ever going to solve its problems once and for all.

It is possible to solve the many crises America faces. It is possible to not just solve but dissolve our crises in education, health care, job creation, etc. But we won't do so if we keep trying to solve them the way we have... separately. We must solve them in the context of redesigning the larger sociological system in which they all reside.

And this is why I am urging all of you to explore the life's work of Dr. Russell Ackoff - and that of the other systems thinking theorists with whom he worked - on this, the occasion of his death. There is no more critical thing "we, the people" can do for the long-term health of our nation than to reorient how we approach solving our problems.
We must learn to think differently!

Russ Ackoff knew that the true solution to a problem can only be found by examining the design of the larger system in which the problem exists... and then correcting that design to eliminate the flaws that generated the problem in the first place. This "start with the whole and work back down to the broken part so you know *why* the part is broken (not just *that* the part is broken)" is a radical and upside-down way of thinking, but it works!

Analytic view of problem solving... problems persist. Synthetic/Systemic view of problem solving... problems dissolve, never to return! It's that simple!

Problems Dissolved, Never To Return

"Problems dissolved, never to return? What are you talking about? If such a thing were true, how come I haven't heard of it before? If Russell Ackoff - and no disrespect intended... may he rest in peace - helped develop such a miraculous way of solving problems, how come he isn't as famous as Einstein? In fact, how can you compare someone who's unknown to someone as famous as Einstein?"

I'm sure many of you are thinking some variation of the above thoughts.

And let me say for the record that the nearly 60 year history during which a critical mass of the American public - or, at a minimum, of the American public's political/civic leadership - never learned that this body of knowledge exists is one of the greatest cultural developmental failures I have ever known... but one I have come to understand in the following terms:

Only when disaster strikes do cultures make significant changes in how they view what they are doing... in how they organize themselves to create a future that's different from their past. That disaster can be economic (The New Deal grew out of The Great Depression) or military (Japan's non-violent constitution grew out of it losing WWII) or a combination of both (Nazi Germany grew out of Germany's loss in WWI and its economic crisis - linked to the global economic crisis - in the years immediately after). Please note: I didn't say all such changes are for the betterment of the global situation. I only said that disasters produce change.

Einstein and his colleagues benefiting from the fact that they were working within a field - physics - that accepts new knowledge once that knowledge has been sufficiently proven. Plus, when it comes to reaching a critical mass of political leaders, they benefited from their research leading to the development of the Atomic Bomb. In a cruel twist of "public marketing fate", the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people from the use of The Bomb - when combined with its unique visual qualities - made it part of the public's consciousness in a significant way.

So, the world of physics was permanently changed. And Einstein's name became known to people throughout the country... and the world.

Russ Ackoff worked within a field in which no such "replace old theory with new" process exists. Old management processes continue to coexist with the new. As I related in my recent Huffington Post essay about why President Obama should listen to the late Peter Drucker rather than General McChrystal, most of us grow up in an autocratic management world called "the family", which doesn't help when it comes to creating a critical mass for change.

But this 60 year long "failure to communicate"may be coming to an end. And not, specifically, because Russ Ackoff has passed away (although I am determined that his passing receives the attention from the press that it deserves).

No, the end to Systems Thinking's long period of isolation in an intellectual wilderness may come because the United States appears to be headed for the kind of crisis that has brought about large-scale change in the past.

As I said above, America is tearing itself apart.

As Frank Rich reports in today's New York Times, the Republican Party is progressing steadily down a "road to purity" (led by people such as Sarah Palin and Glen Beck). This will further destroy the already nearly non-existent partnership that exists between the two sides of "the house of America". And as President Lincoln said, "A house divided against itself cannot stand." I don't care what the DOW does or what the GDP numbers are in the next quarter. (And please note: BusinessWeek doesn't appear to care about GDP numbers that much anymore either. See "The GDP Mirage" in the latest issue.)

It's the health of our socio-political fabric that determines whether a nation avoids a catastrophic crisis or not. And right now, that health is dropping rapidly.

So, the stage is being set for when America will finally be ready for "a new way". I only hope that the Systems Thinking community (and its cousins - by virtue of the Performance Model of The UN Global Compact - in the corporate social responsibility community) manage to get organized well enough to offer themselves as the "new way" when the time comes. Because if they don't then some "other new way" will take its place. (Yes, I'm talking about, Sarah Palin. I know she sees this crisis coming. But she has a very different take on what the response to the crisis should be. After all, she's an "end of days" person.)

But there's another hurdle that Systems Thinking will have to overcome. And that is that - at its very core - it is a discipline that involves thinking differently. As the name suggests, it involves thinking in systems... frequently and continuously... which is not how many of us have been taught to think.

Ours is a culture of specialists. From doctors, to lawyers, to sports, to politics... most of us specialize in something. Precious few of us are generalists. The saying "A little knowledge is a dangerous thing" is correct when it comes to doing specialized actions, like flying a plane. But "a little knowledge about a lot of things" is actually a very powerful thing... because only by knowing "a little about a lot" can we see the connections between things that don't necessarily appear to have obvious connections.

But there's one person who comes to mind whose 20+ years of talking about "connections" - to the public in a very effective way - may be of use here. I'm referring to the British historian and educator, James Burke.

Starting with The Day the Universe Changed (which I watched on PBS in the late 1980's) and through Connections 1, Connections 2, and Connections 3, James Burke has produced the finest examples I know of educational programming on the interconnectedness between ideas and how those connections throughout history have led to the modern society we have today.

I urge the Systems Thinking community to reach out to James Burke and, in all other ways possible, to encourage the public to learn this history lessons he has to teach as a way of motivating study of Systems Thinking.

Russ Ackoff has left a huge legacy. Nearly 30 books, hundreds of articles, and a global network of students and colleagues he impacted in very significant ways. To get an idea of what I mean, I invite you to read the notices from people at the UPenn Organizational Dynamics Program site. Or just search "Ackoff" on Twitter.

But to me, the real legacy of his work is the knowledge of how our society can heal itself. Russ' work wasn't about management in some objective, dispassionate way. It was humane and deeply philosophical... about people achieving their best, based on their individual, natural gifts. He may have talked tough to people at times, but it was a form of "tough love" based on his wanting us all to reach our full potentials.

As a nation, we are suffering sociologically from a loss of capacity to talk to those who don't think like we think. And we are suffering procedurally from an attempt to fix all the seemingly separate challenges we face without recognizing that they all share a common core connection... and that - by redesigning that connection... that larger system - the solutions to those separate challenges will become self-obvious and much easier to design and put in place.

A great man may have left us... one who knew that it's possible for our nation (and our world) to be a place of prosperity for all. And he may have even known how to get there. But what he had to teach remains. The question I'd like to ask you to ask yourself is:

If our society could get beyond the huge mess that it's in but, to do so, I would have to become a generalist instead of a specialist... to see whole systems instead of parts of systems...would I be willing to learn to think this way?

I look forward to hearing answers from those who want to share them.

And here's a one minute video that may help you think this through....

Mountain Redesign: What "Davos Man" Should Be Doing

Originally published in The Huffington Post on January 28, 2009.

The Economist has published an essay on the World Economic Forum in Davos entitled "Mountain Reboot", which says, in part...

It is generally agreed that the system needs rebooting. The Davos agenda, entitled "Shaping the Post-Crisis World", is laden with soul-searching discussions about the mess, from the brainstorming session on "What Happened to the Global Economy?" and an "interactive dinner" called "36 hours in September: What Went Wrong", to CNBC's debate, headlined "No Way Back".

... and sums up this year's event as follows:

Mr Schwab (the World Economic Forum's founder) is likely to be delighted that this year's Davos will feature a record crop of heads of state and politicians. This marks the latest stage in the evolution of the World Economic Forum from a gathering of European businessmen trying to figure out how to get more trade liberalisation into the leading talking-shop for the global elite. Although it is not a decision-making body, the true test of the Forum's value will be whether the week's chatter will lead to action. Having led the world into its current mess, will Davos Man and Woman find a way to lead it out again?

The essay's title -- "Mountain Reboot" -- implies that the system that has crashed just needs to be restarted, like an old computer. This is the wrong metaphor. We don't have a system that needs to be restarted. We have an obsolete system that needs to be redesigned!

I wish the organizers of Davos had invited some engineers and architects to lead the "What Happened to the Global Economy?" brainstorming session, because when something collapses on its own -- as capitalism has -- engineers and architects know to look at the principles used to design the system in the first place and see which of those design principles are the reason for the collapse. Replacing those principles with new principles that work... that will prevent a future collapse... is what they do. (I used to be a civil engineer. That's why I know this.)

Taking this approach, I see that the current system was designed when the world consisted of separate, independent nations that could survive in an environment in which they competed with each other for dominance of the world (putting aside that some of them would be destroyed during the occasional war). "Balance of power between nations" was the catch-phrase. The current system was also designed when "never ending consumption and growth" (including never ending growth of profits) was an essential part of the business world's foundational beliefs.

We now know that "competition for dominance" and "consumption / growth" are obsolete principles.

Why? Because we truly are now in an interdependent world (both economically and regarding the challenges we face, like global warming). And because sustainability -- (the wise use of what we have, including the free energy supply from the Sun) -- has replaced never ending growth and consumption as how we now know we need to live.

It is time for our economic system to catch up with our physical, technological, and sociological realities. The gross mismatch between a competition and growth driven economic system -- functioning in a world that knows we are one human family that needs to live together in peace (and finally has the technological ability to do so) -- is why capitalism has crashed. Capitalism as currently designed must be replaced, not "fixed"... not "rebooted".

Just as you must switch from a car to a boat when you begin traveling on the ocean instead of dry land, our world's leaders must organize around designing and implementing a new economic system appropriate to this totally new world. This is what Kofi Annan knows we need. He has written "At Davos, our business and political leaders must show they understand that our world has shifted for good and that we have to change with it or perish."

Perish we will, if we think using an obsolete system will enable us to travel in the new, "one world" waters we find ourselves in now.

Celebrating Capitalism's Death? Not so Fast...

(Originally published on The Huffington Post on 19 September 2008 as a follow up to an essay entitled "Capitalism Is Dead. Now What Do We Do?" which was published on The Huffington Post on 17 September 2008)

Welcome to our brave new post-Capitalistic world.

Today our leaders in Washington announced (all the details to come later) that the Federal Government is going to rescue the financial system from total collapse.

You can read the story as reported by The New York Times here and, of course, more details of this plan will come out in the hours and days ahead. But I want to address the very first part of The New York Times' report: the reaction of the markets around the world...

Stocks shot wildly upward Friday morning after the federal government moved to try to restore confidence in the financial markets.

The Dow Jones industrial average rose more than 400 points only moments after the opening, and later settled up more than 300 points. The broader Standard & Poor's 500 was up nearly 3.5 percent. Markets in Europe and Asia also traded significantly higher, with stocks in London and Paris up more than 8 percent.

There is a celebration going on. This doesn't surprise me. But I'd like to raise the following point from the world of Systems Thinking:

Just because you stop something old that is bad, doesn't mean you will automatically start something new that's good.

Our government has stopped something it considers to be bad. It saw the collapse of the economic system coming. The action it has taken has -- and this is me talking, not our government, of course -- ended Capitalism here in America.

Actually, its not just me talking. Here's a report from The New York Times on what financial leaders in the rest of the world think about what we are doing here. They know America is no longer a Capitalistic society either. From this September 18th report...

"I fear the government has passed the point of no return," said Ron Chernow, a leading American financial historian. "We have the irony of a free-market administration doing things that the most liberal Democratic administration would never have been doing in its wildest dreams."

The bailout package for A.I.G., on top of earlier government support for Bear Stearns, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, has stunned even European policy makers accustomed to government intervention -- even as they acknowledge the shock of the collapse of Lehman Brothers.

"For opponents of free markets in Europe and elsewhere, this is a wonderful opportunity to invoke the American example," said Mario Monti, the former antitrust chief at the European Commission. "They will say that even the standard-bearer of the market economy, the United States, negates its fundamental principles in its behavior."

Mr. Monti said that past financial crises in Asia, Russia and Mexico brought government to the fore, "but this is the first time it's in the heart of capitalism, which is enormously more damaging in terms of the credibility of the market economy."

We no longer have a "market economy" here in America. Capitalism is dead.

But what are the people on Wall Street and other financial centers celebrating? The end of something bad. But -- I assert -- not the start of something new that is good.

Our government literally sees that the Titanic is sinking. And it is using its extraordinary power to raise the Titanic out of the ocean, shake all the water out of it (literally bailing it out), and place it back in the ocean hoping it will then sail on.

But the Titanic cannot sail on.

That's because the Titanic that is our global economic system is fundamentally flawed. It is based on a belief that we are still sailing in a zero-sum world, a world of scarcity, a world where there will always be too many people chasing too few resources. The sustainability scientists... and those schooled in advance social and managerial sciences as well... know this is no longer true. They know an abundance-based world is what we live in now, from an objective reality point of view. They know that the only thing in the way of that becoming the reality we all live in is the design of our political-economic system.. because it is still a scarcity-based design.

The American government's effort is very impressive in scope... but not in sophistication. It is an 800 pound gorilla approach, involving a huge willingness to throw money at the problem. But, intellectually speaking, it is "the blind leading the blind". It is "experts in the past" attempting to solve a problem whose root cause they cannot see. None of them has ever even heard of - as best I can tell - that scarcity is an objectively obsolete way to view the world. None of them has ever seen what is at the foundation of the work of people such as William McDonough, Amory Lovins, or the late Buckminster Fuller.

It is a tragedy in the making, because they are missing a huge opportunity to truly do the right thing... to take a sophisticated -- rather than 800 pound gorilla -- approach to this crisis.

A sophisticated approach.... one led by people who know how to work with the fact that the present is different from the past -- i.e. designers -- would address the fundamental fact that our economy is based on a zero-sum mental model in a global reality that is actually an abundance-based world waiting to be born.

As a designer myself, I saw this situation when there was a smaller -- but still very visible -- challenge to the stability of the global economic system. This was in October of 1998. At that time, BusinessWeek published an editorial called "The Age of Uncertainty". In that October 26, 1998 editorial, BusinessWeek said:

In the blink of a summer's eye, the psychology in America has changed totally. People suddenly don't know what to think about the economy, their investments, or their future. Before July, the U.S. had economic nirvana. Now confusion reigns. Volatility dominates markets. Hedge funds blow up. Deflation looms. The Asian contagion spreads. Russia defaults. The dollar plummets. CEOs worry. And Washington fiddles with impeachment. Yet the economy still feels pretty strong. So what is really going on out there?

In response to that editorial, I wrote a letter which BusinessWeek published on November 16, 1998. Here's what I wrote back then:

IN A GLOBAL ECONOMY, ALL PARTS NEED TO PROSPER

"So, what is really going on out there?'' you ask, in ''The Age of Uncertainty'' (Editorials, Oct. 26). For a more complete answer, look to the principles of systems thinking. A ''confluence of events'' is not the only thing masking the true fundamentals of the global economy, creating this ''fog'' you refer to. The ''fog'' is being created by the tendency to see globalization from a perspective grounded in our history of living in a world of separate, independent nations. The world's economy has become one interdependent system, yet we continue to view it through independent eyes.

What's really going on, from a systems perspective, is that a new, single, global system is struggling to be seen for what it is -- a system that can prosper only if all of its parts prosper. It is a single system, one that innately knows that either all of it will make it or none of it will. That's the way healthy systems work. The business world will prosper beyond its wildest imagination once it cuts through this fog and stops viewing the future through ''past-focused eyes.''

I still believe everything I wrote almost ten years ago.

The business world will prosper beyond its wildest imagination once it sees the future for what it can be. Some businesses will have to change more than others to take advantage of this new opportunity, but that's what the best businesses do, right? (Weapons manufacturers will have to change the most, as war is finally seen as the obsolete "international development tool" that it is. But that's okay. The skills of those corporations can easily be used to study, analyze, and produce constructive solutions -- especially highly scientific ones -- to our sustainable development challenges.)

This business world mindset is why the business strategy book Blue Ocean Strategy has been a global best seller since its release in 2005... because business leaders are always looking for the "blue ocean" of "no competition"... the economic landscape where they can operate first.. offering new products and services that do and offer things that no other business is selling.

Well, there is a huge blue ocean available to all the world's businesses now. It is the post-scarcity, post-zero sum Capitalism world that is waiting out there.... just waiting for us to reach out for it.

I hope at least some of our business and political leaders are in enough of a shock that they will look for new ideas and new answers such as those I am talking about here.

We don't have to settle for 800 pound gorilla thinking. We can innovate our way out of this crisis, with our eyes completely open to the true nature of the challenge we face... open to understanding the root cause of the challenge we face. And by understanding the root cause of the crisis we are in - that we literally see fighting as the "first principle" of living when cooperation and collaboration should be the first principle -- we can design our way to a better future... to an economic system that will provide all businesses -- and all the people on Earth - with more prosperity than they ever believed possible.

We must not just stop something old that is bad. We must start something good that is new.

Addendum: Saturday the 20th, 8:45am

To give people hope that society can continue to evolve (mature), I invite you to watch the opening of this landmark TV series "The Day the Universe Changed", hosted by James Burke, which first ran in the late 1980's on PBS. Mr. Burke went on to host the similar series about this history of human progress, "Connections", "Connections2" and "Connections3". Mr. Burke's current work can be found here.