By Jim Selman | Bio Ah, January 1st, the new beginning and a chance to finally get it right this year. Or is it? Perhaps it is the End of the Beginning. When we began as a nation, we were full of hope and idealism. We believed that every person could thrive and prosper if they worked hard and learned from their past mistakes. Today, can we honestly say we believe that hard work will take us in the direction of our dreams? What happened to us? Where are we going? [ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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By Jim Selman | Bio
When I was growing up, you needed to be master
the 3 Rs (Reading, Writing and Arithmetic) in order to be educated.
Today we need to master a new 3 set of ‘Rs’: Rights, Rewards and
Responsibilities. When I first started traveling to other countries in the 1970s, the
conversation about the USA was always in a context of respect and even
admiration—even when criticizing certain aspects. But for the last 10
years or so, I have noticed that the conversations are changing. Fewer
people are envious of who we are and our way of life. More and more see
us as recalcitrant, self-centered, parochial and unable to recover
whatever it was that made us great in the post-WWII years. Most people
across the globe have access to the same newspapers, the same media
channels and the same websites that we do. The prevailing and
unavoidable conclusion being touted from many of these sources:
governance in the USA is a mess![ Read More]
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 By Jim Selman | Bio
Read the rest of the 12-Step Program > Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3We’ve been drawing an
analogy between the state of affairs in the governance of our country
and the various kinds of addictive conditions we face as individuals.
Specifically, we’ve been saying the ‘system’ is broken, we’re out of
control and we need to find something larger than the political gridlock
driven by special and self-interest groups we’re witnessing in
Washington. In watching the final hours of the
healthcare debate, I was heartened when
[ Read More]
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By Jim Selman | Bio
I work with organizations that are attempting
to change. At the beginning of working with a new client, I point out
what’s missing for any organization that has recurring or seemingly
intractable problems: what’s missing is a different way of observing.
Whether we’re talking about a company, a community or a continent, a new
perspective always gives us an opening to create new possibilities,
have new choices and take new actions: a new way of observing the world
effectively gives us a different future than some variation of ‘more of
the same’. We need to stop asking what the problems are and start
asking why they persist. When we do, we begin to realize that we
have a paradigm problem. Until we deal with that, none of our seemingly
intractable problems—from staggering debt to unending war, climate
change to the underlying causes of the mortgage crises—can be solved.
Albert Einstein expressed this concisely when he said that sometimes our
problems cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we
created them.[ Read More]
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By Jim Selman | Bio
Future
historians may mark the first decade of the 21st century as the time
when democracy died. And if they do, they will say that democracy died
because people became so resigned and afraid that they retreated into
closed and cloistered communities motivated by self-interest,
ideological fervor and ignorance. History will note that what began as
honest differences grew into an irreconcilable fragmentation of the
body politic.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
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 By Jim Selman | Bio
I am not an economist and I don’t know what
to think about all the ‘unprecedented’ claims coming from the joint
communiqué of the G-20 summit. I hope it works. But, hey, a trillion
isn’t what it used to be! As a guy who has been around enough to be a
little bit wary of political claims of bright horizons, I wonder if the
world’s leaders are really united to correct past excesses and grease
the financial system enough to restore confidence in the future. After all, isn’t that what this is really about?[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Leadership
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By Jim Selman | Bio
One more day and we’ll know for sure who
will be our President. If we accept the polls, it looks like a
slam-dunk for Obama. (I already voted for him.) But even should there
be a miracle for McCain, the nation faces a moment of truth unlike any
time that I can recall’—at least not since the end of the Civil War. I
am talking about how we get beyond the LEFT versus RIGHT schism that
has divided and fragmented our nation and made a mockery of what we
used to say in the ‘Pledge of Allegiance’ when we declared ourselves to
be “One Nation Under God, Indivisible, with Liberty and Justice for
All”.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Leadership
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By David Korten | Great Turning website
Read more posts in The World We Want series.
Profound social change takes place when an
important cultural story changes—and the impetus to challenge imperial
rule rarely comes from within the institutions of Empire. Democracy
took hold when we replaced the story of the divine right of kings with
the story that the powers of government derive from the will of the
people. People of color and women won recognition of their full human
rights only as the civil rights and women’s movements successfully
exposed the fallacy of the story that people of color and women are
less than fully human. Recognizing the full humanity of all peoples
opens us to a deeper understanding of what it truly does mean to be
human in all the rich potentials that our human nature embodies.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
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By David Korten | Great Turning website
Read more posts in The World We Want series.
This brings us to the third element of the
big picture of the human confrontation with the limits of our Mother
Earth: the governing institutions to which we give the power to set our
priorities and our collective course. We might wonder how such
injustice could happen in a world governed by democratically elected
governments. The answer is simple and alarming.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at The Great Turning
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Tom Brokaw in a recent AARP op-ed piece
pointed to the obvious fact that as the Boomers retire they’re going to
change our social and economic reality in profound ways. Lots of others
are predicting the coming crunch associated with questions of how to
pay astronomical healthcare and Social Security costs with a shrinking
workforce and tax base. Consider that about 4 or 5 of us have supported
one retiree over the course of most of our career. When we retire, a
couple of our offspring will be supporting us—as well as paying
additional costs for energy, security and cleaning up and protecting
the environment. You don’t need a Ph.D. in economics to realize that
something doesn’t add up.[ Read More]
Written by eldering at Wisdom in Action
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