Metaphoria of Transformation
- Are we aware of this ‘other’ stranger in us?
- Powerful brands are perceived as vehicles of transformation.
- The image points to the gap between the perceived normal and the true normal. This is the direction of the transformational journey and this deep urge is at the root of our consumption, real or substitutes
- Successful brands connect to this deep urge in a very powerful way.
- Every guru, astrologer and the consultant know this. When we are unaware of this stranger in us we are likely to be driven by him.
- Promises and Placebos fill this vacuum. Myths, Metaphor and stories connect to this vacuum.
- Solutions emerge once the image is formed
- Stories synch brains (link)
The following threads to stories and metaphor can be used in many ways. It is for the facilitator to customise them to the group and the context. They are hooks to connect to the internal and external territories to unearth something that people already know at deeper levels.
1. Story of One, Differently abled Child and the Teacher. This child is unable to pick up maths. For him everything is one. He is shown the door by the teacher. Many years later the teacher meets him on the road. The youth reminds him of the child once thrown out of school by the teacher. Old man is curious. How do you write one now. He points to the rock in the horizon and draws a line in the air. The rock splits into two and move apart. The participants are facilitated to connect to the rationale of the story.
2. Mental maps – Eagle’s gift
Thinking about the unthinkable
The eagle nests on the tallest tree
The tree is by the side of a very deep well
In the well is a community of frogs. The well is so deep that the frogs have never been out of the well.
As the sun sets and the darkness rushes into the well, the little ones in the community crowd around the nanny frog pestering her for stories. May be she will repeat one of those stories, yet it is still very comforting at the time when the shades of grey drives out th world of light darkness takes over.
Darkness is yet to take over the tree tops. It is very rare that it happens, once in a while when the sky is completely clouded and stars are invisible.
At times the eagle listens to the familiar stories. Over the years of its immortal life, it has heard them many times over, many versions of the same stories over many generations. There is nothing new about the stories other than it is almost a ritual that disturbs it in some way.
It is another day
The thermals are forming. The eagle is waiting for the thermals to gather force. It is quite strong now.
The eagle swoops down into the well, grabs the nanny frog with its claws and rise up from the well into the sky assisted by the thermal moving up at a frightening pace.
The heights and the fear of death overtakes the frog. It shuts it’s eyes tight and wait for the inevitable.
The eagle has reached the heights and hovers there circling in the sky. It goes round and round for a long long time. It senses that the frog has quieted down and has opened its eyes. The thermal is waning. It gently floats down once again into the well and gently leaves the frog from where it has been taken for a ride.
On the return journey the frog had just a glimpse of the larger world outside the well.
The eagle goes back to the tree and waits for the sun to set waiting for the story of the day.
What will be the story of the day?
Each participants writes story. The facilitator gives the feedback based on participants’ stories. Switch the roles of Eagles and trainers so that trainers don’t come to assume that they are the eagles. One has to be an eagle and at times a frog depending on the context.
The human condition is like that of the frog in the well. The mental maps are influenced by the ‘well’ we live in. They are improved with every bit of learning. The developmental process involves revision and improvement of the mental models to maps.
3. The Chandrasekhar Effect.
Chandrasekhar is a very saintly soul with a weakness drinking. One morning we found him in front of his regular hangout. Chandrasekhar was relieved to meet a familiar face. Though drunk he did not want to be humiliated. “Where am I?” He asked.
We take the most fundamental for granted which takes us farther away from reality. When our basic assumptions about our current position are wrong we will not reach home. Any process of improvement calls for fixing a starting position, deciding on the direction and reflecting/review with reference to the starting position.
A large number of people were asked this question as to what our basic needs are and the first reply is always the text book answer, “food, shelter, and clothing”. For someone for whom life is meaningless these things do not matter.
When people are asked “How many sides the coin has?” the answer is always the same – two, though with a little bit of clarification they will soon shift their original positions.
4. Blind men and the elephant
5. Don’t shoot the messenger
6. Mahabali and Vamana
7. Taj Mahal. A modified version of the Cathedral Building story to suit Indian audiences
Emperor Shajahan asked the same question to the three stonecutters. “What are you doing?”
The three answers are:
“I am earning a living”,
“I am polishing stones, and I am the best stonecutter available”
“I am building a monument which is an expression of the love of the emperor to his beloved and this stone that I am polishing will be the corner stone of the monument”
It is obvious that the third mason is more likely to meet the standards for quality and quantity and that if all the three are to meet these and other standards – of effectiveness, excellence and zero defects – the third mason’s vision is to be shared. When we work more and more with intangibles and the slave driver is replaced by one’s own self this becomes all the more difficult but essential to keep the network as one, connected.
9. Indra and the pigs – Resistance to change.
Indra once transforms himself to a pig to experience why pigs enjoy wallowing in the mud. Now he doesn’t want to leave his comfort zone until Narada finds him in the mud and with great effort brings him back to his former self. It is quite ‘normal’ that we get stuck with poor performance and come to accept this as the limit of our possibilities till a compelling experience/crisis or vision might lift us out of the situation.
10. Frog soup
The story is quoted in two of the popular books on management, The Renewal Factor (Waterman) and The Fifth Discipline (Peter M Senge). The frog in the cold water initially enjoys the increasing warmth of water in which it is immersed and by the time it is unbearable it is immobilized and incapable of escape from death. The process of continual renewal is the opposite of this whereby individuals, institutions or a community continually respond to the environment and improve their contexts. The process is qualitatively different and most often ignored in the preoccupation with the short term. U.S. companies now lose half their employees every four years, half their customers in five, and half their investors in less than twelve months[ii]. The returns on investment, yield rate of stocks, market capitalisation or increase in value of ESOP by themselves are not sufficient measures of success. Corporates need to be concerned about the internal as well as the broader external community also, other than the shareholders and the targeted market segments.
11. The Gun Shot/The Two Roads
The road by design and by default
And the moment of truth.
What we believe as mature, normal, is a HABIT, history, the roadblock.
The system at physical birth is comparable to the bullet that leaves the barrel of a gun.
The bullet is helpless to influence its trajectory.
Most systems, individuals or institutions seldom go beyond this level without that choice, a conscious decision to evolve, becoming aware of the position, direction and reflecting on the progress.
When it happens the bullet goes into orbit.
The linear is the road by default, the road to death, accidents, burnout and the road on which time runs out.
The other is the road to eternity, continual renewal and timelessness by CHOICE, the conscious decision to be on the road to continual IMPROVEMENTs, creating the future NOW, by DESIGN, a future better than the present.
The gun shot does not have the potential to become aware of the self. Individuals and organizations have the unique capability of self-observation and self-regulation which implies the possibility of improvement. This is what qualifies us to be termed human. The cannon shot that goes out of the cannon has no possibility of becoming aware of itself and the outcome is already determined at the moment of its departure from the cannon. But the more advanced of human creations like those of sophisticated machines do have more and more of self-regulation built into them. Thus in the case of space vehicles and satellites, extent of self-regulation and the possibility of controlling the behavior of the system from outside the system increases. The extent of self-regulation, the possibility of reflecting on one’s behavior and even laugh at it, is what draws us apart as a class, from the rest of the systems. In the case of the cannon shot gravity operates mercilessly and ultimately the shot is overtaken by it when the shot reaches terra firma. In the case of individuals and organizations, it is the vision that keeps them going. The vision is liable to be corrupted and needs to be renewed continuously. Just as gravity operates continuously, the forces of decay too is natural to all systems. In nature decay and renewal are continuous and it follows that for organizations to sustain growth, the effort at renewal too needs to be continuous’.
12. Ashram and the prophets- Leadership, Creating and Renewing Vision and Shared Values. – Scott Peck ?
There is an ashram is in dire straits with four sanyasins struggle to make both ends meet. There was time when crowds flocked to the ashram. One of the sanyasins has a bright idea to seek help from another sanyasin in a distant place. The sanyasin sends them back with just one piece of advice – One of you is a prophet. They don’t arrive at who is the prophet but over time the ashram renews itself and recovers the lost glory. – source unknown
13. 100thh monkey effect. http://www.context.org/iclib/ic09/myers/
14. The Imperial Chill – Daniel Quinn
16. Caterpillar and the Butterfly, Seed to Tree, Cream to Butter, Ahalya, Pygmalion and Galatea
17. Less is more
18. Complex vs. simple. Tools and redundancy
2×2=4
4×4=16
16×16=256
256×256= ?
19. Blindness, Seeing, Jose Saramago
20. Magister Ludi, Herman Hesse
21. Time
Mastery of time involves going beyond the ordinary or common to the transcendental experience of time. The common understanding is very essential to deal with the day to day world but this is never the complete story. It is only a partial truth (illusion). Time /timelessness is another duality, gate, to learning the direct (mystic) experience, freeing one from the entanglement of a linear experience of time.There is nothing linear about nature. Linear time kills in many ways. Timelessness, eternity, is a common experience if one reflects over those experiences when time stood still, while you were in love vs. waiting for a P breakts
22. Timelessness/Real time
Real time
What black is to white is time to timelessness, as memory is to forgetting
Linear time meets memory at ground zero
To beget the NEW
As the eagle soars up in the sky details get blurred
But the essential is not lost
It swoops down faster to the goal.
Knows when to strike and when to sail
To switch between time and timelessness
What to gather and to leave behind
Complete the learning so as to forget
Learn history so that history is created
Both personal and collective, for the flow of life to go on
Bury the dead so that renewal rules, not death and decay
Free the ground for the dance of eternity – timelessness
23. Habit/New habits
Transcend habits by more powerful habits.
Habit is history that keeps us stuck. Even death is a habit and fear of death is the mother of all fears which drives many businesses. Resistance creates resistance. If the child wants to touch fire we can tell her don’t do it – a sure fire way of achieving what we never wanted. Instead show her the butterfly. Her attention is shifted to something beautiful. Big time improvement strategists play the latter game. They don’t preach change. They play the game of radical improvement through which people come together as one, in relationships, internal and external alignment, creating history. In the process we move forward, get unstuck. Everyone wins and none loses.
Amor is the Roman god of love. The root from Sanskrit ‘amar’ means immortal and ‘amrut’ is that which makes one immortal – knowledge. Work is love expressed – Kahlil Gibran. The path to immortality, exceptional performance, is possible only through transformation of work as expression of the self, an expression of love
24. The Light House Position. What is your call?
25. We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence is then not an act but a habit – Aristotle
26. Man meets Woman
Man meets woman, Adam and Eve
Since their parting outside the gates of paradise
They had lost their selves
At the beginning of time or even before
Together they saw the road they came
That they thought was the wrong one
Or was it the right one?
Why did he tell us not to eat from the tree of knowledge?
Now we know
He wanted us to eat from the tree, crafty old fox that he was
And continues no less to be
Now that the lesson is learnt the wrong one has become the right path
The pain gives way to a silent growing pleasure
Together they went back in time over the ages
Seeing how they were reduced to their shadows
Empty cages from which the parrots had escaped , long long ago
Now the parrot has come back to its nest
No more the cage that it thought it was
No more the parrots that they thought they were
But eagles waiting for the thermals
To take them up into the new sky over the blue oceans
The world will never be the same again.
27. The Cloud Community College
Eagle’s gift
Continual learning is the path to continual renewal.
Nature is in a process of continual renewal but for the ecological footprints left by our interventions. It takes more than a year for nature to renew what we consume in a year and some damages are irreparable.
The frog in the well forms a model of the world. The eagle on the tree has a different model. When the frog is taken out by the eagle and brought back into the well these two merge together to form a map of the world. The world has not changed but the models of the world have changed. We had a flat earth model in the not too distant past. With better technology and tools these models have given way to maps with increasing precision. Though maps of the physical world have become more precise the mental models that went with them are not easily discarded.
The eagle represents the big picture and frog, the details. Both are connected just as the Hubble telescope sends us pictures from outer space and the Femtoscope helps us see the smallest of the small.
The eagle represents the global and frog the local which are but different perspectives of the whole. Thus being GLOCAL – is an imperative. So is the imperative of continual learning, leading to continual renewal. We are frogs in the well of nature
28 A brief history of learning/ renewal
Real work is the expression of a mature self
As a Dairy Technologist, I used to watch the huge butter churns in motion, waiting for that magical moment when the cream breaks out into globules of butter. This was my first project at work- to find a solution to mountains of cream that had accumulated over the previous surplus season. In the long hours that i worked towards reducing the bulk, I was forced to fight the boredom, visualising the mythical churning of the sea of milk by the Devas and Asuras to make amrit, the stuff that makes one immortal – knowledge.
Later on I had the privilege of observing a very sedentary ascetic centenarian for the last twenty five years of his pursuit of learning which had started at the age of nine. At 60 he had made it known that he had another 40 years of work left to complete. He completed his 40 years and went on for another six months and 15 days.
In developed nations the fastest growing segment of the population is centenarians.
While most “successful’ people in the ‘modern world’ (read top of the pyramid – sic) contribute in real terms for 15/20 years of their life span of around 75, what goes into the making of the rare centenarian who remains productive many times over ? If the product is in the process, what makes this process so rewarding in itself which keeps them relatively less mortal physically and immortal in the world of knowledge. Why are we not able to go beyond them as a community?
A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it. – Max Planck (1858-1947)
Imagine the churning that preceded the above statement!
Nicolaus Copernicus (February 19, 1473 – May 24, 1543)
Proof: Galileo, (1564-1642) Strategy: Patience, non- action, out-wait competition
Ever wondered about the history of churning and the consequences?
We have a secret dread of being thought ignorant. And we end by being ignorant after all, only we have done it in a long and roundabout way. (From the short story – Once there was a King) Rabindranath Tagore, 1839-1941. The Parrots Tale develops this in much greater detail. Viswabharati, the university he set up, was the solution that he came up with for the problem.
There are only two ways to live: Either without thinking of death… or with the thought that you approach death with every hour of your life. – -Leo Tolstoy, 1828 – 1910
There is a third way, the path of regeneration, living with birth/death, NOW, in real time, the path taken by the high performing centenarians and the path open to the next generation who would go far beyond them. Most of us live in linear time. Living in real time is living in eternity.
Tolstoy was a prophets’ prophet, a link in the long chain from Buddha, Asoka the great and Christ who greatly influenced two of the heroes of our time and kept alive the idea of non-violence and non – action, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi (1869 – 1948) and Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929 – 1968).
Why do champions of non-violence die a violent death?
Tolstoy’s thoughts on How to live: (He appears to have founded the human potential movement much ahead of the new age messiahs.)
The more upset you are with other people and circumstances, and the more satisfied you are with yourself, the further you are from wisdom.
Don’t compare yourself with others. Compare yourself only with perfection.
It is not the place we occupy that is important, but the direction in which we move.
When you want to escape from rage, do not walk, do not move, and do not speak. Your rage cannot be justified by anything. The reason for your rage is always inside you.
Speak only when your words are better than silence. For every time you regret that you did not say something, you will regret a hundred times that you did not keep your silence.
There are two ways not to suffer from poverty. The first is to acquire more wealth. The second is to limit your requirements. The first is not always in our power. The second is.
You do not have the right to be unhappy with your life. If you are not satisfied, see this as a reason to be unsatisfied with yourself.
The more strictly and mercilessly you judge yourself, the more just and kind you will be in the judgment of others.
Strive for goodness without any expectations for rapid or noticeable success. For the further you progress, the higher your ideal of perfection will rise. Yet it is the process itself, this striving, that justifies our lives.
Nobody knows where the human race is going. The highest wisdom, then, is to know where you are going.
The truth is that the State is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens … Henceforth, I shall never serve any government anywhere.
There can be only one permanent revolution – a moral one: the regeneration of the inner man.
He died on his way to become a wandering ascetic. Imagine the churning.
Fyodor Mikhaylovich Dostoyevsky, 1821- 1882 turned out to be more prophetic than Tolstoy – Raskolnikov, the hero of Crime and Punishment is the template for our current role models who have perfected the art of committing the perfect crime and earn their place in history as saviours of the world.
29 The product is in the process.
The seats of learning/ churning/clashes and the interplay of history, knowledge, power, religion, politics and culture
Taxila 6th century BCE to the 5th century CE
Nālandā (427 to 1197 CE)
The Imperial Nanjing Institute, China, founded in 258, has perhaps the longest unbroken tradition
Buddha , Christ, Ashoka 304 BCE – 232 BCE , all belong to this period.
Taxila was burnt to ashes in 1197. The fire went on for weeks.
Prophet Muhammad, 570 – 632
The University of Al-Karaouine, Morocco was founded in 859 by two wealthy sisters. Played a leading role in the cultural and academic relations between the Islamic world and Europe in the Middle Ages,
University of Bologna, Italy, 1150. The term university was coined at the founding of this seat of learning. The University of Paris was founded even earlier, was split into 13 universities in 1970.
1167 University of Oxford, UK. Exact date uncertain, teaching existed in some form since 1096
1209 University of Cambridge, UK
1440 the Printing Press
Martin Luther (1483 – 1546)
Harvard University, 1636
Karl Heinrich Marx (1818-1883), John Maynard Keynes, (1883- 1946)
W. Edwards Deming, (1900 – 1993), Peter Ferdinand Drucker, (1909-2005)
Drucker had personal experience of the Nazi regime, probably would have listened to Sigmund Freud as a child, and was a student of Keynes and Schumpeter. He foresaw the possibilities of the modern corporation and continuously reinvented himself. One might conclude that he also foresaw the need for a new paradigm of management with the focus on the self, managing oneself, for which he himself would remain, one of the best models.
Drucker started the study of General Motors in 1945, leading to the publication of the Concept of the Corporation and began his career as a consultant, teacher and writer. He remained at the forefront of the discipline he founded for half a century.
Deming started from where Drucker left off towards the end of his career. Had Deming been accepted in his home country as much as Drucker in his country of adoption, perhaps we wouldn’t have been in our current crisis. The prophet is seldom respected at home. One could argue that Japan had the cultural pre-requisites to accept Deming and the US ultimately had to give in reluctantly to the competition. Drucker could not save the corporation/s whereas Deming left a legacy which forms the foundation to the discipline that Drucker is said to have founded.
The Web. 1992. The parrot leaves the cage, the seats of learning move to the clouds. The internet has dematerialised learning from the seats of learning. Technology has become real time but people are yet to move to real time. . We need new paradigms to bridge the gaps and transcend the learning plateaus in our journey of continual renewal and improvement
> a new discipline and pedagogy > the first discipline>the discipline of sustained high performance
1. Context
The BRIC is broken
The tail wags the head
WMD – Destruction or Dialogue?
War on terror/ talent – WFT, Dream merchants and the revenge of the underdogs, Liberation of Talent
Recession, Booms and Busts, the long cycles and the bubbles in between,
Is there a future? The rise or fall of India, Indian = Global
The climate /energy crisis, water /food security and sustainability
Finance capital > Human Capital > Community Capital > Eco-system Management > Developmental Management > Rethinking Development and Governance
Reinventing the discipline of Management
2. Management Overview
Missing the wood for the trees – What we failed to see, Marketing Myopia, Theodor Levitt
Peter Drucker. The Bystander> End of economic man > to Managing Oneself
Beyond Competitive advantage
3 . First Discipline, SHPC : A Map to the Future and the Road ahead
1. Continual Renewal > Regeneration Therapy
2. Personal mastery and LLL, Life Long learning, learning plateaus
3. System/s Thinking
4. Accelerated Learning and Mental Maps, KM
5. Positioning yourself, your business for SHP
6. Community Intelligence
7. The Singularity Perspective- the map of all maps
4 The Practice of First Discipline.
The tool kit – a backpack for the road
Dialogue and Storytelling
Analytics and Gap Analysis
Aligning with the Deep Structure
Conscious Dreaming,
Participative Action Learning, Research and Real Time Management Development
Sustained High Performance – Growth by Design
5. Custodians of the Future
The Blue ocean people
Milk is white
God’s own country, Devils too – Between the devil and the deep-sea
The Eco-system people, fishermen/ tribal communities
The Fusion fuel and the Energy Challenge
6. Creating a future by design
Rethinking CSR, Wealth and Charity
7. Strategy.
Animating the Learning Engine, Maintaining the LE for SHP
Appendix
Context: First Discipline?
The global failure of management as a discipline- Enron to Lehman brothers, recession, failure of IT , bubbles, poverty and conflicts. Thought leaders – Peter Drucker over the years – In spite of all the hype management in the west also has failed to deliver against the global context
Local failures: Failure to connect to the developmental management issues of India
Failure to define what is Indian (global) about management
Failure to attract management to governance and development
Academic work in India has failed to make global impact
A dialogue between an academic and a development practitioner
The collapse of governance
The disillusionment with managers and academics, failure of leadership/intellectualism
The majority are left to fend for themselves –
TECHNOLOGY AND ACESS IN A CONNECTED WORLD
One man can make a difference
IT was entrepreneurial /technological/ learning breakthrough and not a product of management thought
Competencies of the new manager- Development practitioner?
These issues remain to be further explored through this dialogue
Birth of the professional manager: the ethical /competency /community imperatives
Peter Drucker vs Amartya Sen
Stafford Beer vs. Peter M Senge
Prahlad vs Porter
Chris Argyris vs. Maslow – End of Organisation man ?
Deming vs. Drucker
Aurobindo vs. Ken Wilbur
Management Development , Nurturing the new managers
Action learning – Reginald Revans
Schumacher vs Schumpeter
Kuhn
30 Freewill and the Immortality Quotient
The Shift
Ideas are like antibiotics. They lose their potency over time. Resistant/mutant versions of bacteria or virus surface and the search for more potent ones add to our ‘busy-ness’, a Pandora’s Box. Intelligence would have been an appropriate term to discuss what we are about to. Intelligence has become intelligences like one god in the west become many in the east. There are too many shades and versions of them. We too have contributed to the babble. Community and Gender Intelligence were our favorite buzzwords in this dialogue
So what is the new coinage? Why is it imperative?
The ‘Immortality Quotient’.
There are many reasons. First one is semantic. We talk about change; change is the only constant etc. Change can be + or – . The + and – might cancel each other out or what we now think + may be – in the long run.
We talk in such gross generalities that the word is killed and the talk only adds to the noise pollution. Our communication has no power. The word does not create and it is like a mantra chanted ad nauseum, without understanding the meaning of it. Had we been talking about improvement in place of change we would have been far better off.
Let us take a 2011 resolution that change is out and improvement is in?
Another one is our preoccupation with the immediate, the quarterly, playing Robin Hood and robbing peter to pay Paul, quick fixes that kill even the remote possibility of sustained or sustainable improvement. If we are driven by the logic of the market place and the best sellers, we will always be after a mirage, this format would not be necessary and no dialogue will be possible. We need a core of permanence, the center, to accumulate the pearl material. The best sellers are designed to be best sellers and the best of them are the result of some intelligent repackaging. This is what intelligence has come to.
Now that we have many an example of Skill + killings and layings, (read Enron and rest of the list) we know what the best and the most intelligent and the war for talent have come to be.
Why are we tagging immortality with freewill?
Free will is about choice whether to be an angel of death or a devil for life. The immortality option is seldom explored because we are bogged down by the burden of normality which has nothing to do with true normality. To conform is natural yet not ‘natural’.
To be immortal is to stand the test of time. The blue ocean people are pointers in this direction. Buddha, Christ and Mohammad continue to be immortal and alive to influence our dominant world views. It is not really a clash of civilizations but a clash between mortals and immortals. With the longer life spans and the late bloomers, we are about to face challenges of relative physical immortality and eventually the problems of physical immortality.
It is better to believe in life/immortality and die a physical death due to any number of possible causes, than to believe in death and die before physical death.
Do we really believe in freewill?
We may not but we would like to. An ounce of prevention is better than all the cures. We pretend that we have freewill because we want to live in free will while we continue to freewheel, like we pretend that we are working or adding value while we add to the semantic confusion, noise pollution and kill more trees. We don’t see evidence of anything free in the real sense of the term and it seems like the proverbial ‘eternal recurrence’.
It is a problem of what we pay attention to. We see brief manifestations of free will when we look at improvements over time and cumulatively we have many things to be put in perspective to build up a case for freewill.
It could be our 2011 resolution that we will work hard to develop a little of it.
So be it. Have a wonderful year ahead.
Religion owes its origin to immortality. I will always be with you till the end, said Christ. For ‘Peters’ the managers, institutional and personal self-interest take precedence over the conceptual and the visionary. Dependence is the fuel for survival of the pyramids. Hierarchic religion will be the first casualty of empowerment!
How do you select a facilitator, Guru or even your physician, the consultant?
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him. There are no Buddhas any more.
Mintzberg says, “Coach our selves”. Gurus die very young.
If the emperor claims to be the emperor, he is no emperor.
We are in transition to the age of the common Buddha. If you are in doubt, check it up at the corner shop.
Let us bury the dead. Shun the angels of death not the devils of life. Is she healthy physically, mentally, spiritually? Does she believe in community and dialogue? Is she an adult on the path to immortality? Does she see the adult in you, even if it is a dormant one? What is her IQ, immortality quotient, commitment to the long term?
In 1990, Tara was attending the beginners program in yoga. The centre was part of a large international network. She was carried away by the ‘presence’ of the facilitator and at the end of the sessions wanted to remain in touch with him. In the twenty sessions that they worked together with around twenty participants he had never shared his name or any other details. She was curious and once the question popped out of her.
“How old are you?’
“I am ageless”
“May I know your name?”
“What is in a name”?
This was all the one to one conversation that she had. She continues to practice yoga. She returned to the centre more than once in search of the guru who had set her on her yogic path. He had left the center and they could not help her to trace him. But memories and the learning remain. His words to the group still echoes in her.
“All learning is in the body. The body is the learning engine”
31 What is in a name?
Pied Pipers?
Ratsinger
Zuckerberg, it sucks
The millions averaging six hours a day
It sucks, is it social?
Bill Gates and Windows
Open the windows, Close the Gates
Do a Mother Theresa
End of Strategy !
Obama, Osama, the double or the other?
Bush and ambush, plain vanilla bush
Swartzkopf and shotskop
Friedman, hot, flat, crowded, and fried?
Hawking, hawks?
Grand design
Or Grand default?
Satyam = truth, Adarsh = the ideal
Maytas, truth reinvented the Indian way
Just two from the Indian summer of scams
Skill + Killings, spice it with Layings
Enron follows and the others join
Mc Kinsey, Donalds and WhartOn All!
Hamels hammer?
So much for the talent hunt
What a hunt?
What a war?
Overdogs or underdogs
What do the dogs see?
Outliers or mainstream
Black swans or White,
All is not well in Gladwell’s well
Where the eagles do not dare
Connect the dots, says him
Patterns, puzzles, mysteries and the misery
It is a mystic mandala
Hi Charles
It is very Handy
To be appropriately selfish
Read Will
Durant the durable
Not the perishables
The case for India
He had something of freewill
Not a free wheeler
For a taste of your own medicine
Appropriate selfishness
Stay Hungry, Stay foolish
Says the richest from the pulpit
Wow, what a Job, Connect the dots
Echoes Bansal from the land of immortals
Meluha
The empty raincoat, making sense of the future
Let us make sense of the present
The future will take care of itself
Empty drums echo best
The new Brahmins
Brahmin = Knowledge bearer, Vidyadhara
Vidya = real knowledge
Vidyadhara = one who bears knowledge
Vidya was lost on the way
Knowledge bearers became plain bearers
A country went under
History repeats on other shores
Connect the Dots, Manuel
God is with us
Will the elephant dance?
Will it?
Wont it?
We Will
Freewill and freewheel.
32 Angels of Death and Devils of Life, Old and New
What would you prefer to be, an angel of death or a devil of life? Be a devil of life, a ruthless one at that, 8×5 if not 24×7.
If the belief in god begets the devil, isn’t it better not to believe in that god ? God and devil, life and death need not be at the poles and in opposition to create each other. If charity begets charity, it takes a lot of courage to stop being charitable.
Can life die? Everything that lives eventually dies, says, a popular author to his six year old son who asks, will our sun eventually die and the earth turn into a lifeless planet? It takes some understanding and even more courage to say, I don’t know.
The true scientist working to decipher the code for biological immortality has no options but to take a different position, live that reality at least in part, now. For her life never dies, everything that lives need not necessarily die. She chooses to pay attention to ‘facts’ to support her position and work towards translating the dream to a lived reality all through her living life. She sees everything alive and not dying. She too could die but she truly lived when she lived, out of the shadow of death. Biological immortality is a virtual reality for her, now.
Nature continually renews itself. We create death working overtime, resisting nature. Our best selling author also does almost the same, paying attention to ‘facts’ to support his position, spreading the message of death all through his dying life. Death is the virtual reality for him now. The coward dies many deaths.
The author is an angel of death and the scientist, a devil of life. A devil of life is rarer than a black swan.
Black swans are exceptions when we take very thin slices of time and space. Compare this with the universal, all slices of time and space. Imagine all the unknown earths where white swans are as rare as black swans on our planet. In some future time we would be ‘successful’ in making white swans extinct so that the black swans will be the ‘normality. Or it could also be true that in ‘her-story’ in some unknown past, nobody wrote a ‘his-story’ of the swans, black swans were the normality. America was doing all right, perhaps better from some other perspective, even before Columbus ! Thanks to Taleb for the trigger, a black swan in our present slice of time and space. In the cacophony of the market place one with the best noise box is listened to and being audacious is integral to a B-School education. One is advised to have big hoary audacious goals. We go to great lengths to prove that we belong to ‘mediocristan’ to use one of Taleb’s coins. Mediocristan and extremistan are two sides of the same coin which has a third side for ordinary mortals like us and many more sides to the likes of Taleb, which most students and their professors fail to connect to in their case studies in B-School. In the medium run all of us are dead or ‘fooled’ in mediocristan, the flatland.
Angels of death come in all colors and shades, most pleasing, gentle, dying to do good, promise to make you all powerful, beautiful, immortal, a full life here, another one after your death – ‘mutually inclusive’, so on and so forth. The cosmetics peddler, medicine man, philanthropist, priest, pedagogues, top of the pyramid, blue chip performance, pied pipers, astrologer, snake oil in all rainbow colors…………noblest of intentions ………….. The effect is invariably malignant and they are so sure of themselves. You will never hear them say, I do not know. We are not that sure.
The devils of life come in gray. They are very rare. Keep searching. Appearances are very very deceptive. There could be a beginners’ dilemma.
Keep paying attention to the new. Everything is renewed. Life never dies. Somewhere on the way, the tipping point will come, death will be the abnormal and life the normal. Biology will be infashion than Physics.
Why wait for the prophet who will never come? Let us begin building our ark.
We become what we pay attention to. Resistance creates resistance. Do not resist. Meera looks at the jaded jeans from her B-School days completing a quarter century of companionship. She chooses to see the new feel of it, today, now.
33 Positioning: Where are we?
Visualizing Knowledge
What the dog sees and we don’t. Who has gone aSTRAY?
From the lowly perspective of a dog’s eyes, everyone looks short – Chinese proverb
IF
Just as we forget phone numbers and multiplication tables with cell phone memories and calculators we have forgotten to check our positions and some whiz-kid has hacked into all the GPSs to show the wrong position
THEN
We will all be rushing madly to where no one really wants to go
WHAT IF
This is the truth with or without GPS?
The corruption in our thinking is at the very source itself!
So how do we debug the source code?
For us the dog’s is a lowly perspective. But we can prove that the dog’s position is above us and ours is the lowly perspective. All dogs do not see the same. Stray dogs see even better than their domesticated fellows. The latter become less intelligent in the process of socialization with the humans who cut them to size to suit their unfulfilled needs and wants of relationships and community. We are far inferior to them on Community Intelligence and I have reasons to conclude that the stray dogs see that we have gone astray! This is what the visual above shows. The top left quadrant shows the increasing potential of simple to complex systems. The bottom right quadrant shows the corresponding performance at each level of systems. We don’t see a gap between potential and performance till the level of animals, the level which also includes the dogs. From the level of animals we see a fall, which we take it as great progress. What we see depends on where we stand. In the case of the human and still higher systems, performance is below that of animals. The fall is so steep that it is just on par with simple systems similar to a clock. What we see as great progress is a myth and we are firing on all cylinders heading towards disaster without even realising it.
Where are we ? The Chandrasekhar Limit
This has nothing to do with the famous scientist and the phenomenon that goes by his name. This is about another limit more closer home and this Chandrasekhar is a friend of mine. One morning too early in the day for most of us, I found him in front of his regular bar frantic and searching for a familiar face. He wanted to go home but he didn’t know where he was. Imagine his relief to meet me. He could not hold on and it just popped out of him “Where am I?” He was greatly relieved. I was not. It continues to haunt me that we know far better about the unreachable stretches of space than what is closest to us and we go around creating a world outside to fit the garbage inside us. That also includes the cosmologist who attributes his fear of death to the universe seeing it breaking down like a clock.
The Position and Positions
Without answering where we are as a species, we cannot have an answer to where I am as an individual.
The first step to a common journey, to go home or elsewhere, virtual or otherwise, is to know where we are now .The GPS or the compass eases the complexity of the task in our regular journeys. Progress is a different kind of a journey and we are yet to agree on this first step. Each of us has a different position on this and the proverbial babble of Babel is the corollary. When we have different positions it is imperative that our perspectives do not converge. Unless we agree on a non-controversial reference to the starting point there will be no common journey
When our basic assumptions about the home position, the reference point, are wrong it is certain that we will reach some place where we never wanted to go. Any process of improvement calls for fixing a starting position, deciding on the direction and reflecting/review with reference to the starting position.
For over two decades we have been asking people what our basic needs are. The first response is invariably the text book answer, “food, shelter, clothing”. For someone who has decided that life itself is meaningless and suicide is a better option, none of these matter. When we ask “How many sides the coin has?” the answer is always the same, two. With a little bit of prodding around they will shift their positions and see better.
For a moment let us take position where the four lines meet and take in the common perspective that collectively we are no better than a clock in terms of our performance against our collective potential to perform.
Now it becomes possible to fix a direction for improvement and on this journey of improvement there will be variant positions as we move forward
Now it is also possible to position myself (example: a professional or a facilitator to the journey) and see the variant positions, milestones in that long journey
Ref: Positioning – The seven dimensions
34 Directioning: Where we should be going ?
Blue Ocean People at the Top of the Pyramid, BOP @ TOP“
Potentially, anyone of us could aspire to be one of them. Please see the wiki list of lists of centenarians to get a feel of what I have in mind. Most of these people would qualify to be there in the BOP@ TOP list that I am compiling.
Having worked for over three decades at the bottom of the pyramid and branded myself a low impact lifer, aka poor, much before the jargon was in vogue I am more fascinated with people at the top of the pyramid. It is for the TOP to make it lighter for those at the bottom. We have enough of them to show us that it is indeed possible. These people have taken the road less or not travelled. They show us the direction for the journey, milestones that point to further stretches of the road not taken, of the unrealised, unexplored territories, the blue ocean space of strategic directions for self-management or HRM, Human Resources Management, to use a B-School jargon. They give much more than they take. They are Low impact on inputs and very high impact on output. They bridge us with the past and point to us, the future
For me HRM is Hira Ratan Manek. Born in 1937, a graduate in mechanical engineering who carried on with the family business, of shipping and spice trading till he retired in 1992. After working for 3 years, he re-discovered the secrets of sun gazing. Since June 18th, 1995, HRM lives only on sun energy and water. Occasionally he drinks tea, coffee and buttermilk. He had three strict fastings, during which he had just sun energy and only water and was under the control and observation of various science and medical teams. The first of these fasting lasted for 211 days which was followed by a 411 day fast from 2000-2001 in Ahmadabad. Indeed it is written “Man Shall Not Live by Bread Alone “
Another one is, Pandit Sudhakar Krishna Rao Chaturvedi, a vedic scholar, teacher, writer, translator and journalist was born in 1897. At 113 years he says in the Vedas it is said that a person of pure character can live for 300 years. He hopes to live that long. He has planned his work for another ten years.
PC Devassia, whom I knew from very close for over two decades, who is in one of the wiki lists, lived for 100 years 6 months and 15 days. This by itself is not a feat but how those years were spent is. On the day he retired from nearly four decades of work, he talked on how he planned to spend his remaining 40 years. His magnum opus,Kristubhagavatam, a meeting point of two cultures was written in his seventies. All those forty years were exceptionally productive, even more productive than the first forty years of work. The decision to live for a 100 years was a conscious one taken very early in life which he had made known to his son when he was in school. The position was taken very early in life, the direction was set and reflection was a continuous process. His work was his spirituality and he was religious about it. Making work meaningful and fun is the best medicine to live long. Instead we wait for a day when nano-robots will make it possible for us to become immortal.
Dominic Chacko Kizhkemuri, DC,was born in 1914 .He worked as a teacher for over a decade, was involved in the freedom struggle and imprisoned, promoted SPCS, the writers’ cooperative which created history. He retired at the age of 60 and started his own publishing firm, the DC Books with a capital of less than $ 200 which became a market leader in the business by the time he died in 1999
I am grateful to my B-School education for introducing to me many in the following lighthouse people. Some of them continue to beacon us and would qualify to be included the list of immortals if there were one. The immortality quotient, my fascination for the long term, was triggered by them
Ludwig Vn Bertalanffy 1901-1972
Anthony Stafford Beer 1926 – 2002
Emanuel Revici, M.D, 1898-1998
Obviously living a long life is not the only qualifier to be in the list of BOP @ TOP. Warren Buffet or Bill Gates will not qualify in spite of the combined weight of their charities.
The Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Rene’e Mauborgne, is about uncontested market space, how market leaders continue to stay far ahead of competition without wasting their energy and effort on market wars. I draw my lessons from people not corporates having lost my faith in B-Schools and business with my four years of education in two Of them. Imagine the vast unexplored space that is available to move on and the spin offs if more of us decide to adopt a blue ocean strategy in our lives. That would set one of the coordinates for strategic HRM, the blue ocean space that each individual discovers around oneself is the major driver for growth and improvement, true of all of history and the drive behind all those in the Guinness book of records. Future is in the making when we see this collective blue ocean space that remains unexplored.
The seniors shall inherit the earth
Can one grow old and young at the same time?
Some people, a small minority, do it. They mature like old whisky and still remain young, challenging common wisdom that old dogs cannot pick up new tricks. New findings suggest the opposite. For some seniors growing old and growing young are parallel processes. They challenge their brain with continual learning. The result, plasticity of the brain improves. Intelligence too has the same character. It improves if one keeps challenging it against problems. When the brain remains young and one is driven by work that is motivating on its own merit, the body grows young renewing itself continually like a river which is not blocked from renewal by our ecological footprints. One grows old and young at the same time.
Olive Riley, the world’s oldest blogger, passed away at 108. She must have picked up blogging when quite old by our usual standards. I also know some very smart, much younger people who boast of not using the internet or the computer claiming that they are against too much of technology. I am afraid it is a camouflage to cover up the resistance to embrace the new. In my search for the old and young I met Joseph Smith. He weathered many a storm on the high seas and on land for 82 years and graduated from the school of hard knocks. He is old and young, more active and concerned than most of us about the way the system works or does not. The ‘old and young’ need closer attention because they are travelling a different road which is likely to be a mega trend, gathering momentum.
Elsewhere there is a conversation going on the future of social enterprise. I am convinced that the future of business is in the enhancement of community, global and local. I spent four years as a student in two B-schools. Both claimed to be teaching management but proved to be just business schools. Some of them have an identity crisis like many of their clients. I would prefer to believe that every business, including the business of religion and non- profits, is about creating community within to connect to the community outside and business performance ought to be measured by the enhancement of community or net value addition to the community capital. Many of them very successful by conventional norms could be destroying community. They survive and grow by reinforcing the business of shadows and substitutes. Growth does not differentiate between real goods and services and shadows and substitutes.
Established religions have stood the test of time, but have a shadow side to their existence. They appear to be more successful than most business organizations in promising the most intangible with the lowest cost of production, manipulating masses on the fear of death and retribution in next life. Priests and politicians play god and peddle dependence. Many of them love to be worshipped and are on a drive to fulfil their own power drive distortions. Did somebody say that the earth will be revealed to us when heaven is destroyed ?
Will insurance companies have any business if people have no fear of death or the future? If people are anchored to their true SELVES how would the fashion and cosmetics business respond which often assumes that the cosmetic is more important than the content?
Would there be a fall in demand for big screen heroes if we reframe our notions of the hero to the real meaning of the term, conquering one’s own fear?
If people redefine work as self-expression, will they continue to suffer from boredom and consequently will the market shrink for entertainment products and services? The entertainment industry stretches itself to keep boredom at bay. The demand is a derived one from the inability to find a purpose in life and work that is motivating by itself.
How would lotteries and the stock market fare if more people put an end to the wait for a better day game and start living in the present?
More than economics distorted human drives drive the economy. Which business is not a social enterprise though most of them implicitly admit that they are antisocial. What would be the role of charity, other than as a measure of guilt associated with wealth when every business redefines its mission as enhancing global community?
These are landscapes that one might come across on the two roads, one by design and the other by default.
One can go on ad nauseum about the shadow side of every business, profit or non profit. I believe more than the religions, business will take the road to spirituality. I have experienced better community in business than in religious organizations. Business will be more pressed to reinvent itself as enhancing community within to connect better to the external community locally and globally in a borderless world.
It is neither easy for business or for individuals to walk out of the shadows, because we will have to turn against our own vested interests, the shadow side.
The ‘young and old’ show the way. The most successful of them have no learning plateaus as they take their positions very early in life. They quit only when their mission is fulfilled. The others have successfully negotiated the learning plateaus at different stages of their life. They live a life of their own design and they are their own heroes. They earn credibility with their life and walk the talk. They are not looking for a secure tenure or driven by the need to perform in the marketplace where your future is as volatile as the stock market, where in the first 15 years of your career your fate is almost sealed whether you belong to the ‘top of the pyramid’ material or not. Demography favors the seniors. Thanks to the web more of them are finding their voice and we have enough of them in the public domain to listen and learn how to live a life by design.
‘
The elephant rock declaration’
In one of our workouts, we, twelve 60 + couples, got together to discuss the trend, climbed the elephant rock and shouted out the elephant rock declaration – “The seniors shall inherit the earth”
35 Dialogues – Aging out of life
Meenakshi asks, In our time do we age out of life?
Like most questions, the answers are yes, no, and yes and no
“Death is not essential’, said The Mother
Reading this, has been a milestone in my learning.
Life begins when we resolve our issues with death and ageing
We are not designed to die but to live
Death is a habit and we are breaking more and more out of this habit – people are living longer.
What is time? Is it linear, a one way traffic, an arrow that moves from birth to death?
This cannot be natural since nothing in nature is linear. There is an arrow of time that goes in the opposite direction, memory – how we RE-collect our past. The sun we see is around 9 minutes old but our thought does not take nine minutes to reach the sun we see, the sun that was nine minutes ago.
Yes thought is faster than light.
As we talk our cells die and new cells are born, two more arrows, to put it in a very crude way. In place of the first arrow we have four arrows of time now.
When this is experienced, birth and death become simultaneous, not a journey from point A to B, birth to death. One transcends linear time and steps into eternity, become ageless.
So we age out of linear time, not out of life, and start living in the NOW, – eternity.
When was I born? MM DD YYYY? That was the birth of my body.
Did I have anything to do with it?
The real me was born much later when I RE-collected all that scattered stuff and put them all together and I walked out of the shadows of death, linear time, my unconscious and took that first step to the birth of myself , eternity and continual renewal.
How old are you?
I have multiple choices to suit the questioner
I am 61, for the straights
I am 39 when I count from the birth of my SELF
I am 29 if I count from when I decided to live life on my terms ( It took ten years for the self to become mature enough to make that decison)
15 billion (in arrow terms) years.
The logic is I am as old as the Universe and everything that went on is mapped in me in many ways
> 15 billion years – something in me will go on living for ever.
< 2 years – age of the oldest cell in my body ?
Take your pick or all of it.
Have some more of your own answers.
It is always better to have as many answers, perspectives, than anyone single answer.
NAN?
What is NAN? The Indian bread? New Age Nonsense?
Well I could have been dead yesterday. I haven’t. What greater miracle do you need to make life wonderful?
So what is the answer, without beating around the bush?
In “our times “, we can age out of time itself.
We can age out of life too.
It is a Choice.
36 Building Our Ark, Living in Real Time
In the beginning was the word and before the beginning, we lived in real-time.
Most of us live in linear time and some in real-time. Those living in real or relative real time live longer, the blue ocean people. Those living in linear time die early.
Noah, Aaron and Abner are kids from my neighbourhood. We are fascinated as to why we go back to the Old Testament to dig up these names? History and myths chase us when we don’t understand them?
Books can be written only in linear time. So is history. In real time all of past and all of future are NOW. From now we connect to a history of the future.
In linear time, we and the world were born at some distant past. We and the world will die at some far away future.
Wright brothers were right. They gave expression to our collective longing to fly. Buddha, Christ, Mohammad and Gandhi voiced our longing to break free in a different way. We played with technology to break free from the confines of the planet driven by some distant memories of longer flights. In the beginning, was oneness and the longing for oneness took us to transcending the barriors of time and space. With the emergence of the web and the cloud, when we are stuck in the clouds for hours we have a semblance of what it is to live in real-time.
In real time the flood is now, not in some distant past. It calls for all our skills to craft an ark to survive the flood. One such skill is to transcend the linear to dynamic and real time. The ark is the symbol of the self. Everything of the past is embedded into it, a new synthesis of all that has happened in the past, the sum of all improvements in the evolutionary journey, plants, animals, and a select few from the millions who are ready for the transformational voyage, crafting an accumulator to collect everything with a survival value and stepping into a new future of rainbow promises.
The old fisherman took me to the shore, pointed to the horizon, some distant waves and the shoal. I could not see any fish. I pretended that I could,the coward that I was. Then on I started watching the waves, and to learn to see beyond the waves. Gradually it fell in place how all the waves, together, tangible and intangible, come together to create what we create.
It is against our programming to think in waves. Unlike fishermen, men on land have come to think in straight lines which leads us to booms and busts rather than waves and cycles which are but natural But we are always taken by surprise. The captains could not see beyond the linear, waves and cycles.
Dev complains, the dialogue brushes past too many issues and leaves everyone of them unexplained
Dialogue is for ADULTs. They need no advice. You can at best draw their attention or perhaps provoke them to ask questions. Once this is achieved they need be left to make the rest of the connections. (If there are gaps one can always Google it). There has to be enough space for the adult to find itself and mature.
Now that the context is set and the flood is more than a myth, choice is between building your own ark or a community one. The latter happens only in myths and is beyond our scope.
There is no substitute to building a personal one. We need as many arks as possible rather than waiting for another Noah. Each one needs to build an ark for oneself. Without learning to ride the waves, one can not lend a helping hand. That would be catalyzing suicide
The pyramids were built when the valley was fertile and the soil supported the community. The floods used to keep the soil fertile. When we were young we celebrated the floods which were a rare event. It was a time for celebrations, taking out the canoes, go frolicking. Now they have built embankments to the river. When the river swells, the currents are stronger digging the bottom of the river further down. The embankments get washed away but are strengthened continuously, further accelerating the death of the river. The forests were replaced by a wide portfolio of crops which more or less acted like natural forests which gave way to the plantations, fertilizers, pesticides and weedicides. Now the soil is dying. Floods when they come spread the pesticides and weedicides all over, further accelerating the rot.
The other flood is more difficult to see. The most endangered species is the Homo sapiens and not the others in the list. History tells us that the collapse takes more than 100 years for the full cycle to be completed. When our span of attention is less than 15 years, we fail to see the flooding that takes a century or more.
The crisis could be the birth pangs of a new species. Nature is ruthless when it comes to the survival of the fittest.
One of the participants had this dream of the pied piper and the giant wheel. We get into the giant wheel and the driver decides when we need to get out. The music is so enchanting that we merrily join the flow, the flood. We become the frog soup – drowned in the flood
Either we dream of a glorious past or a glorious future. Neither helps, the flood/ crisis is a perennial one , taking place here and now. We pray to our father who art in heaven. Just as we push him up (push HER underground) out of our lives we dream of a golden past or a future. This is the problem with stimulus selectivity. We would like to listen to our favourite music and shut out the inconvenient and the unpleasant, out of focus.
Are you suggesting that we don’t wait to save the planet but be selfish enough to save our own skin.
That may be the best that one can do., appropriate selfishness – Charles Handy
Nature will see that in spite of floods and plagues there will be enough left for the show to continue. One can choose which fork to take. The crowd will always be behind by at least 20 + years behind the lone walker. Nobody is going to build a Lexus, reading the Toyota Way
We can learn from the people on the edge. The African proverb, a favourite of Al Gore and quoted in The Hot, Flat and Crowded by Fried man, “If you want to go quickly go alone but if you want to go far, go together” may at times turn out to be suicidal.
For Galileo it was much longer. Had he gone with the crowd, we wouldn’t have him in the history books. The crowd and the pyramid dwellers took a long long ime to reconcile with his personal vision. One can not always go with the crowd. One has to learn to hunt with the hound as well as run with the hares.
What about the Gurus, Best sellers, the secret, the law of attraction, the self improvement industry – NAN
There are enough saviours/ pied pipers who promise salvation. The crutches help till you learn to walk. Once you have learnt to walk, it is time to dump the crutches and listen to the guru inside. One cannot see through the other’s eyes. We need new eyes to see a new vision NOW to create a desirable future
The Ark
What is the visual about?
The new eye, window to the self, reality
We have attempted to map, create a visual of what we have been discussing. Perhaps one could meditate on it for some time. We were talking about a the ark as the learning engine.
The Ark is the learning engine which continually outperforms, beyond booms and busts, floods, feasts/festivals.
It is about our self and selves.
37 Go to market strategies
“I am alive”
“No. I am anti-fragile” says, Taleb
“Hare and the tortoise” – fable
“Fast and slow, System A and B – Kahneman
“Which way to run? Asks Ratsinger
Suggested reading
Gerald Zaltman and Lindsay Zaltman, authors of Marketing Metaphoria: What Deep Metaphors Reveal about the Minds of Consumers (HBS Press 2008).
The Power of Storytelling Jim Holtje, Prentice Hall Press
The Leader’s Guide to Storytelling by Stephen Denning, Jossey-Bass
Tell to Win Peter Guber, Crown Business
Resonate Nancy Duarte, John Wiley & Sons
Storybranding Jim Signorelli, Greenleaf Book Group
Winning the Story Wars by Jonah Sachs, Harvard Business School Press
Illustrators and Visual Storytellers Map the World by Maria Popova
First Discipline 
Thank you