Blog year2008 in october is about ending poverty http://events.takingitglobal.org/20255 so we hope this week's syndication to 100 blogs will exponentialise to tens of thousands of blogs by then, with a little help from friends like you
sustainability club http://sustainabilityclub.com
social business club http://www.socialbusinessclub.net
collaboration cafe http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_9nL_a0K97I
yunus 10000 http://yunus10000.com collaboration coordinators for youth dialogues in that city and between cities together with invitations to action specific to each video good news story - eg if you want microcredit to beat off big banks why not help any school try out micro credit with the world's simplest program small change, big changes - a microloanfoundation franchise
Peers across hemispheres and I are far more interested in ensuring that each of these intercity movements vetoes any uses of 20th c failing system methods that the majority of club coordinators -or where elected an honorary board - vote against, than prescribing revenue models.
OPEN SOURCING THE CLUBS
Obviously we should want coordinators to make a living out of work input whlst at the same time recognising that being a club coordinator is probably worth more than having many a professional qualification - or needs to become so if this world is to be sustainable. Equally where profits are repeatedly generated I assume we can find a way iof agreeing some sliding scale that should be contributed either to your favourite grassroots organsiation in bangladesh or to a small list of other potential grassroots partners of future capitalism which should probably need at least 75 of members refendum to confirm
I am very happy if people will negotiate what other rules they would need to want to participate as well as to clarify where they want diferent contant at the mother webs. The main web system I use costs $35 a year per web so its not difficult to imagine that major cties will also want to set up their own branch web or of course a free blog - either of which we will happily linmk from the top of the mother web.
Obviously some of our constitution needs double checking with for example the 100000 bangladeshi's and other Gandhians who are the main practical exemplar of the values we seek to network worldwide so that the future sustains 7 billion brilliant jobs and goodwill multiplying across all women, children and even men.
We wish to learn from each city's most successful ways of mobilising and cross-cultural celebration, as well as metods for ensuring that any action network actually reaches to those in most desperate need of its service. This is one of the big lessons of bangladeshi experience -reiterated by every micro-system designer in bangladesh we have interviewed - once a networks starts empowering the entrepreneur inside it will never get deeper than the deepest needsholders it begins with. This is a lesson that many global NGOs seem never to have begun to grade.
chris macrae http://worldentrepreneur.net
washington dc inquiries desk usa 301 881 1655 info@worldcitizen.tv
y10000 at facebook http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=22045349892
|
Launch of Future Capitalism book: features Grameen Danone as world's first multinational social business & explains how social business model has been validated from 30 years of developing the microcredit banking sector J1 | Business Week article F29-Yunus world's favourite goodwill entrepreneur whose goal of ending Financial Imperalism is as big as Gandhi’s | | | |
World Economic Forum: Bill Gates joins Leaders of Future Capitalism: J25 | | Parisian business leaders celebrate French edition and Grameen Veolia is announced | Launch of Innovation Bank in Bahrain & announcement of 2 Billion $ inward investment in Bangladesh | Top 25 dialogues of microcreditsummit year 008 are announced. They include industry sector responsibility response to Mexican abuse of goodwill and IP. |
| Doonesbury cheered as inspiring economics correspondent at London School of Economics talk - changing mindsets and mini-professordom is development economics biggest crisis F15 | President Sarkozi orders HEC to provide an SMBA with Yunus a Chair of Social Business | World's G3 : Grameen's Yunus, Genome's Ventner & Google's Schmidt |
|
Thanks to London as one of the main Yunus forum cities helping to track the change world networks and diary of Dr Yunus
Dr Yunus of Grameen and microcredit and Nobel peace 2006 is setting cities and citiens around the world an interesting challenge. If he is passing through your city would you be able to find 1000 people who all wanted to collaborate with each other as well as him in empowering a good global world instead of the bad one currently compoundingSynonyms for good are win-win-win, sustainable, empowering every community up, one where hi-trust people transparently win over low-trustSo 2 questions:if Yunus was passing through Africa cities, which do you think would produce the most collaborative impactsif you are a twin national
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2516276605 - eg living in a rich city but with family roots back in Africa - how ready is your big rich city to represent Africa interests when Yunus hosts his Forum 1000 there.My friends are particularly working on London and New York as 2 test cities; partly because a London University student spent the summer interning in Dhaka on this project. One intercity collaboration idea is collaboration cafe - see those we have already hosted and tell us at info@worldcitizen.tv if you want to replay one in your city or virtually
http://worldcitizen.tv/_wsn/page4.html Another collaboration idea is can we produce a good global idea to heroes, their projects and networks for humanity. Why do people all over the world know the top 10 sporstmen for 50 different sports but not top 10s for different vital issues of human sustainability?
http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5475184122
The impact of cafes (one hour open meetings but on particular crisis invitations - ie truncated open spaces) where invitations are past through all changemakers networks has never been higher. Especially in London as a model for the future of all open cross-cultural cities and villages as social sub-networks - a reconciliation of enduring urgency forced on us by 7/7 and the recognition that government over many years has failed to wholly integrate cultures at the grassroots in ways that people and local communities must take charge of.
This is such a huge subject that I neither have time nor space in this weblog medium to do justice to all the questions that live cafes have raised and how all the major crises of lost sustainability and distrust between different local and global groups of peoples are being made ever more conflicted by national government- whose monopoly rule over public service budgets in the most vital areas like safety, media, health, education, peace is disastrous when most of the challenges facing us are as world citizens (interlocal waves that are made worse wherever a Blair of Bush make decisions like a Canute) or wherever 2 party politics one-dimensionalises issues that need 360 degree diversity of transparent public dialogue
We will have a special series of cafes in the Islington area all of sept 11-15 - email me for a full calendar; and if you only read this after sept 15: I will be happy to after action debrief on you what we learnt from the dialogues and where next we will be restaging them. I will also be putting a lot of the learnings from our cafe series at these weblogs which are inter-related . chris.macrae@yahoo.co.uk
http://worldcitizen.tv - this looks as ways we citizens can perform communications experiments to show that huge investigative journalism contexts are being missed (biased out) by the BBC, and debates how to rectify this
http://worldentrepreneur.net which focuses on the source of good news out of America in terms of supporting the world's poorest with 30 years of mapping what social projects have resolved crises in one local community and can be replicated as interlocal franchises
http://worldeconomist.net pulls together these latest practical banks of learnings and connects this back with my father and my future history book on death of distance in 1984 which forecast that economics as a worldwide discipline would need transforming between 2005-2105, as much if not more than when James Wilson founded The Economist to keep questioning how economics could sustain peoples through the industrial revolution
We also has http://worldapprentice.com given that folk of every age need to start blueprinting a revolutionary new curricula and modalities of education for all our children if we are to time warp through sustainability's inconvenient truths. At time of writing I am still waiting to hear whether I will get accepted into the first wave of 2000 people being trained by Al Gore on how to present his inconvenient truth slides. This first wave rehearsals and start of an amazing change network takes place In Nashville towards the end of September
http://www.theclimateproject.org
The RSA's and Starbucks and BBC action network coffeehouse challenge in 2006 has been much more interesting in London this year as its been permitted to brew as a summer long festival rather being constrained to a one-month (May schedule)
CAFES & OPENSPACERACE 1 2
God bless all who host and attend cafes - seeds and real-people crossroads to the huge virtual networks that can be multiplied if each person's social network can be interfaced with each other person united in hi-trust and wish to raise questions about a global crisis context before we rush for any open answer
To support beings after Tsunami : Tsunami UK Umbrella*,red cross, Islamic ReliefThe * Disasters Emergency Committee umbrella group of UK charities* includes: British Red Cross, Cafod, Oxfam, Save the Children, Tearfund
3 Great Rolling Agendas Londoners are helping to Network Around the World
Water
Continuing News building up to world conference in Foz , September 05 -email wcbn007@easynet.co.uk explaining what linking in interests you have
2004, December at Brazilian Embassy London
Cultivating Good Water
By Nelton Miguel Friedrich
Coordinating Director of ITAIPU Binacional - World's Largest Dam & Programme of 100 Connecting Ecology in Community Experiments
Slide presentations available
2004,October 15:Simpol Cafe:
A chance to discuss with Brazilian Franklin Frederick the following sorts of topics on the humanitarian crisis of Water: either at the collaboration café at 1.00pm Tuesday Oct 19 at public café of the Friend’s House opposite Euston Station,London- or if you can’t attend but would like an email intro to Franklin, please tell me
1 Anita Roddick’s New Book - Troubled Water
The Global Water Crisis. The next war will be over water!
Water is more fundamental than any other substance on Earth: you can live three weeks without food, but without water you'll be dead in three days. www.anitaroddick.com
2 The many meetings on water that Franklin spoke at during the European Social Forum in London over the weekend, and his next plans fro the World Social Forum in Brazil in January
3 How in Brazil , the church and Franklin’s movement- soon to be The International Free Water Academy - is the voice representing people’s rights to water versus on the other side multinationals, and increasingly the government and commercial mass media.
The Church in Brazil embarks on its 40th “Fraternity Campaign which was presented in Brasilia at the head quarters of the Brazilian Bishops’ Conference CNBB. The theme of the campaign this year is “Fraternity and Water”, and the slogan is “Water Source of Life”.
The aim of the 2004 campaign is “to increase awareness of the value of water, source of life, a need of all living beings and a right of every human person” in order to encourage people to work to guarantee present and future generations the right to waterFather Daniele Lagni, National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in Brazil, said that the theme chosen for this year’s campaign fits well with a missionary life lived as proclamation of the good news of Jesus who wishes to be “life in abundance” for every man, woman and child. The slogan “Water, Source of Life” is therefore a call to fight to defend life
4 Why so many of London’s largest campaign networks including www.wdm.org.uk, www.bethechange.org.uk and www.simpol.org.uk see Water as the humanitarian issue connecting all others
5 What seems to be the extreme corporate irresponsibility of global brands like Coca-Cola and Nestle on Water. Without major changes in the reality of their goodwill, I don’t either will be in the top 10 brand ratings in 5 years time – how do you feel?
sincerely
chris macrae, wcbn007@easynet.co.uk, mobile 0793 144 2446
| Monetary Reform
MONETARY REFORM POLICY FORUM
Wednesday 2 March 2005
at a Central London venue
With James Robertson & John Bunzl
authors of
'Monetary Reform: Making it Happen!'
and Peter Challen of the
Christian Council for Monetary Justice
Draft
SIMPOL-UK
The national branch of the
International Simultaneous Policy Organisation
is organising a Policy Forum, open to all, on
REFORM OF OUR UNSUSTAINABLE MONETARY SYSTEM IS
NOW ACHIEVABLE THROUGH INFORMED ACTION BY VOTERS
at [6 pm] on Wednesday 2 March 2005
in [House of Lords Committee Room X / Friends House, Euston Road / ...]
Why the system is grossly damaging and exploitative and needs to be changed
It is not widely understood that 97% of the money in circulation in the UK has been created by commercial banks at the touch of a computer keyboard as an interest-bearing loan, and only 3% as banknotes and coins issued by the Bank of England and the Royal Mint. From this arrangement the banking community gains over £20 billion a year in interest from the 97%, while the taxpayer gets £3 billion from the 3%. A comparable situation exists in other countries.
Apart from the injustice of exploiting the value of a public resource for private profit, an economy in which most of the money has been created as debt will inevitably experience high levels of public and private indebtedness. It will have to grow ad infinitum in order to meet a growing burden of interest payments on a growing money supply. It will be inherently distorted, inefficient and unjust in various other ways.
How voters can pressurise governments to institute reform
For many years a viable alternative to this destructive and unsustainable system has been proposed, but resisted – partly by exploiting a fear that the loss of the present hidden subsidy would damage the international competitive performance of the banking industry and of the national economy as a whole.
Now, for the first time, an answer to this is in prospect. This is the adoption by citizens worldwide of the Simultaneous Policy (SP), the new way by which voters, acting together across frontiers, can empower accountable politicians to cooperate globally, and bring pressure to bear on governments to enact saner policies -- such as monetary reform -- simultaneously.
First Forum objective: Consider the beneficial reforms proposed
This first objective is to discuss the socially beneficial and entirely practical proposal that national monetary authorities should create non-cash (bank-account) money as well as banknotes and coins at regular intervals, as required to regulate the amount of money in circulation. They should give these amounts to their governments as debt-free public revenue, and the governments should put the money into circulation by spending it. And it should become illegal for anyone else to create bank-account money denominated in the national currency.
Second objective: strategies for building public opinion favouring reform
The other objective is to agree ways in which such a major, new-paradigm proposal can be made politically acceptable, first by demonstrating to citizens and business people worldwide that they have allowed their governments to endorse a system that keeps them in a completely unnecessary spiral of debt, and to show how, as voters supporting the Simultaneous Policy, they have the collective power to influence government policies. And secondly to convince politicians, who had a "massive vote of no confidence" in a recent Gallup International poll, that they can restore voters' confidence by supporting such a bold -- and more democratic -- policy.
| National Contributions to Global Reconciliation
Your correspondent spent the week before Chistmas in Delhi as a UK representative of the Global Reconciliation Network whose members from all continents reported project actions. First consider Africa:
An hiv support worker from Kenya explained how the team initiatives that have been franchised across many countries from the London International headquarters of the Salvation Army were the most hopeful community building initiative
A lady representing the people of Somalia provided detailed testimonies on wht its like to be in a country that is virtually without government
GRN is linking in with the initiatives announced at its 2003 annual roundtable spearheaded by Mary Robinson and Charles Villa-Vincencio, Executive Director Institute for Justice and Reconciliation, South Africa. The Australian HQ of GRN also has the support for the concept of bearing witness to local reconciliation testimonies from Archbishop Tutu We have been receiving ever greater demands to lobby the BBC for more supportive coverage of heroes stories across African communities. If the youth of one university town in Sweden can pledge that any who go on to become famous will support the alumni's twin town African projects; surely the BBC could take more interest in demand for University of the Stars to be developed with some help from the world's largest publicly owned broadcaster. We also believe that the combination of an innovative reality tv program and a google partnership could make a 30000 action project hunt unifiable, especially as India is strengthening links will all international alumni circles (including many in Africa) of Mahatma Gandhi's change project guidelines, with Delhi hosting a worldwide congress celebrating Gandhi in 2007. |
Colin Morley was a great family man, a friend of all who search for empowerment and sustainability and Gandhian Spaces, the editor of the now vanishing empowermentillustrated.com and a Londoner lost to 7/7
Here we invite you to mail in any writings of Colin's that should be recalled for all time. We are searching especially for texts from EI
September 30, 2003
Cloke and Goldsmith
Two people who make the case for empowerment and higher awareness are Ken Cloke and Joan Goldmith, whose book 'The End of Management' describes how much better off we would be without managers interering and adding unneccessary bureaucracy. (Also reviewed here.)
Another area they have written about is Resolving Conflicts at Work in which they present conflicts as opportunities for spiritual growth.
Ken Cloke's book The Art of Waking People Up also looks interesting.
Neuland
I like using the Neuland system for strategy and planning sessions. Here is a brand strategy board after about 1 hours work. (I have covered over the company name.)
The great things with this are that - lots of people can take part and contribute their ideas- you can prioritise, sort and change the ideas as the debate develops- people can see all the many aspects of a problem and not just that will fit onto a flip chart
Jerry Hampton
A Community Building facilitator that people often talk about as a role model is Jerry Hampton - his site is community4me.com. He reprints the poem 'The Road Not Taken' by Robert Frost - one of the inspirations for Dr M Scott Peck the developer of Community Building.
A Ministry of Empowerment
In India they have a Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment.
"The Ministry of Social Justice & Empowerment is entrusted with the welfare, social justice & empowerment of disadvantaged and marginalised section of the society viz, Scheduled Caste, Minorities, Backward Classes, Persons with Disabilities, Aged Persons, Street Children and victims of Drug Abuse etc. Basic objective of the policies, programmes, law and institution of the Indian welfare system is to bring the target groups into the main stream of development by making them self-reliant."
Fergal Quinn
The founder of the Irish supermarket chain SuperQuinn, Fergal Quinn is a world role model on customer centricity. His book 'Crowning the Customer' describes simple approaches to understanding customers and their needs that most businesses are not emotionally mature enough to put into practice.
For example he talks about how you handle complaints. He says that companies should encourage complaints and not make it an objective to minimise them. Of course you should minimise the CAUSES of complaints. But you will find out the most useful information if you show customers that you really want to hear their thoughts and not just fob them off like a head waiter who goes round saying 'everything all right for you sir?'
So this is really empowering customers.
Gavin Friday
In Dublin last night saw a powerful one man show by rock band singer Gavin Friday. He is quite a cult figure in Ireland as an 'art-rock terrorist' and member of the Virgin Prunes and his show is really a monologue description of people who have influenced him in life and artistically.
So we hear about his parents, prods (protestants) who as friends opened him up to new ideas, Bowie, punk including Jonnie Rotten, Jacques Brel, Kurt Weil, his wife and others. Its a funny, sad rant that ends up as a powerful complaint that kids today do not have the same kind of risk taking artistic figures to look up to as existed in the 1970s.
The line that sticks in my mind from all this is a big empowerment point - "I don't know what I want but I know how to get it." Gavin Friday has a lot of impact on people and makes them listen. Question is, what is it all for?
Global Empowerment Network
The Global Empowerment Network site is" Envisioning and Supporting the Co-Creation of a Loving, Peaceful, Ecologically Sustainable World Community, Based on Freedom, Compassion and Equanimity with Healthy, Happy Life for All Beings."
They describe a turquoise vision based on natural life principles including:
"FLUID: Flowing freely with natural energy currents.
BALANCED: Combination of extremes working together in harmony.
SELF-ORGANIZING: Like attracting like.
DYNAMIC: Molding and changing with time. Producing energy force.
RESPONSIVE: Connected to natural feedback mechanisms.
FRACTAL: Operating simultaneously over many scales.
GUIDED: Having a core seed template, vision, and spirit, providing a blueprint code for spontaneous replication."
Posted in Links and resources.
Garry is free
Garry at 'Day in the life' is now free. I wonder if he will become a full time senior blogger?
Web user empowerment
The guru of usable web design, Jacob Nielsen, tells us that simple low functionality web graphics empower users more than fancy memory grabbing gizmos.
And in "User empowerment and the fun factor", Nielsen hits back at people who say that simple websites are not fun.
Katee
Katee is a performance artist, among other things. She travels around, staying with people and seems to feel her way around the new cities she is in, discovering what part she and her art can play. In Prague she went to second hand shops and bought beautiful materials to stitch into strange costumes which she used in her street performances.
She plays a sort of jester role in companies, using her energy and different perspective to wake people up and show them something different. One of her performances is as the 'Perfect Secretary', amazing people with her assiduousness and making them laugh. She also makes fantastic chocolate cookies apparently...
Empowerment and energy
Since I went on the workshop last weekend with Don Americo Yabar I have been thinking about and experiencing how I and other people get energy. I don't mean calorific energy. I suppose I mean psychic energy or whatever kind of energy comes from the earth and the cosmos - spiritual energy.
I've been rereading The Celestine Prophecy by James Redfield which has a lot on this. Males need female energy - females need male energy. People get addicted to energy from other people and then play control drama games to get energy flowing their way.
I was lucky enough to see the Rolling Stones play a week ago in Dublin where I am working. People say how do they keep going? It seems clear that they get their energy from the adulation of the audience.
Don Americo says we can get energy from the earth - Pachamama and from the cosmos. We can then give it to other people. If we have heavy energy we can give it to Pachamama and clean ourselves.
People who are empowered have this energy. People who are not empowered need to rid themselves of heavy energy and learn how to gain energy from Pachamama and the cosmos.
The Seven Marks of the Spiral Wizard
"Sometimes they are prophets crying out loudly in the wilderness. Sometimes they are quiet, calm voices whispering words of encouragement and gently pointing out alternative pathways and solutions."
Beck and Cowan in the book Spiral Dynamics describe the characteristics of people who can influence change from a yellow or turquoise '2nd tier' perspective:
1. Spiral Wizards think in OPEN systems rather than CLOSED final states.
2. Spiral Wizards live and work within natural flows and rhythms
3. The ultimate goal of Spiral Wizards is to keep the spiral healthy
4. Spiral Wizards interact comfortably with many conceptual worlds
5. Spiral Wizards possess a full complement of resources, strategies and skills
6. Spiral Wizards are systematic thinkers and integrative problem solvers
7 Spiral Wizards possess a unique blend of personal beliefs and values.
These are the qualities possessed by people who are capable of making appropriately empowering interventions at any level in an organisation or system. As opposed to most managers who are only familiar with the appropriate interventions for certain particular levels or situations.
Ken Campbell
Mike reminded me of Ken Campbell who is an amazing speaker and very original thinker. I saw his History of Comedy, part one Ventriloquism several years ago. He described how when he was young, he and a friend would speak jibberish at each other for hours until they entered a halucinatory state and started speaking in tongues.
Are you a natural systems thinker?
Hal Williamson draws a distinction between 3 types of thinking - Analysis, Synthesis and Holistic thinking. He argues that analysing things and putting them back together prevents us from truly understanding the way that a natural system works.
"Systems thinking entails a three step mental process:
- studying the parts of a system, - perceiving the system as a whole, and - developing an awareness of the role or function of the system in a larger containing system.
This three step process yields understanding and explains a systems relationship to an environment that contains it."
He draws on the work of Dr Roger Sperry, who discovered the different roles of the left and right sides of the brain, and Ned Herrman who invented the Brain Dominance Model to understand the different thinking styles that people use.
Dr Russell Ackoff then described systems thinking within this model as being a combination of analysis and synthesis.
Demotivators
I've found it! I've been looking for this site ever since I started writing this.
"Increasing success by lowering expectations" is the promise of www.despair.com. The ultimate in making fun of those posters they put on the walls in call centres.
Don Americo Yabar
Don Americo is a Peruvian shaman who works with energy. Energy must flow. Heavy or blocked energy causes problems. Salka energy is untamed, natural, healing energy that comes from the earth and from the cosmos.
He speaks like a poet, in Spanish with Marina translating. After a while the little Spanish I know, together with other languages is enough for me to understand half of what he has said before the translation.
He shows us how to do many different 'energy passes' which help the energy to flow. We work outside, close to nature.
The most important energy pass is to contact mother earth - 'pachamama', then the cosmos with the right hand, convert this energy into magic with the left hand, and then bring it to the heart before giving it back to pachamama. In this way we turn our own energy into cosmic energy and are ready to share this energy with other people.
When we share energy it must be with 'intent'. Oakley Gordon explains this very well in describing his research work in Peru. "Think of 'intent' as 'sincere pretending'. Through this process of 'sincere pretending' subjectively real experiences emerge."
He tells us to relax the mind - to let it rest. Many of our questions are mental questions. The mind fills up with knowledge and leaves no room for its real purpose - wisdom. We need to open up our stomachs and hearts to let the filaments of energy flow and connect with nature, the cosmos and other people.
It seems clear that disempowerment is caused by blocking of energy and empowerment involves releasing blocked energy. Empowerment has a kind of magic, mystical, right brain side to it that gets lost in translation.
Salka WindFilaments of Light
Meg Wheatley
One of the champions of natural systems theory and its use in business is Meg Wheatley.
"...once you have formed a strong core identity you can then trust people to organize their own behavior around that identity, instead of organizing by policies and procedures. The behavior will look very different from person to person. And that will be okay, because (and this is one of the great lessons of chaos) you then stand back and look, not at those individual behaviors but at the pattern. Then you will be able to see the true pattern of the organization."
She studied quantum physics and chaos theory and reached some strong conclusions about business. In an interview on scottlondon.com she says
"...the real eye-opener for me was to realize how control and order were two different things, and that you could have order without control."
As a result she talks about 'de-engineering' rather than 're-engineering'.
And in yet another article she says "in organizations where people trust and believe in each other, they don't get into regulating and coercing behaviors. They don't need a policy for every mistake. They don't need to use force of any kind. And of course, people in these trusting environments respond with enormous commitment and creativity."
Natural Systems Theory
Howard Bloom argues that Human Beings are part of a bigger system, not just individuals pursuing our own personal agendas. One of his books is 'The Global Brain - Evolution of the Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century.
Bloom says that our lives are shaped in the way that organisations naturally set up 'inter-group tournaments', with maintainance of accumulated knowledge governed by 'conformity regulators' and innovation stimulated by 'diversity generators'.
Albert Schweizer
"Until he extends his circle of compassion to include all living things, man will not himself find peace."Albert Schweitzer (1875 - 1965)
"Therefore search and see if there is not some place where you may invest your humanity."Albert Schweitzer
"You must give some time to your fellow men. Even if it's a little thing, do something for others - something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it."Albert Schweitzer
"I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve."
Albert Schweizer both preached and lived his principle of 'reverence for life' and helping all living things whenever our 'will to live' encounters theirs.
So he was advocating the empowerment of not just human beings but also animals.
I asked my youngest son if people want to hear this message. He tells me that this way of thinking is becoming more prevalent among people he knows.
Ritz Carlton Hotels
A business that seems to live the principles of the service profit chain is Ritz Carlton Hotels. Apparently their mantra for their staff promotes the dignity and self worth of serving customers "Ladies and Gentlemen served by Ladies and Gentlemen." Training is done in facilities that are of the same standard as the facilities that the employees work in.
Their mission statement is full off emotional detail:
"The Ritz Carlton Hotel is a place where the genuine care and comfort of our guests is our highest mission.
We pledge to provide the finest personal service and facilities for our guests, who will always enjoy a warm, relaxed, yet refined ambience.
The Ritz Carlton experience enlivens the senses, instills well-being,, and fullfills even the unexpressed wishes and needs of our guests."
Acronym finder
The Acronym finder at Business Balls has a comprehensive selection of business acronyms of the ecucational, technical and cynical sort. For example:
"AFLO Another Frigging Learning Opportunity. Polite version. A big mistake or onerous task. (Ack. Janet Connolly)"
Empowered by retouching
See how Greg Apodaca can change our view of reality by retouching - before and after.
Empowerment through Casual Dress
Empowerment Enterprises provide help with maximising your image in casual dress at work.
Themes in management evolution
Somebody who has been studying high performing US businesses tells me some of the themes that are emerging for him in developing a model for evolving company management:
1. Enlightened leadership - not telling people what to do but providing a framework for peoples' own creativity to be maximised.
2. Servant Leadership - inverting the management triangle with the directors on the bottom supporting the staff in serving customers
3. A clear sense of 'The way we do things around here' - often very different between different companies. People who don't fit the company modus operandi don't last. (South Western Airlines seem to epitomise this with their philosophy of 'Hire for attitude, train for skill', interviewing 18 people for every one they make an offer to.
4. Providing mechanisms for employees to have a say in the way the business is run.
5. Imbuing a sense of dignity and self worth in serving customers (whatever the job).
Bob Marley
"Emancipate yourselves from mental slaveryNone but ourselves can free our minds"
Bob Marley's Redemption Song is a great inspiration. I enjoyed hearing these words on a track mixed with 'Oh Happy Day' by the Edwin Hawkins Singers on a Cafe Del Mar Ibiza CD. Trouble is I don't know which number Ibiza CD it is.
Yes Groups
Anthony Robbins is clearly in the self empowerment business.
"The quality of our lives is a direct reflection of the expectations of our peer group."
Yes Groups support you in taking massive ACTION.
Empowerment and being a victim
Robert Burney says that as long as we look outside ourselves for self worth we are setting ourselves up to be victims. He says empowerment is "... seeing reality as it really is, owning the choices you have, and making the best of it with the support of a Loving God-Force."
Boy Shit
There is a message about empowerment or unempowerment in this cartoon from incorect. I just think its funny. Start at number 1 and work through.
The Empowerment Network
"The Empowerment Network (TEN) is a resource hub for state legislators, grassroots organizations, and other civic leaders promoting American family and community renewal of civil society in the 21st century. TEN's grassroots network provides the winning edge on policy initiatives that support youth character and family revitalization, entrepreneurship and the unleashing of faith-based initiatives and cultural remedies."
I can't tell if this is a party political organisation or multi party.
The World Bank?
"Empowerment is the expansion of assets and capabilities of poor people to participate in, negotiate with, influence, control, and hold accountable institutions that affect their lives."
The World Bank discusses the meaning of the word empowerment.
Compulsory Education
The Empowerment Academy has a revolutionary manifesto for changing compulsory education.
At the heart of this academy's ideal curriculum is Philosophy and Creative Expression. Next comes Health, Evolutionary Psychology, Choice Theory and Conflict Resulution plus Communications.
"we believe that the word "empowerment" sums up all of the goals of our educational system. We empower students to develop their own ideas, realize their dreams, and flourish in any environment.
We realize that there are a number of scattered schools that individually call themselves "youth empowerment academies", and even a few schools who use the shorter "Empowerment Academy." But to us, Empowerment Academy is not the name of any particular school, but rather the name we give to our goals and ideas. (Incidentally, this is also why we avoid using the article "The" as part of our name; Empowerment Academy is a concept, not a physical location.) Any school using our curriculum is an Empowerment Academy -- it doesn't need to use this as its name. It would become very confusing to have so many schools named "Empowerment Academy" once our curriculum becomes mainstream."
The future's brightish
Limpfish is not persuaded of the empowerment capabilities of mobile phones.Still it has a useful quiz to help you tell your arse from your elbow.
