This venture in pyjama publishing from my dining room shows how you can share in a new found maturity we're experiencing in international society. We'll look at how to anticipate subsequent changes in society so as to benefit yourself, others, and everything around you. We'll explore opportunities to go beyond the usual project management approach that our plans were based on to date.
On November 26, some of us met at the Columbus Centre in North Toronto. We fleshed out the beginnings of the Omni-Dimensional Alliance. This promotes neighbourhood revitalization through learning, creativity, and harnessing some of our great collective capability so as to spur innovation and continued success within our neighbourhoods.
Einstein pulled away from the details of day-to-day life to point out that nationalism has been a childhood illness for humanity, much like measles.
Note that the alliance places emphasis on revitalization of international society rather than waiting for the recovery of nations. From the viewpoints of nation states, international society has ground to a halt after a nasty meltdown. To put it more kindly, society is taking a period of bed-rest in what's been dubbed recovery without jobs.
From a national perspective it's hard to recognize the huge evolutionary surge within social and economic development that social creators have brought about. We're surrounded by evidence that millions of people are collaborating in ways that complement the previous ways that society got things done. That evolutionary surge moves through and resonates in our bodies bringing intuitions of a bright or gloomy future. We have yet to understand the outcomes of the new mood with our minds.
This leads to the role of vision which is to let us know what are we collaborating to achieve. Do we develop an international vision? Or do we blindly bump against the walls of limited resources and finances and find out what happens next?
Vision and therefore your visual sense depends on your eyes. The eyes are actually parts of the brain that extended forward on stalks and emerged on your face. Coordination needs vision. Coordination of society will happen over the Internet. The Internet is the nerve system of international society. I've said this ever since I became involved in early publishing trials using telecommunications in 1982.
(I'm back. Just dug up the gladioli and put some plant pots away for winter.)
Coordination of society will happen when neighbourhoods develop the equivalent to brain cells that are vigilant to changes in the immediate surroundings - changes in terms of today's needs and opportunities. Coordination within and amongst neighbourhoods is different from the kind of coordination we can expect from rule by corporations or global institutions where response times are measured in years.
One influential political economist in Toronto said during the 1980's that corporations hate one another more than they hate unions. There was no coordination. Not only were institutions fiercely competitive, when it came to getting things done they were hampered by limited brain power. Corporations really were limited. They ran on the brain power of a tiny accumulation of leaders or executive officers within the administration who ran the show. In the corporation the main body of people was there to fulfill policies within budgets. Most people were basically there to look for solutions in the manual. As a consequence social development was limited because leaders choose to organize as corporations.
When corporations coordinate this goes against anti-monopoly laws. It also fuels conspiracy theories in that we must question which pyramid sits on top of the other pyramids.
Hence the meeting to set up the alliance. It will facilitate collaboration amongst corporations based on coordination by neighbourhood - without a pyramid at the top - and tap corporations into a network of creative professionals that assists corporations to adapt to challenges. This creative network identifies today's needs and opportunities creating markets across neighbourhoods and amongst members of the alliance.
I will follow up again in the days ahead.
"Smart firms can harness collective capability and genius to spur innovation, growth, and success. The most profound changes of our time, Wikinomics challenges our most deeply rooted assumptions about business."
This quote is from the book
Wikinomics - How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything by Dan Tapscott, Anthony D. Williams, and Alan Sklar.
