Shadowy Bilderberg group meet in Greece - and here’s their address

From Wikileaks

Gorbis: Organizational Change Is Coming Soon
May 18, 2009
By Marina Gorbis

In the past century we have mastered the art of corporate organization — the art of organizing people and resources for the ultimate goal of maximizing shareholder profits. Along the way, we developed a host of management theories and practices that have become bibles to generations of working men and women.

The corporate culture we created spread well beyond the business realm. In his forthcoming book “Life Inc.,” media expert Douglas Rushkoff points out that corporatism has permeated our culture, language, philanthropic organizations, schools and media. It is how we’ve come to think about getting things done. We almost cannot conceive of a world without hierarchical organiza-

tional charts, mission statements, bounded departments, and clear sets of corporate rules and incentives.

All of this is about to change. You can think of the next decade as a decade of experimentation with new ways of organizing our society, including our economic and business activities. Beginnings of new organizational shapes already abound — from Wikipedia to volunteers taking over customer-support services for organizations. Turns out that being helpful to others can be its own reward.

It is perilous to predict what all the varieties of forms will be or whether we will converge into one dominant one. However, we can already see signs pointing to big shifts in how we will organize and think about work:

Emergence of Ecological/Epidemiological View of Markets and Behaviors. Recently, scientists have begun to apply an epidemiological lens to many social phenomena, such as happiness, obesity, criminality, health behaviors and others. Turns out that what we have traditionally seen as individual behaviors are shaped by others.

Not that we didn’t know this before. But now with diffusion of sensing and mobile computing tools we can support this view with much more data and use it to help us unearth complex patterns that were previously invisible. In fact, we are making the invisible visible through use of data.

Recently the governor of the Bank of England has brought in Lord Robert May, prominent zoologist and former chief scientific adviser to the government, to brainstorm about what lessons from the animal kingdom can apply to the banking system. Specifically, the bank is extending the lessons of fishery ecosystems, with its rich ecology of plant and aquatic species, to banks. Similar to fisheries, the banking system is best understood as an ecosystem with unique environmental contexts and a rich variety of actors.

Understanding the larger ecosystem is required for informed decision-making in the business sector. Prepare for the next generation of organizational and industry consultants to come equipped not with MBAs but with graduate degrees in sciences as diverse as zoology, biology, ecology and others focusing on complex interdependences of actors and resources.

Rise of Amplified Individuals. Two years ago, Time magazine’s Person of the Year was ... “You.” You, the individual, Time proclaimed, were in the driver’s seat as a creator and consumer of products, services and ideas. The story was right but only partially so. We are not talking about the powerful individual operating on his/her own. Amplified individual power derives from his connections to the collective resources and collective intelligence of multitudes of others. It is this ability to connect to their knowledge, tap into their resources and rally them when needed that amplifies individuals’ power and gives them unprecedented ability to bypass traditional organizational structures and boundaries.

Journalist Roxana Saberi’s fast in protest of her sentence in Iran would never have achieved the same level of impact if not for hundreds of people organizing on Twitter and other social networking sites to fast along with her. Her connection to these strangers is what ultimately amplified her plight.

Instead of fearing the power of amplified individuals, organizations have the opportunity to amplify themselves by tapping into amplified individuals’ skills and resources. It may be time to think of assessing your employees on the metric we at the Institute for the Future have come to call the “Network Intelligence Index” — the ability to access and use resources of the larger network to amplify one’s individual and, ultimately, larger network abilities.

Focus on Engagement. How do you get thousands of people to do things for free simply because the task is so absorbing, so satisfying, that they can’t stop? We see examples of this every day — people sharing links and ideas on Twitter, contributing Wikipedia entries and edits, offering reviews on Yelp, and spending hours playing online video games. My colleague Jane McGonigal, renowned game researcher and designer, calls this retreat from reality. But rather than blaming people for spending time on useless pursuits, ask yourself what is it that these platforms and worlds offer people that you don’t? And how can you harness this kind of engagement for the benefit of your project?

It is not surprising that so many organizations are now looking at gaming as a means of engaging their employees and collaborators. We are at the early stages of understanding the neurological basis of happiness and engagement — states often attained while playing either physical or video games. So much of our organizational practices and processes, however, have been based on simplistic carrot-and-stick approaches. In the next decade, much greater understanding of the human brain and principles of engagement will make us rewrite many of our management books and manuals. Do not be surprised to find many more neuroscientists and game designers among the human resource professionals.

So don’t wait for the new management books to come to the bookstore. We are writing these as we speak. Instead engage in experimentation today. Look at new organizations, new kinds of projects harnessing mass collaboration and collective intelligence of amplified individuals (many of these outside traditional organizational structures), understand deeper transformations they embody, and apply the lessons to your own organization.

Marina Gorbis is president of the Institute for the Future in Palo Alto, Calif.

2009 © Roll Call Inc. All rights reserved.

If the banks are so healthy, how come we're all still broke?

Douglas Rushkoff, the author of Life Inc.

We're supposed to take heart in the fact that the Treasury Department's bank "stress tests" didn't come out worse. No, our biggest banks aren't insolvent, exactly. In fact, enough cash was printed to guarantee that they should be able to survive the rest of the recession. Worst case, with a little late-night printing and lending by the central bank, even the worst of them - like Citibank - should be able to hobble through. Our Treasury Department wants us to be reassured.

True enough, as long as banks are understood by many as fueling the economy, this should be good news. By this logic, banks disperse the capital that allows businesses to do their business. As so many have explained to me, it all starts with the banks. Banks lend businesses money, and then those businesses turn it into something real - like products, salaries, or innovation.

Sorry, but that's just not true. Labor might make money, but money doesn't make labor. (Or as I said to Rolling Stone's editor, music makes money - money doesn't make music). And while we can certainly point to the fact that assembly lines and mixing boards cost money, neither are required as the first step in creating a car company or a musical act. Yes, in a well-functioning economy, good production yields income, part of which goes to making production better. A great company dedicates part of its winnings to R&D.

But the notion that enterprise and production starts with banking is just another artifact of Renaissance-era currency monopolies. Back before the first central banks, production and yield actually created money. (That's what all this hoopla about complementary currency is about.) Money was not lent into existence by a bank. Instead, farmers brought their grain to town and received receipts for the grain. These receipts served as the local currency. Currency was worked into existence. There was as much money as there was grain.

The problem with this scheme was that people got too wealthy - especially in comparison with the feudal lords and fledgling monarchy, who had always been used to getting rich, well, by being rich. So they went and made all the grain-based currencies illegal, and forced everyone to use coin of the realm - central currency. While this coin was better for long distance trade and collecting taxes, it was lousy for local transactions. People lost their ability to live off the land, took jobs with early corporations, got poor, less fed, and eventually the economic downturn in Europe led to a plague that killed half the population. This isn't economic interpretation - it's just fact.

Eventually, with only half the population to deal with, Europe's new economic scheme proved basically sufficient to the task. And we got the rules that have - in one form or another - defined economics to this day: people don't make money, banks do. The chief function of money is for money to make money - not for it to be used for successful transactions.

But today we may be smart enough, information may travel around fast enough, for many of us to realize just how transparent a fraud we're witnessing unfold before us today - how the bailouts of AIG were really funding Goldman Sachs, how intimately involved are bankers - Rubin or Paulson, are with Treasury chiefs like, er, Paulson and Rubin. How government and banking are one and the same, both after the same centralization of authority, both inextricably linked with the biases of lending-based wealth schemes, and both utterly incapable of serving as the source of anything.

ok so there is a pig flu...

some people think its a hoax...

some people are concerned that curfews and quarantines and even martial law will be used and that abuses will take place, rights will be lost...

its a strange situation, of course we will all assume malicious intent any time our rights are restricted, even if a real pandemic were taking place...

but i digress why would the powers that be HAVE to do anything to help us ever is the real question, people get sick and die everyday, why suddenly, should the government get involved in health matters at all, its not like we have a population shortage.

the very nature of this situation is the same as any other, its not about the powers getting involved in our lives, its about why are the powers there at all, and why are they going to exploit EVERY situation for their own benefit?

they are not concerned with our lives or freedoms, they are concerned with if we pay our taxes or not. and of course those of us estimated to pay more taxes will be protected while those that dont pay as much taxes will be left to die!

look at what happened during Katrina and then compare that to the more recent wild fires in California...we all know whose houses were saved and whose houses were destroyed. and it has nothing to do with color, it has everything to do with tax brackets!

no matter what happens, regardless of the situation, the poor will be left to suffer every time.

i suggest we take note of our elite, take note of their inability to properly manage the business world and provide a sound economic life for America/the World...

i suggest we question our elites inability to manage money and ask ourselves what kind of mismanagement they would make of our nations health should we trust them with that as well...

i suggest we question the nature of our need to be ruled over by incompetent thieves, PERIOD.

Gaia might seem like a strange thing to some people, but its not as boring as Myspace , isnt as complicated or costly as WOW, and some might say has the best of both worlds!

I like it alot! In fact if i had made a Gaia account first, i would have never opened a myspace ever!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shirley_Bassey

Who are the Tarnac 9?

• Fri, 09 Jan 2009 10:32 am — Posted by Micah M. White

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