The BBC presents a review of the new phenomenon of free product made possible by the digital age. Digital product can be given away or at least made available for free. This is not the advertising gimmick of “buy one get one free” or similar, it is product given away free such as openoffice.org productivity …
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Category:Holonics
Holonics, integral thinking, big picture thinking …
Finally! The US has owned up to a recession.
It has been a long time coming but it looks as though the US is finally owning up to an economic recession. According to the US National Bureau of Economic Research the US entered a recession in December 2007. It does not forecast the length of the recession, however, data suggest that the slowdown is …
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Morals and the Meltdown
A good perspective from Robert Skidelsky. He writes well. His language is a bit religious for me, but the analysis is all too accurate. Here’s the link to his website and the article is copied below. In our view, we are now confronting the limit to the growth of humanity he concludes with. Morals and …
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Financial Crisis – Background, Outlook and Action
Our presentation reviewing the financial crisis has been updated. There is a little more data and a more extensive list of action items for consumers, investors and businesses. Self-help action is focussed on small and medium sized businesses. SME’s are going to bear the brunt of the downturn and be the most important factor in …
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Systems-Thinking.org
Mental Model Musings at the web-address www.systems-thinking.org offers an easy to navigate portal in to the world of systems thinking. Worth a browse for anyone in the knowledge business. To get an idea of the extent of the musings of Gene Bellinger, here are the contents: Systems Modeling & Simulation Systems Introduction to Systems Thinking …
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Chaordic giant VISA to IPO
Visa, the trillion dollar credit card administration business, is to be listed on a stock market. It will be interesting to see if the innovative company structure designed by Dee Hock (Chaordic Commons) will be compromised by the listing. It won’t immediately. But the very nature of shareholdings is so fundamentally different from the member …
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The world says NO to the death penalty
The United Nations General Assembly has at last voted for a global moratorium on the death penalty. While the resolution is nonbinding and its symbolic weight was hardly mentioned in US media, for those who have been trying to move the world away from lethal revenge as government policy, this was a milestone. The resolution …
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Behaving like monkeys
A couple of articles discussed recent research in to the genetic programming of fairness. A study by Keith Jensen of the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology published in Science concludes that a sense of fairness is genetically encoded in humans, but not in chimpanzees. It is also apparent that some people are fairer than …
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“Living” Companies Perform Better
We are especially drawn to this title being advocates of anthropomorphic business models and biomimicry. This article, Living Companies Perform Better, outlines the approach discussed in the book Profit For Life. While the specifics may differ from other proponents, the systems approach is common to this big picture way of managing complex organisations. It draws …
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Let innovation be free
The Economist reports on the changing face of innovation, its benefits and how to encourage it. What is clear from the various articles is that openness, open systems, freedom to do business are the characteristics that allow creativity to flourish. The internet is such an environment (you only have to browse YouTube to see that). …
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