March 4, 2007 We are Staying Awake to our intentions, sensibilities and curiosities while attending our experiences at hand. Subscription Management — Commentaries — click a topic These Very Times Ingenuity on Parade Organizations without Organization Focused Excellence author, publisher, originator of this ezine, Staying Awake. » Graphic and Web Design » Newsletter Production » Life Coaching DavidMoorhead.com 1+ 214 341 5599 Email Staying Awake I bring together fun-loving, thoughtfully curious and dynamically creative people! That’s the possibility I bring to clients’ businesses. ~ DM I think with intuition. The basis of true thinking is intuition. Indeed, it is not intellect, but intuition which advances humanity. Intuition tells a man his purpose in life. One never goes wrong following his feelings. I don’t mean emotions, I mean feelings, for feelings and intuition are one. ~ Albert Einstein (b 1879) Learn not to be careful. ~ Diane Arbus (b 1923) (spoken to her students), American portrait photographer of people on the fringes of society Cosmology One of the three philosophies in metaphysics is cosmology: The study of the origin and evolution of Universe, especially with such of its characteristics as space, time, causality, and choice. Human subtlety will never devise an invention more beautiful, more simple or more direct than does Nature, because in her inventions, nothing is lacking and nothing is superfluous. The poet ranks far below the painter in the representation of visible things, and far below the musician in that of invisible things. ~ Leonardo da Vinci (b 1452), Italian Renaissance Roman Catholic polymath, considered archetype of the Renaissance man: architect, anatomist, sculptor, engineer, inventor, geometer, musician, painter It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. We address ourselves, not to their humanity but to their self-love, and never talk to them of our own necessities but of their advantages. ~ Adam Smith (b 1723), Scottish political economist, moralist, philosopher, Father of Modern Capitalism, developed European industry and commerce I sit down to the piano regularly at nine-o’clock in the morning and Mesdames les Muses have learned to be on time for that rendezvous. ~ Pyotr Ilich Tchaikovsky (b 1840), Russian composer of the Romantic era If all people were educated and knew the history of the world since the beginning of time, there would be no war, there would be no capital punishment—there would be much less evil from America’s favorite sins of hate, hypocrisy and intolerance. ~ David Llewelyn Wark Griffith (D.W. Griffith) (b 1875), American film director, known for directing The Birth of a Nation the movie Even if you are on the right track, you’ll get run over if you just sit there. ~ William Penn Adair “Will” Rogers (b 1879), American comedian, humorist, social commentator Instead of giving a politician the keys to the city, it might be better to change the locks. ~ Doug Larson (b 1902), English racer, humorist The corporation as we know it, which is now 120 years old, is not likely to survive the next 25 years. ~ Peter Ferdinand Drucker (b 1909), Austrian author, management-related literature Don’t own nothin’ if you can help it. If you can, even rent your shoes. ~ Forrest Gump, the principle character in Forest Gump, the movie The biggest problem with leadership communication is the illusion it has occurred. (from book, The Leader’s Voice) ~ Boyd Clarke & Ron Crossland †Too many men in USA corporations aren’t cognizant of results of standardization and uniformity, which, as we observe from the forces of nature, are a veil away from systemic extinctions. China bears little resemblance to USA corporations’ ruthless plunders of intuitive and inventive expressions. Fifteen years ago companies competed on price. Now it’s quality. Tomorrow it’s design. ~ Bob Hayes, the Philip Caldwell Professor, Emeritus, Business Administration, Harvard Business School © 2004-2007 All rights in all media reserved. You may quote my words as long as you attribute my name. Staying Awake content may be forwarded in full without special permission for nonprofit purposes only, provided full attribution and copyright notice are given. Thank You. Staying Awake Archive and publication dates. My email database will not be given away, borrowed nor sold. This ezine is freely distributed by EZezine.com Our constant curiosity is key to watching what’s being created. ~ DM

Greetings All,

And, a welcome to our newest subscribers! It’s March already, and it seems much has happened around the world since the first of the year. But, why remember only what’s occurred in 2007? Once we remove calendar boundaries, we can imagine the span of Earthlings’ presence since the beginning as noted in humans’ memoirs scripted by myriad historians and scribes.

I’ve said it before and will probably say it until you’ll want to cover your ears: We live in the most fascinating times imaginable. If you haven’t already done so today, let this sentence remind us of how far we’ve come in life, and of those experiences that come to mind for which we are grateful.

Studying and writing embellished my hyper curiosity for connecting dots following September 11, 2001. Staying Awake ezine was begun in January, 2004, after the dots got closer together stretching lines to each other—leaving space for more dots. Golly, my gawking started once I saw the lines thicken with historical markers. I’ve not been the same since.

These Very Times

I reread some early newsletter editions, and if I’m like other Earthlings who’ve awakened in the last five years, we’ve dramatically revised our personal cosmologies after looking back on humankind’s blueprint of existence.

You and I were born for these very times! If we must live with delusions we allowed into our lives by choice or default, then we may expect more of our long held deceptions to scramble ‘til they scurry out of sight from spectrums of relations, businesses, governments, and most importantly, science and its nemesis, western religions.

All Earthlings, including highly ranked religious leaders, governmental officials, and the invisible rulers who switch the economic rules at their whim, are bound with the very same Universal energies that whorl around and inside all physical bodies. But, intuitive elements of comprehension that glide upon those energies get all too easily dismissed within our three dimensional world. It appears intuition is one thing men and the few male-trained female governances would rather us neglect. They want us distracted, worn down, unable to make sense of their desensitized wordy insinuations oozed from deadpan countenances.

Weak as water interviewers pretend we listening commoners can’t intuit leaders’ sheepish robotic pretences of good will. Leaders only mock themselves presuming the sheeple have forgotten the gambling salons from which international warlords pimp more combats. Such are ongoing deliberate charades played into Earthlings’ whelmed psyché.

So, let’s gird our loins—read, and read some more, and keep open minds for trusting our sensibilities. More of the same religiously political psychical violence is certainly on the way.

The world is filled with people who want to dream, to love, and to be happy. Yet happiness, love, and dreams are nowhere to be found on the agendas of governments and of world affairs. There must be something wrong with this planet’s politics. To be lasting, an artist or writer must be a prophet of good, hope, and happiness. He must deal with the essentials of life and give inspirational, uplifting, reassuring answers.
~ Robert Muller (b 1923), Belgium born, former Assistant Secretary General to three consecutive Secretaries General at the United Nations for some 40 years; currently Chancellor Emeritus of Peace University, Costa Rica, Central America

With all due respect to Muller, fixating too much on inspirational, uplifting, and reassuring answers for contradictory ideas, colluded with inflated mandates, is too much to ask—confusing and diluting matters of emergency in these very times.

We and our global sisters and brothers are doing the best we can for peace and a restful sleep, while enduring a geological evolution with the sun’s emergent transformations in domains known and unknown to us.

Ingenuity on Parade

The rest of this ezine was inspired by several recently viewed TEDTalks, especially Charles Leadbeater’s (recorded July, 2005, in Oxford, UK). With his economic and journalism backgrounds, he exposes innovation as not only for professionals any longer. Within the open-source movement, everyone has opportunities to invent.

Instead, it’s now users and consumers who’ve been and are able with technology to put their collaborative intuition and ingenuity on parade into the faces of juggernaut corporations.

A case in point is the invention of mountain bikes. Was the first mountain bike invented by a lone genius fiddling around in the garage with the idea of inventing a mountain bike? Nope. Was the mountain bike conceived by some large corporation that thinks up contraptions for the market place? Nope, again.

Mountain bikes were invented by collaborative creativity and ingenuity in a group of young people mainly in Northern California USA, users who were frustrated with glamorous racing bikes as well as their dads’ traditional, too heavy pleasure bikes. The youngsters began piecing bikes together using frames, gears, brakes, handle bars, and assorted features from other bikes to produce a line they called Concord. Later, a company called Marin began producing and importing parts for the mountain bikes. About fifteen years later, conglomerates decided to get into the swing of things too by manufacturing the popular bikes.

Here it is thirty years later, mountain bikes with their accessories and equipment account for about 65 percent of bike sales in the USA, which equals about $58 billion dollars, annually. That market was generated by users and consumers who early on intuited the need, ingenuity, incentive, opportunity, knowledge, and tools altogether unconceived by typical corporate business heads. Apparently, those heads, being in the shadows of systemic, debilitating organizational expertise, had little feel for how their shared ingenuity on parade could create innovation.

Organizations without Organization

Groups of creatives are relocating their meetings away from elite universities. Also, left behind are unique R&D labs built beside rivers and streams in forests for inventors wearing backwards baseball caps, sitting on bean bags in rooms with walls painted stimulating colors. Organizations without organization are made in virtual spaces in which inventors gather. Inventors and producers (users and consumers, amateurs, volunteers) cluster to put their collective ingenuity on parade via Internet; intuiting questions, getting on with pursuing answers then inventions.

How are growing numbers of virtually clustered inventors and producers with very high standards of production in software, music, natural sciences and astronomy, and in vast areas of leisure activities, planning to organize themselves without succumbing to traditional corporate forms of organization? Can virtual organizations exist without organization?

An insight spoken by Charles Leadbeater in his talk at TED dot com is corporations have automatic, locked-in organizational tendencies to reinforce previous successes. Consequently, large corporations have too much invested to spot emerging markets as easily as virtual groups of inventors do. By demands of old organizational forms that keep risks to a minimum, corporates stifle creative expressions, and inventors have been moving away.^†

Manly powered, insular myopic corporate organizations are threatened and collapsing. Passionate users in emerging markets are the breeding grounds for invention, and that’s why corporates are payrolled to willfully distort and corrupt, thusly doing everything to prevent inventors’ patent, copyright, and trademark processes. By making thickets of complications, inventors’ products and rights are intercepted and trapped by corporations.

Do we detect unethical corporations’ and their witling lawyers’ alliances to greed and profiteering governments? Is there any wonder Earth’s air and environmental landscapes suffer? Will organizations without organization survive to surface in spite of what’s presently occurring? Let’s stay awake to see.

Laws alone cannot secure freedom of expression; in order that every man present his views without penalty there must be spirit of tolerance in the entire population. ~ Albert Einstein (b 1879), German-born theoretical physicist, contributed to cosmology, special theory of relativity, quantum & statistical mechanics, Physics Nobel Prize 1921

Staying Awake :: an ezine with your awareness in mind