Tag Archives: korten

The Great Turning

A Different Place

By David Laveman | Bio 

David Korten certainly seems to have a grasp of the timely and seemingly intractable problems we face and a platform from which to raise critical questions. I read his book “The Great Turning” shortly after it was published and I found it provocative in the best sense of the word, laying out in clear relief the choices in front of us. His recent posts on “Beyond the Bailout” on Serene Ambition and on the New Economy initiative on his website spurred me to begin a deeper inquiry, the highlights of which I’d like to share here. 

Although Korten’s analysis of the source of our current economic problems makes sense, I do not see much by way of articulating the real implementation trade-offs, conflicts and behavioral reactions that his ‘New Economy’ solution will trigger. For instance, even on a smaller scale we can see the enormous reaction that would take place if the government bails out homeowners who are being foreclosed and do nothing for those who are struggling to pay their mortgage

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The Great Turning

New Stories

By Jim Selman | Bio

David Korten does a great job of showing us how the rich get richer and the poor get poorer—how the ‘system’ is rigged to create more for the’ haves’ and less for the ‘have nots’. It makes sense. We can see it everywhere from the government’s disregard for regulation, to the now inevitable necessity for a ‘bailout’, to the way we measure the health of our society to the ‘either/or’ controversies that rage on while giving us more of what we resist. The saddest aspect of this whole financial meltdown is that we probably won’t learn our lessons. After all, wasn’t all of our current regulatory apparatus created after the 1930s so the Great Depression would never happen again?

David’s proposal—and I could not agree with him more—is that we must create new ‘stories’ that can move us from Empire to Earth Community and have a world that can work for everyone. In Alcoholics Anonymous, the second step is “came to believe that a power greater than ourselves could restore us to sanity”. A new story for mankind needs a idea of something beyond our own closed and self-referential worldview, although it need not be a deterministic deity that is

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The Great Turning

Navigating the Turning

By Shae Hadden
Bio

David Korten’s opening remarks addressed all present at this conference as ‘navigators’ of the Great Turning. I find the term interesting: navigators, in effect, act as leaders. They are responsible for guiding the ‘ship’: they envision arriving at the destination, chart a course to it (however tentative or uninformed), and then direct the actions of others to make that ‘vision’ reality. I agree with Korten that leaders are of critical importance for navigating the sweeping transformations happening in our world today.

I was somewhat surprised to see
that most conference participants appeared to be in their late 40s and
up. The few younger people who were present stood out from the crowd.
Korten noted in his closing remarks how most audiences he speaks to are
comprised of older people in their 50s and 60s, and that there is a
need to attract younger people. Perhaps their absence is indicative of
the fact that North American society does not, for the most part,

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The Great Turning

Mentoring

I had a great meeting with David Korten yesterday. He is the very
inspiring thought-leader I mentioned in a past blog and the author of The Great Turning.
His vision of some of the underlying issues that perpetuate the
persistence of many of the world’s nastiest problems is brilliant and
offers a framework for creating a ‘new story’ of who we are and what’s
possible.

Part
of his vision and mine is for our whole generation to declare our
responsibility for the world and become

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