By Jim Selman | Bio
Someone said to me in a meeting yesterday that there are a billion blogs. The number seemed high, so I did what we all do these days. I went to Google and in about 30 seconds of looking at “How many Blogs are there”, I was assured there are closer to 100 million, with about 175 thousand new ones being created every day. So while the billion estimate was a bit exaggerated, it is obvious that there are a LOT of blogs.
This got me thinking: why so many? A blog is basically
By Jim Selman | Bio
I cannot remember having experienced or even having read about a time when there have been so many “extremes” co-existing in terms of political points of view and ways of understanding the world. All seem to simultaneously have the quality of being both ‘life threatening’ AND intractable. Whether we’re discussing climate change, social justice, lifestyles, civil rights, the economy, our political process or the price of oil, everyone seems to have a strongly held point of view without much evident interest in learning or working toward some common resolution of our differences. It would seem collaboration is fast becoming extinct—an endangered competence.Collaboration isn’t the same as compromise or negotiation. Collaboration is not about winning an argument or making the strongest case for a particular point of view. Collaboration is grounded in the simple notion that we can’t accomplish something alone. To collaborate means to accept and value our differences, rather than attempting to homogenize our thinking into some sort of bland agreement. Collaboration, like coaching, is primarily a process of creative
By Jim Selman | Bio
I am not an economist. Thank goodness. This is not a good time to be one. There is a wonderful overview of the field, “How Did Economists Get it So Wrong?”, by Paul Krugman in the New York Times. The bottom line is that the current situation “which nobody could have predicted” was predicted and it doesn’t take an economist to know that:
With all the theoretical back and forth between the various ‘schools’ of economic theory, one word jumps out at me: “technocrat”.