27. July 2009 by admin.

    Perhaps there’s no better time to point to the long-denied dysfunctionality of many of our modern organizations. We have created systems such as these organizations to serve us and make our lives easier. Yet so many people feel more like servants to these systems than masters of them. So how could this change? How can we restore full functionality and consciousness to our organizations? How can we regain mastery over our organizations so they serve us and not the other way round?

    Well, we can unleash the whole capability of the individual – mind, body and spirit – giving enormous power to the organization, which would truly empower members of the organization to devote their entire beings to the ultimate purpose for which the organization exists, which is to serve others. And we can let go of the machine model of work, and begin to step back and see ourselves in new ways, to appreciate wholeness, and to design organizations that honor and make use of the totality of who we are.

    Companies can begin shifting from know-it-all cultures to cultures of being always willing and ready to learn. After all, this is what helped propel the tremendous acceleration of recent new technologies, ever quickening flows of information and increasing obsolescence of yesterday’s wisdom. It also came at a time when many companies were beginning to realize they’d become complacent and were losing their competitiveness.

    The ideal Learning Organization includes a workforce that is constantly learning and receptive to new ideas, changing its ways of being and implementing new and better practices. Corporate cultures already embracing this philosophy have committed themselves to an open-minded way of working together, a vast improvement over the “know it all” organizations who were caught sleeping at the switch as the Information Age really got rolling.  

    As people evolve toward self-actualization and become more conscious beings there is a concurrent need for our organizations to follow suit, i.e. Conscious Organizations. As this becomes more widely recognized and people continue on their individual paths of self-actualization, the enterprises, institutions and companies where human beings come together to work will need to change dramatically. If they don’t, people who are becoming self-actualized will no longer want to work in them.

    Conscious Organizations will possess very low tolerance for unconsciousness behavior, such as idle gossip, rumor, politics, breaches of ethics, addictions of all sorts and other symptoms of organizational bureaucracy and dysfunction. People working in the Conscious Organization will subsequently possess the collective will to be vigilant about matters that might fester under the surface of awareness or otherwise go unnoticed in organizations which do not embody this commitment.

    As unconscious elements of a Conscious Organization’s culture are recognized, a rallying cry goes out and the organization’s resources are marshaled toward “cleaning up” that area much like the human body’s immune system rallies itself for any invading infection or toxic agent. Instead of being tolerated or covered up, these “toxic agents” are sought out and transformed.

    Becoming conscious is becoming aware of something and then acting responsibly in light of the new awareness. It is not synonymous with awareness alone, as some dictionaries state. Responsible action is another element of human consciousness. Responsible action does not mean acting compulsively or reactively. It means choosing consciously, resulting in the least number of unintended consequences.

    The Conscious Organization is a group of people who are constantly examining their own individual and their collective consciousness. By definition this makes the Conscious Organization a work-in-progress. You won’t find many fundamentalists in the Conscious Organization because they like things nicely laid out and fixed so they can simply follow the pattern they learned and not worry about anything changing. People who like this kind of certainty and familiarity will not be comfortable in a Conscious Organization and are not a good fit.

    A commitment to being a conscious person is lifelong. Leading “the committed life” means constant vigilance, impeccable discernment and an ongoing willingness to continuously examine oneself, one’s values, and one’s relationships - to oneself, to others, and to the world. This sort of self-examination is what brings meaning and worth, for the individual as well as the organization, reminding us of Socrates’ statement that “the unexamined life is not worth living.”

    Since an organization is a collection of individuals who have come together to work for some common purpose, an organizational commitment to being conscious requires the same continuous exploration and re-examination that is needed for personal consciousness. A company wishing to be a Conscious Organization needs to embrace this commitment to continuous self-examination as a core ideal throughout its life.

    Since the Conscious Organization is the opposite of a dysfunctional one, its commitment to explore any “shadows” that come to light is totally contrary to the less-healthy company which often serves as a refuge for co-dependent behaviors. The term “shadow” was coined by psychologist Carl Jung to describe some unwanted trait that avoids self-recognition, often leading to acute levels of denial – a total unwillingness to see or recognize parts of ourselves we don’t like.

    People in a Conscious Organization are open and willing to discover any unconscious patterns and breaking through any barriers they may have that prevent full functionality.  Having a conscious and healthy relationship with co-workers and the organization’s mission is of paramount importance, far more important than any individual’s need to maintain their image, political advantage, the illusion of control, or remain in denial about something that violates the core principles of consciousness.

    Unlike ambush-like interventions which might occur in some more dysfunctional organizations, Conscious Organizations welcome interventions. They seize such insights as opportunities to rid themselves of any behaviors, people, policies or practices which do not serve the group’s consciousness and, thus, the performance of the enterprise. 

    Conscious Organizations have their lights on - always ready to shine wherever darkness is found.  They are great places to work for people who are striving to be more conscious themselves and are seeking work environments that energize them. Everybody in the Conscious Organization knows that seeking greater enlightenment - shining light into the shadows and curing the dysfunction - is highly valued and takes responsibility for calling attention to anything that frustrates its mission.

    How about you? Are you ready to work in or even create a Conscious Organization? Would you welcome the opportunity to transform your company or institution into one in which shadows are illuminated and dysfunction is cured so the enterprise is more effective and the people can be more fulfilled? If you embrace this idea or model start to explore options and resources for making such a commitment and implement such a transformation for your organization. If the transition is successful, I guarantee it will be worth it.

    JA

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12. July 2009 by admin.

    As countries and industries grow increasingly overwhelmed by wave after wave of bankruptcies, layoffs, restructurings, botched contracts, and embarrassing bonuses, they might lose sight of a second, much larger set of tsunamis gathering force over the horizon. While the economy is melting down, technology is moving forward at an even faster rate. The ability to adapt to the accelerating pace of change will determine who survives.

    To use the current bailout jargon, at least three major technologies are shovel-ready: the programming of tissues, the ability to engineer cells, and robots. As these breakthroughs and others converge, we are going to see a massive restructuring of global economic power.  

    We can now program life. Several months ago, researchers at the J. Craig Venter Institute and Synthetic Genomics took a mycoplasma cell and inserted long strands of DNA into it, making the cell an entirely different species. In January 2008, the same team built and inserted the world’s largest organic molecule into a cell—this is the equivalent of a complete software package to program cells. One year later they produced thousands of these programs in a single day.

    Taken together, these discoveries mean that one can write out a life code, manipulate a cell, and execute a specific desired function. It means we can convert cells into programmable manufacturing entities. But this software builds its own hardware, allowing companies to begin using bacteria to produce chemicals, fuels, medicines, textiles, data storage, or any series of organic products.

    These discoveries, and new applications, are spreading rapidly. Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have assembled a standard registry of biological parts. Think of this as a RadioShack for cells. You can get open-source proteins, RNA, DNA, regulators, and terminators. In 2008, hundreds of students from 21 countries came together to make cool live stuff. Rice University’s team tried to engineer resveratrol (the substance that makes red wine good for you) into beer, leading one judge to exclaim, “Wow, cancer-fighting beer. There is a God!” The Taiwanese team was just a little more ambitious. It attempted to engineer gut bacteria to act as a kidney.

    Over the next decade, hundreds of open-source and private designs will blossom into millions of projects and applications. Some of these products will fundamentally change how and where we produce most of what we consume.

    A second major tsunami is our increasing ability to grow complex organic structures, such as limbs, bladders, hearts, and tracheas. All complex organisms start out as undifferentiated, pluripotent cells, meaning these cells contain an entire genome and are able to produce all body parts. Mexico’s dinosaur-like axolotl salamanders naturally regrow body parts, including sections of their hearts and brains as well as whole limbs. A very young human can regrow parts of fingers. Taking this concept one step further, Cliff Tabin at Harvard Medical School is growing extra wings on chickens.

    And soon, it may be possible to do this without a full body, just some cells. Over the past year, researchers shocked human cells back to their pluripotent state. This means that rather than using embryonic stem cells, we can grow skin cells from our own tissue into other body parts. Wake Forest University’s Anthony Atala is growing human bladders and ears in glass containers. A Colombian woman dying of tuberculosis had her own trachea regrown. And Harald C. Ott, a researcher now at Massachusetts General Hospital, took all the cells off a rat heart, leaving only a framework behind. His team then put rat stem cells onto this scaffold, whereupon the cells self-organized and the heart began to beat. Turns out life happens, and we are just learning the rules on how to program it.

    Finally, a third tsunami, one we have gotten tired of waiting for: robots. Those of us of a certain age grew up expecting that by now we would have the Jetsons’ robot maid, Rosie, simplifying our lives. Yet so far, all we have is the Roomba vacuum cleaner. We have waited so long and watched so much science fiction that our expectations are now very low.

    But change is coming fast. Boston Dynamics’s BigDog robot, for instance, is at the forefront of a paradigm shift in transportation, logistics, and perhaps warfare. It can carry nearly 350 pounds over complex terrain, including ice and steep, snowy forest ridges. Harvard University’s Robert Wood is working on the other end of the design scale, building robots the size of flies. All manner of surveillance, transport, and communication are about to be altered permanently by the coming robot age. When this development is tied to miniaturized, terabyte-scale processing, the engineering and data-processing breakthroughs will be extraordinary. Before we know it, robots will be everywhere.

    Robotics and materials design are already changing humans. In the 2008 Olympics, double-amputee sprinter Oscar Pistorius attempted to compete against the “able-bodied.” Running on a pair of artificial legs made of carbon fiber, he missed the cutoff time by just under a second. One of Pistorius’s successors is going to qualify next time. Two or three Olympics after that, the “disabled” may well be unbeatable. And the materials and robotics revolution is coming together with brain mapping, imaging, and control. Already, artificial arms can be controlled with no muscle input, just brain commands.

    The possibilities go way beyond limbs. Our hard-of-hearing grandparents used big megaphones; our parents had big boxes, above the ears, that would whistle at odd times. Now we use barely visible miniature earbuds, and cochlear implants provide the deaf with at least some sense of sound. In a few years, as machines continue to double in power and halve in cost, they will hear normally. Two or three years after that, they will do many things we cannot: focus hearing, increase or decrease sensitivity, and hear sounds that dogs, bats, or whales can hear.

    The same is happening with eyes. Implants may soon allow the blind to begin to see light and dark, and eventually shapes, colors, and details. Implanted eyes may someday be able to focus, see ultraviolet or infrared light, and record and transfer images externally.

    As innovators begin to read, reproduce, and program life, they will change almost every industry across the globe. Already, a majority of the grain we consume is genetically modified, and clothes, medicines, plastics, cars, fuels, and information companies use life-science technologies. Disposable food containers at Wal-Mart are made of biodegradable plastic grown in plants. Companies as diverse as L’Oréal, Procter & Gamble, Kaiser Permanente, and Intel are betting part of their future on life sciences. DuPont has invested more than $100 million in a fermentation plant that helps grow your breathable, water-repellent jogging suit from bacteria. Toyota’s life-sciences division is making car parts from plastics grown in plants. Google’s mapping software helps display and navigate bacterial genomes, and the company is backing a Harvard scientist in decoding the genomes of 100,000 people.

    Over the past few decades, the ability to code digits created an unprecedented burst of wealth, a large-scale restructuring of industries, and the rapid rise of once poor countries (Ireland, Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, and some regions of India come to mind). Something similar is occurring in life-literate countries. What began in the mid-1990s as an obscure subspecialty related to pharmaceuticals has become a key component of national development plans. Brazil leads the world in biofuels production thanks to life-science programs launched decades ago. South Korea invests in cloning and tissue engineering. Costa Rica is bridging medicine, ecotourism, and biomanufacturing. The next Bangalores will likely be powered by the life sciences.

    Life code and other applied technologies such as robotics are perhaps the most powerful levers humans have ever had. The ability to adopt and adapt to these technologies will eventually determine who gets, or remains, powerful and rich on an individual, national, and regional scale. It is the basis for the next Ford, Intel, Microsoft, and Google. Boston, San Diego, Rockville, and Silicon Valley, not to mention Beijing, Singapore, and Seoul, are continuing to invest in life-science stocks, which are outperforming stocks in other industries.

    But even the rise and fall of nations and regions may be relatively small compared with the eventual scale of the change. By beginning to read and write life code, we are gradually becoming a different species; we are moving from Homo sapiens into Homo evolutis, a human being that deliberately engineers its own evolution and that of other species. And that is the ultimate tsunami.

    JA

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2. July 2009 by admin.

    The political scene has changed immensely since the last time a Democratic president tried to reform health care. So has the health care picture: with costs soaring and insurance dwindling, nobody can now say with a straight face that the U.S. health care system is well. And if surveys like the New York Times/CBS News poll released last weekend are any indication, most voters are ready for major change.
 
         The question now is whether the country will nonetheless fail to get that change, because a handful of Democratic senators are still determined to party like it’s 1993.

    Yes, that’s Democratic senators. The Republicans, with a few possible exceptions, have decided to do all they can to make the Obama administration a failure. Their role in the health care debate is purely that of spoilers who keep shouting the old slogans — Government-run health care! Socialism! Europe! — hoping that someone still cares.

    The polls suggest that hardly anyone does. Voters, it seems, strongly favor a universal guarantee of coverage, and they mostly accept the idea that higher taxes may be needed to achieve that guarantee. What’s more, they overwhelmingly favor precisely the feature of Democratic plans that Republicans denounce most fiercely as “socialized medicine” — the creation of a public health insurance option that competes with private insurers.

    Or to put it another way, in effect voters support the health care plan jointly released by three House committees last week, which relies on a combination of subsidies and regulation to achieve universal coverage, and introduces a public plan to compete with insurers and hold down costs.

    Yet it remains all too possible that health care reform will fail, as it has so many times before.

    The Congressional Budget Office’s preliminary cost estimates for Senate plans were higher than expected, and caused considerable consternation last week. But the fundamental fact is that we can afford universal health insurance — even those high estimates were less than the $1.8 trillion cost of the Bush tax cuts. Furthermore, Democratic leaders know that they have to pass a health care bill for the sake of their own survival. One way or another, the numbers will be brought in line.

    The real risk is that health care reform will be undermined by “centrist” Democratic senators who either prevent the passage of a bill or insist on watering down key elements of reform. Scare quotes are used around “centrist,” by the way, because if the center means the position held by most citizens, the self-proclaimed centrists are in fact way out in right field.

    What the balking Democrats seem most determined to do is to kill the public option, either by eliminating it or by carrying out a bait-and-switch, replacing a true public option with something meaningless. For the record, neither regional health cooperatives nor state-level public plans, both of which have been proposed as alternatives, would have the financial stability and bargaining power needed to bring down health care costs.

    Whatever may be motivating these Democrats, they don’t seem able to explain their reasons in public.

    Thus Senator Ben Nelson of Nebraska initially declared that the public option — which, remember, has overwhelming popular support — was a “deal-breaker.” Why? Because he didn’t think private insurers could compete: “At the end of the day, the public plan wins the day.” Um, isn’t the purpose of health care reform to protect U.S. citizens, not insurance companies?

    Mr. Nelson softened his stand after reform advocates began a public campaign targeting him for his position on the public option.

    And Senator Kent Conrad of North Dakota offers a perfectly circular argument: we can’t have the public option, because if we do, health care reform won’t get the votes of senators like him. “In a 60-vote environment,” he says (implicitly rejecting the idea, embraced by President Obama, of bypassing the filibuster if necessary), “you’ve got to attract some Republicans as well as holding virtually all the Democrats together, and that, I don’t believe, is possible with a pure public option.”

    Some of the balking senators receive large campaign contributions from the medical-industrial complex — but who in politics doesn’t? Probably what’s really going on is that relatively conservative Democrats still cling to the old dream of becoming kingmakers, of recreating the bipartisan center that used to run the country.

    Hopefully this fantasy won’t be allowed to stand in the way of giving the USA the health care reform it needs. This time, the alleged center must not hold.

    JA

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