Leadership
THE LONG HOT SUMMER
Tue Oct 05, 2010
It’s been almost two months since I last posted here. It’s not that I didn’t have time, or that it flew by, or that I didn’t want to.It’s just that I wanted to say something that I wasn’t ready to say, and until I said what I wanted to say I didn’t want to say something else.
I wanted to look back at events of the early summer, but I was still “in them” and had no distance. Now we’re deep into autumn. The long hot summer is long gone. I’m far enough way. Enough distance.
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BUYING BOOKS
Sat Jan 09, 2010
I love to buy books and read books. I don’t often use the library. I don’t own a Kindle. I buy books. But I’ve noticed that I end up reading only about two thirds of the books I buy. Not a good percentage. Each of those I don’t read wastes stuff: paper, ink, money, time, and space. I’d like to raise the percentage.
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Orr & Brand: To Save Our Civilization
Fri Oct 23, 2009
Awhile ago I gave up on doom and gloom. I’ve learned enough to know the problems, and I tired of reading 250 pages of meticulously researched how-bad-it-is-and-how-bad-it’s-gonna-get followed by 25 pages of generalities about the solutions. But I broke my rule when I saw David Orr’s new book, Down to the Wire. The subtitle is Confronting Climate Collapse. He does just that.
He says that “The global crisis ahead is a direct result of the largest political failure in history.”
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Cool Biz
Sun Oct 18, 2009
I have about half a dozen posts half done and about half as much time as I wish, so for the moment I’m just going to tell a short story paraphrased from Tim Brown’s new book Design Thinking. But coming soon there will be more about that book (and IDEO, the amazing company of which Brown is the CEO), a piece about pirates (as democratic role models!!), a review of two remarkable new books about our future (one by Stewart Brand and one by David Orr), a discussion of how little I understand about the economy (after reading The New Yorker’s ” Money Issue”) and more. . .
In 2005 the Japanese Ministry of the Environment approached an advertising agency called Hakuhodo. They wanted help getting the Japanese people involved in meeting Japan’s Kyoto commitment. Hakuhodo suggested creating a campaign to mobilize the collectivist ethos of Japanese society toward the goal of reducing emissions 6 percent.
They called the campaign Cool Biz. Within one year a staggering 95.8% of the Japanese population recognized the slogan.
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