Tag Archives: Resilience

Strategy vs. Resilience

20 Friday Jun 2014

Posted by in business, Emerging Markets

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Back in 2006 I was part of Lockheed Martin’s strategy department. I had been with the company for 6 years, and had successfully graduated their 3-year long Leadership Development Program that groomed young professionals into future executives.

I would be traveling regularly to Europe, California, Florida and New York, overseeing a number of advanced research projects and international business partnerships. I was a firm believer in strategy, and the strategic planning process that was so carefully coordinated by smart, battle hardened people with white hair.

That’s when an idea took hold: would all my strategy acumen give me an edge in an emerging economy? Could I be a successful entrepreneur there as opposed to an employee in the U.S.?

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A brief history of complexity and the mechanisms of resilience

04 Wednesday Sep 2013

Posted by in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, future, innovation, society, technology

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Resilience will receive a lot of attention as the complexity of our world increases. Below is a brief description of the logical correspondence between complexity and resilience, followed by a succinct primer on mechanisms of resilience. But first, a bit of history is in order.

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Why higher education requires a new underlying philosophy

18 Thursday Jul 2013

Posted by in future, knowledge, philosophy, society, technology, Uncategorized

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Futurists, scholars and entrepreneurs seem to agree: the higher education establishment will be disrupted in the near future. Thomas Frey foretells the collapse of over 50% of colleges by 2030 while Clay Christensen proposes higher education to be just on the edge of the crevasse. The culprit responsible for the disruption in their view? Technology, or more precisely the increasing availability of online learning to which Michael Saylor would add the proliferation of mobile devices.

My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.

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The rising toll of the (still) predominant mechanistic mindset in a complex world

11 Tuesday Jun 2013

Posted by in complexity, Crisis, democracy, future, society

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Thesis: there is I believe a meta-societal, global shift from robustness to resilience (see this for an intuitive illustration of the difference). This is fueled by an underlying transition from a mechanistic (Industrial Revolution) to a complex-adaptive (Conceptual Economy) worldview.  We have managed to design robust systems (economy, air traffic, healthcare, energy), but not resilient. Robust systems are great for quasi-stable environments, but the price for not having resilience in highly dynamic, networked environments is staggering: $12 trillion for the 2008 financial crisis, and counting. Unless we learn how to design resilient systems, likely through the application of complexity principles, democracy itself may be at risk.

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Post-causality: a quiet global revolution in the making

05 Wednesday Jun 2013

Posted by in business, capitalism, complexity, consulting, democracy, future, human capital, innovation, knowledge, management, philosophy, problem solving, society, taxonomy, technology

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If one were to cut a global cross-section through social classes, nationalities, ethnicities, ages, professions, genders, and so forth, very few commonalities would emerge. And yet, there is I propose just such a common thread: a shared causality mindset, a globally predominant belief in the supremacy of cause and effect.

Since it is people who run our institutions, this belief continues to shape our modern society and even influence to a large extent the technological outcrops of our knowledge economy. From business strategy to macroeconomic models, and from political debates to Big Data, causality is pervasive and its implications profound.

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Why the “individuality disorder” is the great tacit crisis of our times and how complexity informed management can help resolve it

18 Saturday May 2013

Posted by in business, Communication, complexity, Crisis, future, human capital, management, Organizational Development, paradox, philosophy, society

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With all the benefits derived from the advances in standard of living, our modern society suffers from an apparent paradox which can be best paraphrased as “if everyone is special, then no one is”.

We strive for individuality even as the economic affluence required to express ourselves is increasingly tied to economies of scale and the uniformity they foster. We do our best to proclaim our uniqueness to the world on social media pages, but have to make use of highly standardized templates in the process. We share in the belief (and rightfully so) that the very success of our modern society depends on scale, yet it is precisely scale that appears to generate confusion when it comes to the most intimate aspects of our human identity.

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