Sunday Open Thread – October 14, 2007

What I’m Thinking of Writing (and Podcasting) About Soon:

Coping With the Strategy Paradox: I met recently with Michael Raynor, who wrote The Strategy Paradox. He’s now looking at what else we can do to deal with this paradox, and he poked some holes in my argument that what we need is resilience, not planning.

The Evolving Role of the Information Professional: Since I listed the five major ‘products’ of my new employer, some people have suggested that this list might define the new role of the information professional in all sorts of organizations.

A Coming Class/Generational War?: Exploding economic disparity, and the widening wealth and opportunity gap between the old and the young, may be sowing the seeds for a class war between the old & wealthy, and the young & poor, that could transcend geographic borders.

Why We Need a Public Persona: The journey to know yourself is the first step towards understanding how the world works and becoming truly yourself, which is necessary before you can make the world a little better. As de Mello said, this journey is mostly about getting rid of the everybody-else stuff that has become attached to us as part of our social conditioning, and getting rid of this stuff is perhaps what ee cummings meant when he said the hardest thing is to be nobody-but-yourself when the world is relentlessly trying to make you everybody-else. From birth, we pick up all this everybody-else stuff that clings to us and changes us, muddies us. We are rewarded by society for doing so. I find the ‘figments of reality’ thesis helpful in this hard work — realizing that our minds are nothing more than problem-detection systems evolved by the organs of our bodies for their purposes, not ‘ours’. That ‘we’ are, each ‘one’ of us, a collective, a complicity. What makes it so hard is that becoming nobody-but-yourself opens you up to accusations of being anti-social, weird, self-preoccupied, arrogant etc. So we end up, I think, having to adopt a public persona that is, to some extent, not genuine, not ‘us’ at all. That’s hard. How can we make this public persona as thin and transparent as possible?

The Water Crisis: The disappearance of fresh water is likely to be the first wave of the future cascading crises of global warming. Ironically, the second wave is likely to be floods.

Vignette #6

Blog-Hosted Conversation #2: This week (a bit delayed, sorry) I’ll be publishing my narrated, edited interview of Jon Husband, which I recorded earlier this week, on hierarchy, community and education, and recording a third interview.

Possible Open Thread Question:

We know people judge us by appearances. To what extent, do you think, does the way we make ourselves appear affect our own sense of identity, our ability to be nobody-but-ourself? If we looked and behaved exactly the way we wanted and felt, what would  happen to us? Is our illusory ‘right’ to dress and appear the way we want to, part of the way societykeeps us from being who we really are?