Gil Friend’s Blog
Speaking of Pinchot…
...I'm blogging today from the Social Business Accelerator, presented by Gif's Bainbridge Graduate Institute and the Social Enterprise Group, where I'm helping develop the business strategy for a new, innovative social marketing venture. More details as the cone of...
Values, value, money – another data point
[Booz Allen Hamilton]: A new study -- Deriving Value from Corporate Values -- by the Aspen Institute and management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton found that companies routinely identify values as a top agenda issue, and public companies that report superior...
Kyoto switched on, US sits out – sorta
The Kyoto Protocol takes effect, with 141 countries signed on. (Joel Makower has an excellent Kyoto primer this week.) Some are more consequential than others. Some, under the terms of the treaty, won't have to do much of anything. (China and India, for example -- a...
Ed Applewhite, RIP
[Bucky's Dome] announced the passing of R. Buckminster Fuller's collaborator, Ed Applewhite last week, as 'Ed Applewhite, gone fishing in the cosmos.' Ed passed quietly at his home on the morning of February 11, 2005. Ed was one of Bucky's dearest friends and his...
The persistence of really bad ideas
[Seth Godin]: No, this is a post about how bad ideas stick around forever. The reason is simple: in most organizations, you don't get in trouble for embracing the status quo. More than a hundred years ago, Kaiser Wilhelm wanted to get rid of his enemies in the German...
Quote of the day
[43 Folders]: Our closing quote this time around comes from what purports to be a Chinese proverb, and I think it's just one of the most cunning things I've ever heard: 'If you chase two rabbits, both will escape.' Awesome.
Meanwhile, out in the macroeconomy
WT. Trade deficit in 2004: $618 billion. Despite a substantially weaker dollar, which makes U.S. products cheaper overseas, a deficit emerged for the first time in farm goods after 50 years of surpluses, according to yesterday's Commerce Department trade report. The...
‘End of a hatchet woman’
[NY Times business writer Lawrence M. Fisher, in Salon]: Hewlett-Packard's ousted CEO Carly Fiorina destroyed a great company's creative soul and trashed its business. Quoted at at length here not to pile on HP (disclosure: my company has worked with HP, producing...
Miniature Earth
Miniature Earth is a fine (and multi-lingual) flash animation renderingny Allysson Lucca of Donella Meadows' 'If the earth were a village of 1000 people...' essay. It's worth revisiting -- often enough to stay attuned to the social reality of this planet home.