Michael Sales

The Anthropocene is a shaky ride. Many belongings will shift during this wobbly flight. • Are we on automatic pilot toward an, as yet unnamed destination? Are the conspiracists right that an elite, secret society will take over the planet?! [Spoiler Alert: No.] • Does humanity have any shared concept of where we're headed? Certainly, ideologues of every stripe from individuals shouting on street corners and dinner tables to global leaders followed by millions claim to know "the truth" and to have "the answers." But humanity's incessant conflicts demonstrate that few of these influencers align to a common purpose. • Is our technological power about a zillion light years more powerful than the capacity of our educational system to inform the general populace about it? Unfortunately, yes. For example, many, perhaps most people use Newtonian physics as their guide, if they give any thought to the matter. Relativity, quantum mechanics, models of consciousness? Fugget About It! Hell, Americans don't even use60 the metric system!

We developed a training program to introduce managers and informal leaders of healthcare organizations to key concepts of teamwork, safety leadership, and simulation to motivate them to act as leaders to improve safety within their sphere of influence. This report describes the simulation scenario and debriefing that are core elements of that program. Twelve teams of clinician and nonclinician managers were selected from a larger set of volunteers to participate in a 1-day, multielement training program. Two simulation exercises were developed: one for teams of nonclinicians and the other for clinicians or mixed groups. The scenarios represented two different clinical situations, each designed to engage participants in discussions of their safety leadership and teamwork issues immediately after the experience. In the scenarios for nonclinicians, participants conducted an anesthetic induction and then managed an ethical situation. The scenario for clinicians simulated a consulting vi...

In 2008, MIT’s Peter Senge et al. wrote that the Industrial Age bubble was ending and that, especially due to climate change, a “Necessary Revolution” was needed to create a sustainable flourishing world in the decades ahead. Since then, many business organizations have moved toward sustainability to some degree, and many other organizations have emerged, mostly non-profits, to help business and/or prod them to pursue ethical strategies. This report explains how the revolution is unfolding, by briefly mapping some 150 organizations that are driving the greening of capitalism, and grouping them in several meaningful categories: Business-Led Groups, Ethical Groups, Broadened Accounting Groups, Certifying Organizations, Green Investing Groups, Sustainability Consultants, and Green Business Publishing. Each of these groups is important in facilitating the revolution, especially those promoting corporate social responsibility, broader accounting practices, certification, and green invest...

In 2008, MIT’s Peter Senge et al. wrote that the Industrial Age bubble was ending and that, especially due to climate change, a “Necessary Revolution” was needed to create a sustainable flourishing world in the decades ahead. Since then, many business organizations have moved toward sustainability to some degree, and many other organizations have emerged, mostly non-profits, to help business and/or prod them to pursue ethical strategies. This report explains how the revolution is unfolding, by briefly mapping some 140 organizations that are driving the greening of capitalism, and grouping them in several meaningful categories: Business-Led Groups, Ethical Groups, Broadened Accounting Groups, Certifying Organizations, Green Investing Groups, Sustainability Consultants, and Green Business Publishing. Each of these groups is important in facilitating the revolution, especially those promoting corporate social responsibility, broader accounting practices, certification, and green investing. Among groups that list their beginning, the median start-up date was 2003—thus a doubling in 13 years.
This revolution certainly appears to be well underway, leading to a contest between 21st Century Green (or Sustainable) Capitalism, valuing the triple bottom line of People/Planet/Profit to some degree vs. 20th Century Industrial Era Capitalism that adheres to a single bottom line and narrow accounting measures. But the revolution is a quiet one that is underappreciated, due to fragmentation and lack of leadership. Hopefully, if well-publicized and widely discussed, the January 2017 Better Business, Better World report of the Business and Sustainable Development Commission, making a strong all-win business case for pursuing the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals, could provide a large boost to the necessary revolution. In turn, this could energize the larger system of more than 1000 sustainability-related organizations that are identified in the August 2016 Interim Draft of The Security & Sustainability Guide. We are not yet winning the struggle for sustainability in our era of great and intensifying uncertainty and danger. But with cities and responsible business taking the lead, and with more horizontal thinking that includes broad consideration of security issues, the necessary revolution can become more visible and thus accelerate.

The Confederacy whispers across the psyche of America like a corpse that refuses to die. Its ghosts hamper our forward movement and prevent our culture from truly embracing the science and new thinking needed to address present-day complexity. The offspring of this benighted era of open white supremacy despises the idea of an American society where the longstanding divisions its power depends upon are finally and thoroughly vanquished. They resist the continuing maturation and even the survival of our democracy. I call the embodiment of these longings for a reinstallation of the sad system of domination, heartlessness, and cruelty that was the Confederacy “The Zombie Named Dixie”

The ways in which the profound prejudices of the Confederate slave system continue to pollute the American landscape are at the heart of this essay. Some personal reminiscences about being a native son of the South are combined with a reading of history that focuses on the consequences of Abraham Lincoln’s death for our current national condition. Specifically, I am concerned with how America’s untreated pathology of white primacy persists and the growing threat it poses.

Thesis (Ed. D.)--Harvard Graduate School of Education, 1984. UMI #84-16,936. Vita. Includes bibliographical references (p. 507-525). Photocopy.

This case study tracks the 15 year evolution of an arts organization that gave its members the right to engage in all organizational decision-making activities. The objective of the research was to test the hypothesis that the broad right to participate in organizational processes would increase organizational engagement and effectiveness. The hypothesis was disproved. The results indicated that various political groupings emerged in the organization and that the members of these constituencies did not have the action skills or cognitive frameworks needed to create success.

The organization, which once had many hundreds of members and performed an important function for a large arts community, no longer exists,

Systemic forces result in chronic underutilization of the knowledge and insight of middle management. This hypothesis is explored through a case study, which recounts both the efforts of a group of technical managers to affect R&D policy and staffing in their company and the negative reaction of their superiors to this initiative. The management group used various ‘futures thinking’ technologies as a backdrop to their proposals and these are described. The case data are then interpreted through the lens of Barry Oshry's organizational theory, with a particular focus on the difficulties of acting in a concerted fashion from the ‘middle’ of an organization. Some of Oshry's antidotes to the organizational pathologies impacting middle managers are discussed, including recommendations for executives who want to deploy their subordinates strategically. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Purpose – The authors illustrate how the Dynamic Scenario Learning Process works in practice. Design/methodology/approach – A case showing how “Forward Bank” used the DSLP to discover crucial inter-relationships that were not intuitively obvious. Findings – Forward's scenarios provided a year's head start on understanding how to manage the dotcom collapse and the 9/11 attacks. Because managers had considered how