The Right Way to Flourish

A colleague sent me a link to a article from Aeon magazine with the above title (without the “enough”). The author, Nick Thorpe, sums up his thesis in a few paragraphs. > According to data aggregated by the Global Footprint Network, it takes the biosphere a year to produce what humanity habitually consumes in roughly eight months – a situation that is logically unsustainable. And yet we persevere with what the British psychologist Michael Eysenck calls the ‘hedonic treadmill’, holding out the unlikely hope that the spike of satisfaction from our next purchase will somehow prove less transitory than the… Read More

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I have been gingerly backing away from using the word, sustainability, for some months. The reasons are several fold. First, the word has become little more than jargon and is no longer an effective call to action. It means too many things to too many people to enable the kind of coordinated action it takes to combat growing unsustainability. This problem could be alleviated by a concerted effort of everyone concerned about the state of the world to come to some consensus about the meaning. Easier said than done. A little history of “sustainability” activities and programs reveals such diverse… Read More

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My co-author, Andy Hoffman, sent me a link to an article in The Guardian about some recent utterances of James Lovelock. Lovelock has been raising attention to the environment for about as long as any living person has. Lovelock has been dispensing predictions from his one-man laboratory in an old mill in Cornwall since the mid-1960s, the consistent accuracy of which have earned him a reputation as one of Britain’s most respected – if maverick – independent scientists. Working alone since the age of 40, he invented a device that detected CFCs, which helped detect the growing hole in the… Read More

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My frequent source of inspiration for these blogs, David Brooks, has reached all the way back to the Christian Bible for his column today. Drawing on the parable of the Prodigal Son, Brooks makes an analogy to two major segments of today’s society. When the Father embraces his second son, who has squandered his life away, the hard working conscientious first son gets his nose out of joint, turning on the father for essentially dissing his high-minded life style. Brooks makes an analogy to what he deems is our broken society today, full of metaphorical second sons who are pissing… Read More

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Fast forward a few decades and **imagine** this post’s headline, above, on the front page of the *Wall Street Journal* associated with the following story. > (Washington, February 13, 2030) Today the Supreme Court ruled in favor of the robots in a landmark case, Robots United v. Federal Elections Commission. Echoing prior cases involving corporations, the SCOTUS deemed intelligent robots to be people with a right to vote guaranteed by the Constitution. The court’s creation of new classes of persons began all the way back in 1886 in Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad (118 U.S. 394). In the… Read More

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I found another arrow for my quiver in the NYTimes this morning in an oped piece on long distance relationships. Daniel Jones in a [piece](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/sunday-review/romance-at-arms-length.html?hpw&rref=opinion) to be published in the upcoming Sunday Review, titled “Romance at Arm’s Length,” discusses the growing numbers of people engaged in computer-based “love affairs.” Starting with quick review of Spike Jonze’s movie, “Her.” Jones paints a realistic, but disillusioning, picture of this practice > Other than the sci-fi wrinkle of the woman’s being a microchip, the couple’s ill-fated romance, which involves zero physical contact and relies on electronic communication for emotional sustenance, isn’t futuristic at… Read More

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I am about to spend a few days in Cleveland, weather permitting. I am doing a repeat of a class I did last year for the Weatherhead School Doctor of Management candidates. It will be the first class I have taught that was assigned Flourishing instead of Sustainability by Design. In preparing for this class, I had to carefully revise my presentations to reflect the changes that have entered my thinking and vocabulary in recent months. I use a wonderful video to raise questions about the Cartesian model of the mind as a mirror. This time as I was reviewing… Read More

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I am not sure where David Brooks was going in his Jan 28th oped [column](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/28/opinion/brooks-alone-yet-not-alone.html?hp&rref=opinion&_r=0) about faith. He seemed to be saying that those secular folks who disparage the faithful do so because they do not understand what faith is all about. Not surprising to me because many among the faithful cannot explain what “faith” means. In spite of any vagueness, the column is worth reading just for two included quotes. The first is from one of the most human and articulate voices of modern Judaism. > Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel described one experience of faith in his book “God… Read More

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I don’t tend to read the business pages of newspapers very much, but last weekend, an [article](http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/opinion/sunday/for-the-love-of-money.html?ref=opinion&_r=0) in the NYTimes caught my eye. With the headline of “For the Love of Money,” it began with: > In my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted. This is more than merely greed,… Read More

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Only connect�…�(Howard’s End, E. M. Forster) I have been preparing for a one-day class to be given to a group of doctoral students at the Weatherhead School of Management. They have been assigned *Flourishing*. This will be the first time that this text rather then *Sustainability by Design* has been assigned. I have had to go back and revise all my materials to reflect the change in emphasis and style in *Flourishing*. The first task was to carefully remove just about all the references to sustainability and replace them with “flourishing.” If you have been reading this blog, you will… Read More

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