Resources

We talk about being free in the US, but are we really free?  Do you feel free?  Do you see freedom exhibited among our most powerful and privileged?  Do you think our ultra-partisan legislators are free?  Do you think our addicted and self-indulgent sports heroes are free? When a Gallup poll tells us that almost 50% of people in the US are not engaged in their jobs, are we free?

These last 10 days, I have been struggling with a decision: Should I accept a job offer in Vietnam to teach at a university in Saigon, with good benefits, decent pay, and some relocation support? Or should I remain on the entrepreneurial path and trust to create the work that is emerging for me (partially based on my PhD research-in-progress) on embodiment and change processes, even though the pathway from "here" to revenue appears tentative at this moment?

Can three questions really change the world? Well, maybe. Let's think about it for a minute. One thing we know about schools is that nothing stays the same for long.  Each year brings the latest "best practice." Each week brings a new procedure and its paperwork. Each day, our students pose new challenges. Each hour, the media bombards us with news about the latest crisis. What might possibly help us keep our balance as the world shifts beneath us?

In a recent post on the Harvard Business Review blog, Why Haven't Managers Embraced Complexity, Richard Straub looks at what managers face as they recognize that management practices from past decades don't really fit today's challenges. Even the term "management" may be undergoing a shift - notice that the post is not about "managing" complexity.

With the economy in turmoil and no creditable analysis on where we go from here, a drastic shift might be right around the corner.  One might ask is this current economic dilemma based on lack of jobs, uncontrolled debts, or on goods and services being provided within global competitiveness.  Regardless of these or any other reasoning’s, there is a historic shift happening within the world economy that is affecting all of us from first to third world countries.