Apr 24 2009

The Solar Age

Kenobi

One of the best articles I have found on this big, great transition we are experiencing is Hazel Henderson’s The New Financiers.  In this piece, Henderson, the founder of Ethical Markets and thought leader for a group of progressive investors and people using money as leverage for change, talks about how consciousness and social capital will balance out the ego-driven money grubbing that exemplifies Wall St, and inform a new group of leaders.

Henderson leads off her piece, “the new financiers will be the high-level information and knowledge brokers – and they will aggregate the new research on global change processes and lead in structuring the deals now creating the growing green economy.  Today information and media drive markets.”

Then she gets to the bottom of the connection, “The new deal-makers value the role of honest, well-managed currencies that remain dependable stores of value and mediums of exchange.  Money is a special kind of information, not a commodity in itself, but rather a brilliant invention of the human mind.  When backed by real-world goods and service, as well as strong contracts, money can accurately track and score human ingenuity, productivity and transactions interacting with the natural wealth of resources of our home: Planet Earth.”

I think this is probably the most eloquent description yet of the change I have been contemplating for nearly a decade.  … and that’s not even the point.  ; )

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Apr 22 2009

Update, Thoughts on Transitions, Transformation and More

Kenobi

If you can forgive me the conceit of talking about myself for a second (not my favorite trait in bloggers), I’ve been a pretty sporadic blogger this year.  A mix of moderately heavy consulting work, reading and thinking about the epochal transition, and an extended experiment with Twitter have kept me from pouring much into the nuance intelligence blog bucket.

There’s an ever-evolving blog post I’m writing called “The New Normal” that starts, “A system that values and compensates an individual’s contribution to their community will replace the “greed is good” ethic that allowed Wall St. to dominate our world for the past 30 years.”  Seems simple enough, but the natural evolution from that concept indicates a fundamental transition in our relationship to economics, natural resources, other people, and — for the most part — how we live our lives. In fact, I believe that we are — consciously or not — re-writing the basic Social Contract that ties us together as humanity.

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