Category: Business

  • Bryan Ungard – Deliberately Developmental Organisations

    This came to me via Richard Bartlett and: Listening to it while reading Christopher Alexander’s A Timeless Way of Building feels almost eerie … as if Bryan is looking over my shoulder and re-whispering the book in my ear recontextualized from the architecture of buildings to the architecture of organizations. I felt a deep sense…

  • Japanese Toolmakers

    As I stand at the entrance to the space of Japanese Kumiko woodworking, I find myself also getting acquainted with the tools associated with the culture. And one of the fundamental functions in wood-working is cutting … which ultimately involves blades in many forms. A unique feature of many japanese tools is laminated metal ……

  • Yoga of Groups

    Yoga is a solitary practice, it focuses inwards … my body, my breath, my attention. Maybe that is one of the reasons it appealed to me. When I researched Yoga, I also considered martial arts where there seems to me to be more potential for interaction with at least one other human being. But I…

  • Ceptr CEO

    A few days ago I was invited to listen in on a conversation where some Ceptr friends tried to deal with questions on organizational structure and whether whatever organizational structure there was needed a CEO and/or COO. I am going to try to zoom in on the CEO question as a reflection on the wider…

  • Frederic Leloux – Reinventing Organizations

    I should have posted this a long time ago. I didn’t because I felt that I was too distanced from any organizational work to truly relate and engage with this work. But I have mentioned it numerous times and decided it would be easier for me to have it here as a reference. This is…

  • On Demurrage (negative interest) – Reply to Albert Wenger

    This post is a long comment on Albert Wenger’s post about Money as Commons (and if both our sites were powered with IndieWeb abilities then I would have been able to comment on his site and have the comment automatically posted in my own site). Demurrage in Nature – Decay If I was a grain…

  • Sharing Economy in Amsterdam

    “Amsterdam has developed an Airbnb for city-owned offices, so residents can use them for free, and may do the same with municipal cars and tools. … To avoid damaging the market for companies that provide office space, the project is available only to organisations that are working for a social purpose. … Some of the…

  • Douglas Rushkoff at SXSW 2016

    I have been following Douglas Rushkoff since his launch of the TeamHuman podcast. I recommend it very much. This talk is a good introduction to his work. The main thing I like about him is that he builds a good bridge between two worlds that in my existence seem separate. The people in my life…

  • Government as a Platform

    This may seem slightly off-topic, but for me there is some valuable cross-over of ideas and domains that do relate to Oameni. This is a presentation by Tom Loosemore about his work in the UK Government Digital Strategy during the 2015 Code for America summit. In it he describes an architectural view of a government…

  • The American Dream!?

    This powerful piece about the Unnecessariat describing an out-of-view America and explaining how Trump happened. I was surprised, given that I come from a different background and reality to find that I resonated with this part: “To know that nothing more is expected of you, or your children, or of your children’s children, than to…

  • What does it mean to be a peasant in Romania?

  • Economy for the Common Good

    Economy for the Common Good … being applued in companies, universities, municipalities … using familiar tools of measuring and accounting but applying them to different indicators and goals that are directly (instead of indirect indicators such as GDP) related to well being: “GDP is not valued in itself but because it is associated with positive…

  • Media Literacy

    Another very good episode of Team Human. This time about media literacy … how to bring into our collective awareness that when we use digital platforms (both as consumers and creators of content) we are acting in a space that has been created and shaped by others. Others have made choices (conscious and less conscious)…

  • Trust Disrupted: Bitcoin and the Blockchain

    A good overview of some of the fascinating issues that the bitcoin and blockchain spaces are experiencing. An underlying assumption in this field, that is not explicitly mentioned, is that technology and mathematics can be used to generate trust where people (for different reasons) cannot. That is one of the main reasons I am a…

  • Better Companies: Equal Footing

    So much information reaches me about what a mess we humans are making of this world … so it is uplifting to see a movie like this about companies that operate so differently from the companies I encountered in my career and life. These are established, producing, competitive companies who demonstrate that the well being…

  • Basecamp Company Spinoff

    A beautiful example that business CAN be made simple and sweet: “But first, there are a million ways to spin-off a company. And most of them are fucking complicated. Complicated stuff is anathema to us at Basecamp, so anything messy, extensively lawyer-y, protracted, knotty, or otherwise elaborate was off the table. So what was simple?…

  • Failed Attempts at Negative Interest

    First I came across this article about negative interest spotted in the wild. I was surprised to see this manifest so soon. Things seem to be moving faster. But then I came across this even more interesting article about negative interest backfiring. Basically a person who just manages to get by from a monthly income…

  • IMF admits disastrous love affair with the euro

    Reading this wasn’t too surprising … a more worrying thought that came to me though was that isn’t this how most of our systems government, business, etc .. are run? The list of systemic failures is so typical … and yet here we are. “The International Monetary Fund’s top staff misled their own board, made…

  • David Graeber on Creating Each Other

    imagining economies in which we primarily create each other … and along the way some “things”:

  • Vortex – Bladeless Wind Turbines

    I remember seeing this a while back … nice to them making concrete progress and speaking of commercial version: source