Will All Mentats Please Call the Office? There's a Lengthy List of Pressing Assignments That Need to Be Tackled Now.

Remember the mentats in Frank Herbert incomparable Dune books?

A mentat was a citizen especially trained to think. And think, as the late John Wayne might have drawled, “Damn well!” If Herbert’s mentats understood anything, they understood that thinking is the art and science of understanding what leads to consequences and how to produce—or avoid—them. Mentats were trained to be asking continually what needs to happen, with as few preconceptions as possible, searching all the while for living principles and the broadest possible sweep in the universe.

“Above all else,” wrote Herbert, “the mentat must be a generalist, not a specialist. It is wise to have decisions of great moment monitored by generalists. Experts and specialists lead you quickly into chaos. They are a source of useless nit-picking, the ferocious quibble over a comma.

“The mentat-generalist, on the other hand, should bring to decision-making a healthy common sense. He must not cut himself off from the broad sweep of what is happening in this universe. He must remain capable of saying: ‘There's no real mystery about this at the moment. This is what we want now. It may prove wrong later, but we'll correct that when we come to it.’

“The mentat-generalist must understand that anything which we can identify as our universe is merely part of larger phenomena. But the expert looks backward; he looks into the narrow standards of his own specialty. The generalist looks outward; he looks for living principles, knowing full well that such principles change, that they develop. It is to the characteristics of change itself that the mentat-generalist must look. There can be no permanent catalogue of such change, no handbook or manual. You must look at it with as few preconceptions as possible, asking yourself: ‘Now what is this thing doing?’”

If I had a corps of mentats at my disposal, I'd immediately assign at least one each to:

• replace Karl Rove.
• advise Howard Dean.
• consult with the moderates in Iran on regime change.
• plan next year's manufacture of flu vaccines.
• help Big Oil get its greed back in bounds and its planning in gear.
• redesign the establishment of the post-Saddam Iraqi nation.
• start a Commission on Multilateral Religious Disarmament at the U.N.
• explain to the chancellors and presidents of the top 100 U.S. universities why their Lexus-in-every-lab policies are ruining American higher education.
• help China's ruling elite arrive at a faster understanding of their world responsibilities than the U.S. Congress has arrived at any understanding of its world responsibilities.
• lobby Florida to close the doors.
• persuade President Bush to put his presidential library in New Orleans.
• draft a rationale for a 100-year moratorium on manned space travel.
• design a new way to transport people that people really like.
• convince state legislatures that Daylight Savings Time is a nutty idea.

And on and on.

Sigh. So much for mentats to do.

Posted on October 30, 2005

The World Now Has Nine Billion and Two Blogs. That's Because Dilbert Has Started One. And, Of Course, There's Mine. And Dr. David Cox Is Making Noises Like Maybe He's Testing the Waters.

Dr. David Cox at Arkansas State University, a long-time and valued friend, has always been good for my ego. That's because he doesn't put up with it much.

And he's back. He writes, "Soon after you announced your blog, the attached came in my Dilbert Newsletter."

The attachment he sent read:

"When I see news stories about people all over the world who are experiencing hardships, I worry about them, and I rack my brain wondering how I can make a difference. So I decided to start my own blog. That way I won't have time to think about other people.

"People who are trying to decide whether to create a blog or not go through a thought process much like this:

"1. The world sure needs more of ME.

"2. Maybe I'll shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing my thoughts.

"3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.

"4. I know - I'll write down my daily thoughts and badger people to read them.

"5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn't involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.

"6. What? It's called a blog? I'm there!

"The blogger's philosophy goes something like this: 'Everything that I think about is more fascinating than the crap in your head. The beauty of blogging, as compared to writing a book, is that no editor will be interfering with my random spelling and grammar, my complete disregard for the facts, and my wandering sentences that seem to go on and on and never end so that you feel like you need to take a breath and clear your head before you can even consider making it to the end of the sentence that probably didn't need to be written anyhoo.'

"If that doesn't inspire you to read my blog, I don't know what will."

Dr. Cox thought the above was funny. I do too. I intend to tune into Dilbert's blog. You can join with me at dilbertblog.typepad.com.

Also, I think Dr. Cox should start his own blog. You can join me in encouraging him to do so by writing him at dwcox@astate.edu and telling him that:

"1. The world sure needs more of HIM.

"2. Maybe he should shout more often so that people nearby can experience the joy of knowing his thoughts.

"3. No, wait, shouting looks too crazy.

"4. He should write down his daily thoughts and badger people to read them.

"5. If only there was a description for this process that doesn't involve the words egomaniac or unnecessary.

"6. What? It's called a blog? He's there!"

As soon as he gets his blog up, I'll be one of the first to spread the news here!

(P.S. In all fairness, David did also say in his e-mail, "I sincerely am enjoying your blog. I have even started flossing.")

Posted on October 29, 2005

There Are Few More Important "Thinking Skills" Than Being Able to Think At Least Once a Day About How to Best Take Care of Your Teeth

There are few things that make it more difficult to think straight than a bad toothache. So, even if it’s a bit of a stretch, I’m going to use that reality as justification for what I’m about to say on a blog about the brain and the mind and thinking skills. And it really isn’t that much of a stretch. Taking care of our teeth is a good thinking skill.

Howse’dat?

Keeping your teeth as free of one of the most destructive organisms known to exist—dental plague—is something that you have to think about doing at least once a day or it doesn’t get done. Or doesn’t get done effectively.

I know that for a fact. Because I know a way to prevent you from ever having to go to a dentist again with a fresh cavity.

I’ve talked up this method at every opportunity since I learned about it from the physician and researcher who invented it more than 30 years ago. I’ve talked about it repeatedly to my children. To others in my family. To casual friends and close friends and, on those rare occasions when the opportunity arised, to total strangers. I’ve even tried to get dentists interested.

The problem may be that we can’t really see what happens in our mouth well. So, out of sight, soon out of mind, no matter how many photos we've viewed of the damage that the germs of the mouth can do to our choppers.

My tooth-cleaning method was invented by none other than the man who discovered plaque back in the 1910s—Dr. Samuel Bass of Tulane Medical School. He wasn’t studying tooth decay but rather yellow fever. This led him to spend a lot of time looking in people’s mouths, and as he did so, he began to notice a discoloring, odor-causing deposit on people’s teeth around the gumline. He soon concluded that this build-up was the cause of most tooth decay. He named it plaque. And he set about designing a cleaning method to keep it at bay.

Dr. Bass was 96 years young when I met him as a young magazine writer just beginning to pursue my interest of the past 30-plus years in better thinking skills and brain function research. He was still living a few blocks from Tulane University in New Orleans. And he still had every single one of his adult teeth. They gleamed back at me as we talked.

Here is how Dr. Bass said he cleaned his teeth daily:

1) He flossed carefully with a thin, unwaxed floss of his own invention. He took especially care to work the floss down under the gumline and “scoop” the plague assembling there up and out. He did this repeatedly, literally scrubbing as much of the base of each tooth as he could reach, all the while flicking the floss upward.

2) He then reached for a toothbrush with firm, rounded bristles and firmly scrubbed around the gumline.

3) Next, he reinserted the toothbrush at about a 45 degree angle downward and, flicking his wrist upward, once again repeatedly attacked the plague on his lower jaw teeth with a motion intented to flick it up and off. Then he went at the upper jaw teeth with the brush at a 45 degree angle upward.

4) Finally, he used his toothbrush to firmly scrub the caps of his teeth. And, one more time, the sides.

For decades, the Butler company manufactured the floss that Dr. Bass invented (it was branded as Right Kind®), but a few years ago, they discontinued the line. Now, I buy the smallest unwaxed floss sold by CVS drugstores. And I use a medium Oral B toothbrush. And the only dental work I’ve needed to have done since interviewing Dr. Samuel Bass was left over from the damage done to my teeth before I met him.

Go think! Then, go floss, every day, without fail! I guarantee you'll like the results.

Posted on October 28, 2005

What Do I Think of Edward de Bono, the King of Po? Well, the Man is a Walking, Talking, Sometimes Floating Encyclopedia of Information

A reader in India writes, “I am quite impressed by Dr. Edward de Bono's continued presence in media reports out here. His presence with the Indian cricket team has made terms like ‘lateral thinking’ and ‘six thinking hats theory’ extremely popular here. But the only problem is that the cricket team has been consistently losing its matches.” This reader asks for my opinion of Dr. de Bono, his theories and creativity-generating techniques.

It would be easy to dump on Edward de Bono for apparently having little success at reversing the misfortunes of India’s cricket team, but I won’t do it. For all I know, India’s cricket team is beyond salvaging.

And for the record, I think Ed de Bono has been good for the planet. He’s encouraged a Merlin’s stew pot full of people over the years, many of them in very high-powered places, to think anew about how they think. He’s written about 70 books on the subject of better thinking skills, and virtually all of them are still in demand. And he has a superb gift for keeping the idea that our brains can do better in the spotlight—like showing up in India when its cricket team is in trouble.

Last fall about this time, I spent two days with Dr. de Bono on his private island a ten-minute speedboat ride from “downtown” Venice. Even shared the top billing with him and Richard Saul Wurman at a private conference. Shared the billing but not the much of the platform. It was soon clear that Wurman and I were there mostly as window dressing. It was de Bono’s island, and it was really his event.

This gave me the luxury of sitting back and watching his mind at work. And that mind really is a piece of work. When de Bono is present, a gifted example of a powerful, logic-driven human computer is in your midst. What is he now, in his late 70s? Even so, if that marvelous mind has lost any speed, it’s half a nano-second or so. Hour after hour, day after day, it can just sit there and grind and grind, crunch and crunch, associate and associate, recall and recall, spew out and spew out. It all seems so seamless, how he thinks, what he has to say, the data and the stories and applications that he divulges so effortlessly. Very impressive.

I have many of Dr. de Bono’s books in my library. From time to time, I’ll pull one out and read a little bit. I don’t think I’ve ever finished one. That relentless de Bono use of logic eventually becomes overpowering. Eventually, I get hungry for a little more levity, a little more spontaneity, some acknowledgment that there’s more to creative thinking than knowing and following de Bono’s rules for creative thinking.

As I watched the great thinker sit at his overhead projector with his supply of colored pens and his seamless transparency rolls on his private island in Venice with visitor Henry Kissinger’s pictures on the wall and listened to his seamless commentary, I realized that he's nothing if not consistent. What you get in his books is also what you get in his personal presence.

Even when he’s telling raunchy jokes with a bunch of guys in the back of a speeding water taxi on the way to the hotel, it sounds like you are listening to an encyclopedia that happens to know how to talk. I only heard him tell one such joke, but it was so precisely on target that I got the idea that he knows a ton of them, one for just about every occasion.

And maybe that was the problem for the members of India’s cricket team. They eventually got tired of listening to an encyclopedia.

(Oh, yes. Po. That's a de Bono invention. He says that "no" is the basic tool of the local thinking system. "Yes" is the basic tool of the belief thinking system. And "po"? Well, I'll let Dr. de Bono explain: No, Yes and Po)

Posted on October 27, 2005

I Often Say, "Argue For Your Limits And You Get to Keep Them." Otherwise, Simply Assume That You Are Going to Change Perhaps More Often Than You Realize

Sometimes I’m bemused at the question, sometimes a little exasperated: Can people really change?

I suspect the reason that anyone would ask the question has to more to do with the nature of consciousness than anything else. Consciousness appears to be the paragon of immediacy. “We” may have trouble staying in the here and now, but consciousness doesn’t. It is either here, or not here. (There’s a school of thought that suggests consciousness is gone as much as it is away, even when we are awake and neurologically whole and competent and thinking our consciousness is here. These theorists think consciousness is as hole-y as Swiss cheese, online one instant, off-line an instant later, and then back again, and yet we never miss it when it's gone.)

Because consciousness is so “now” centered, at least when it is here, it’s apparently easy for us to forget how much we ourselves change over time. Or how much others we know have changed.

Yesterday, I took my consciousness (or it took me) off to see one of my professional venders. I’m sitting there, and he’s behind me. Because of my congenital hearing losses, I must read lips a great deal of the time to know what others are saying. I picked up on part of one of his comments while his back was turned, but asked him to face me and repeat it.

“I was married for 32 years, “ he repeated, then shrugged. “She changed.” And that why in his late 50s, he was suggesting, he was now living alone.

Here’s another example. A couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from one of our BTC associates in a land and culture far, far away. For the first time in more than a year, she had taken BTC’s BrainMap® instrument. To her surprise, her new results indicated a pronounced shift toward the top and left of the instrument and away from the center and right compared to the previous time she took it.

What did it mean, she asked?

Before attempting to answer her, I suggested she self-test with another of BTC’s tools, the MindMaker6®. If the BrainMap score is not an aberration, I told her, then she was likely to see changes in her MindMaker6 scores, too. The scores should show a shift of personal values emphasis out of the Alpha worldviews and into the new Beta worldview. She did, and it did.

“What caused this?” she asked.

Knowing a good deal about the circumstances of her life for the past many months, I replied:

“Oh, probably a number of things. You've burned some bridges to parts of your past. You've made some decisions to allow parts of you that have been held back to enjoy more freedom. You've made some important decisions about your future. You are more sure that you know your purpose and are committed to staying on purpose. You are probably getting more encouragement now from people important to you. Those kinds of things.”

Within moments, she e-mailed back, “So TRUE!”

Thinking we know how to change people is one kind of issue. Knowing whether people can change is another kind.

Of course people can change!

They do it all the time.

Posted on October 26, 2005

Forgive Me, But I Need Moment to Revisit One of My Favorite Topics: Dolphin Strategy and the Pools Where Sharks Routinely Bloody the Waters

In their omnipotent beneficence, the gods of the Internet have led me to a tool for searching that I’d not known to exist before. If you aren’t aware of it either, then you may want to bookmark it. The site is www.findarticles.com. It purports to index 10 million articles “not found on any other search engine.” (Some of these can be accessed without charge, and some you have to pay for.)

Now the test of whether this kind of service is worth a moist Fig Newton is always whether anything shows up when you type in your own name.

Fortunately, www.findarticles.com has a few entries mentioning your favorite blog personality or you wouldn’t be hearing anything about it to begin with.

The mention I like best is in an article I'd forgotten. I quote from it not because it spelled my name correctly but because I’ve always been intrigued by the activities it described. So if you’ll indulge me a moment of nostalga, here are a few paragraphs from my only known appearance in Nursing Management. The article is by a Navy captain, Jane Swanson:

“ONCE UPON A time...I became the Director of Nursing Service for a group of 10 clinics spread across three states covering over 984 driving miles. Within 3 months of my taking the position, the clinics were consolidated under a large hospital and became hospital-sponsored ambulatory care clinics. To meet the requirement to provide the same quality of care across all practice settings, we had to hire clinical nurses for the five larger clinics.

“None of the nurses who applied had ever worked in ambulatory care. Most came from hospital backgrounds and had cared for patients who required specific nursing tasks for a finite period of time. The very different demands of an ambulatory setting proved challenging. Many of the nurses experienced frustration, feelings of inadequacy, role confusion and burnout. Staff turnover was high….

“About this time, a staff development program using an analogy from Dudley Lynch's [and Paul Kordis's] book, Strategy of the Dolphin, generated much interest and good-natured kidding.

"A carp symbolized codependent behavior, a shark represented aggressive behavior and a dolphin stood for the ability to cope and excel in a changing environment. ‘Dolphins’ like a challenge and are able to thrive in a tough environment. They are expert at reading the currents of organizational attitudes, searching for clues and monitoring developments. They are very adaptable, swim well in constantly changing water, float in any current, dive in any pool. Being both team players and self-reliant, dolphins can coordinate actions or act completely alone. If things aren't working, dolphins will change tactics until something does work.

“Dolphin behavior around sharks is legendary. Using their intelligence and strong will, they can be deadly to the sharks. Bite them to death? Oh, no! Dolphins circle and ram, circle and ram. Using their bulbous noses as amphibious bludgeons, they methodically crush a shark's rib cage until the aggressive creature sinks helplessly to the bottom.

“The staff began to identify with dolphin behavior. As they noted, most behaviors in the work environment related to carps and sharks. It became clear that the dolphin's strategy is more than an approach to positive thinking. It is a way to think collaboratively.

“On their own, the staff adopted a dolphin emblem for those who had done something especially noteworthy and recognized someone monthly. (Also, plastic carps and sharks appeared mysteriously around the clinic from time to time on various desks.) After workshops in a variety of clinics with all the staff, the FISH framework became well known. Staff meetings were sprinkled with: 'Are you carping?' or 'You're swimming like a dolphin' or 'Ouch, the sharks are out today.' In the end, the staff did start to trust one another. Communication improved, all staff became involved, cooperation increased and healthy laughter was heard once again. A team with a common goal of quality patient care and mutual respect for each other emerged.”

At the time, Capt. Swanson was director of ambulatory nursing at National Naval Medical Center Bethesda in Maryland.

Her bio note added: “The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Navy, Department of Defense, or the U.S. Government.”

Obviously, Capt. Swanson knows her way around the shark pool.

To read the entire article, go here: Building a successful team through collaboration

Posted on October 24, 2005

The New Sign on the Door of a Restaurant I Frequent Says "Dinner Is No Longer Served." And Therein Lies a Story About the Importance of Niches.

As much as I've seen the principle demonstrated, it never ceases to make my brows go up when I encounter another example of just how nitche-specific the Universe is.

My co-author, David Neenan, and I discussed the importance of nitches in Evergreen: Playing a Continuous Comeback Business Game. We introduced the idea this way:

"When we talk about 'niche marketing,' we are speaking of the ability to focus and concentrate on one specific domain. 'Small business advisers' or 'marketing consultants' make a living trying to tell people in Small Niches what should be done next. But about all they know, for certain, is that hard work alone is never enough to guarantee that your Small Niche idea for a new product, service, or organization—will work. Again, the trick is to luck onto, search out, or create persuasive limits to disorder—fresh, fertile techniques, synergies, products, services, or markets poised to align themselves with developing new patterns and energies in the Evergreen."

At breakfast this morning, Sherry and I noticed that one of our favorite greasy spoon restaurants was no longer serving dinner. What was surprising about this was that they'd only begun to serve dinner a few months ago. Before that, for more than 30 years, they had been a wildly successful "open at 5 a.m. and close at 2 p.m." breakfast/lunch place.

When the manager walked past, I asked him why no more dinner times. "We got reminded the hard way that we operate in an industrial district," he instantly replied. "People want fast service and cheap food for breakfast and lunch. But when they 'go out for dinner'—and he raised two fingers on both hands to emphasis the quotes—they want to go to the"—fingers up again—"'entertainment district.'"

It so happens that the "entertainment district" is no more than 90 seconds away from where we were sitting, depending on whether you hit one or both of the intervening traffic lights and/or have to wait for a light-rail train to pass. But that isn't really germane to all this. What happened was that the owners and managers of Poor Richard's Cafe didn't quite understand what their Small Niche is. And that niche happens to be looking like, cooking like, and acting like a cafe in the industrial district. Getting away from their niche was an expensive mistake, one which, to their credit, they quickly picked up on and corrected. They are back to their Small Niche now and are as crowded for breakfast and lunch as ever.

You probably noticed that the term that David and I used is Small Niche. In our book, it is always capitalized. That's because there is also a Big Niche. David and I had this to say, in part, about Big Niches and about niches in general:

"For each individual, there appears to be the reality of a singular, purposeful Big Niche, plus the potentially of numerous Small Niches. Paradoxically, the Big Niche is much more elusive in that, although it is apparently pre-existing, it must usually be diligently searched for. Small Niches, while they may be invented on the spot, can also sometimes simply be fallen into, like ditches."

There's a lot more about both Small and Big Niches on pages 39 through 60 in Evergreen.

Posted on October 22, 2005

Riddle: When Is a Lawyer Not "Thinking Like a Lawyer"? Answer: When He Hits His Thumb with a Hammer While He's Watching Himself in a Mirror

Lawyers I avoid like the plague, unless, of course, I have to have one, and then, of course, I want a very good one.

That’s because in the domains of the Alpha worldviews, which includes most of the world’s population, lawyers are a world (and a law) unto themselves. Everyone else—plaintiff or defender, victim or accused—is an outsider, and the legal “system,” like most systems, often deals harshly with outsiders. The damage that lawyers do has been getting worse and worse. You might say that the world has become much too complicated for lawyers to litigation and adjudicate, but of course every day, they are still out there in massive numbers litigating and adjudicating their little hearts out and billing for it by the fraction of an hour.

And to now, it’s all been built on a phony assumption that the world is totally and completely a rational kind of place. That people do what they do because they think about it first. Reflect on it. Deliberate about it. And then make a selfish choice or act on precisely calibrated assumptions about probabilities and about the future that—to use a phrase from economics—mazimizes utility.

How inobservant and inaccurate.

But then the history of the worldviews of Alpha is, in many hurtful and thoughtless ways, a history of inobservant and inaccurate assumptions and assertions.

The new Beta worldview is giving us new, more complete ways to look at things because the Beta mind is a much bigger kind of place. There is room in the Beta thinker’s world for the psychologist to stand comfortably alongside the economist. And the neuroscientist to sit naturally alongside the law professor. And talk to each other in earnest, inquiring and trustful terms.

As evidence, I offer the July, 2005, issue of the Chicago-Kent Law Review. The entire issue is about challenges that are emerging to the view that rationality adequately explains how and why laws are made—and how the people in the legal profession and the people who find the law being applied to them behave.

The issue’s lead piece is a 45-page article by law professor Jules Lobel and economist/psychologist George Loewenstein that argues “emote control” (emotional control) is usually a more important determiner of why people do what they do than rational control. And that emote behavior is old-brain behavior and nearly always trumps rational behavior because it is faster and brings psychological relief quicker and offers more clear-cut outcomes than new-brain behavior. This makes emotional control the default controller

Now, this is ho-hum stuff to psychologists and therapists and brain/mind scholars. But this is a law journal refereed by lawyers and talking to lawyers.

This is great stuff!

And it becomes totally intriguing stuff when you see what Lobel and Loewenstein do with what they have come to accept as a new dual-controller paradigm that they call “behavioral law.”

These experts put their behavioral law theories to immediate use by shining their new explanatory spotlight on politicians and judicial decision makers who, whether instinctively or rationally, use “emote control” to manipulate the development of the law.

The key, these scholars note, is substituting symbols for substance. Symbols will trigger the old brain emotions, they note. Substance is more the feedstock of the newer, rationality-producing pre-frontal cortex.

I can’t begin to do justice to their ideas and evidence in this space. But let’s pick up a thread or two. They note that in Jon Krakauer’ bestselling Into Thin Air, he recounts the extreme shock he experienced the first time he encountered a climber’s dead body on Mount Everest. It left him shaken for several hours. Then not long after, he encountered the second dead body. And the shock wore off almost immediately.

That’s because, say these authors, the brain’s affect systems are sensitive to changes in things—to situations that appear to be new. And then adapt quickly to ongoing or repeated stimuli.

They point to President Bush's response following 9/11. Whether the President rationally made a decision to use “emote control” following 9/11, he most assuredly and rapidly tapped its powers when he began to say things like this to the nation and the world: “In the new world we have entered, the path to peace and security is the path of action” and the “war against terrorism ushers in a new paradigm … ushered in not by us, but by terrorists.”

The law journal writers say:

“The perception of the September 11 attacks as ushering in a new era was a powerful emotional motivation for changes in legal doctrine that might not survive rational scrutiny. That the United States is facing a new situation has been utilized to justify (a) changing international legal rules on the use of force to permit preemptive self-defense; (b) not applying the Geneva Conventions to alleged terrorists; (D) detaining people without charges or trial; (d) a very narrow definition of torture permitting coercive interrogation….[The] perception that the problem of terrorism was in some sense ‘new’, encouraged an affective response to the problem that discourages and distorted rational debate....”

Their conclusion: a little "emote control" can be a very dangerous thing when it is left unchallenged as the default controller of behavior. Especially, in the profession that makes laws, litigates and adjudicates.

This is just one juicy bite out of Lobel’s and Loewenstein’s hefty, thoughtful apple. Go here to read the whole article: “Emote Control: The Substitution of Symbol for Substance in Foreign Policy and International Law”

Posted on October 21, 2005

I Just Hope I Haven't Won the Lottery in Beijing Or Been Named a Beneficiary of a Long Lost Irish Ancestor Who Struck It Rich in Shanghai

I am now getting spam in Chinese. At least, I believe it to be Chinese. Here is the subject line from the latest e-mail: 最大的2006年全球建材展.

Now, if that turns out to be scatalogic or instructions on how to do something illegal, please don't notify Dr. Dobson or the FBI. To my eternal regret, I don't read a single character of Chinese, if such that be. So I don't have the foggiest idea what it says.

Of course, I'm not sure that my new Chinese spam-sending compadres' English language skills are up to par, either. "Dudley Lynch" doesn't exactly suggest that I have a Chinese heritage or the capacity to read these unsolicited epistles. So I'm not sure how I became a Chinese spam target. But the Chinese spam just keeps coming.

But then, the Chinese have a reputation for keeping on coming that is second to none. They aren't likely to be superseded in this department any time soon.

In yesterday's New York Times, there was a mesmerizing article about Shanghai's changing skyline. The city already has almost twice the number of skyscrapers for living and working that New York City has—about 4,000. Another 4.7 billion square feet's worth is scheduled to be completed this year. Never mind that prices for a luxury apartment are at New York levels, too.

The Times quotes Richard Burdett, professor of architecture and urbanism at the London School of Economics: "There's no doubt what is happening in parts of China is on a scale we've never seen before."

That Times article interested me intensely. Another article in the paper worries me. It isn't just new buildings where the Chinese are off the numbers charts. It is also new birds. Poultry. The 1.3 billion Chinese also own a quarter of the world's chickens, two-thirds of the world's domesticated ducks and almost nine-tenths of the world's domesticated geese.

And the Chinese are also the world's leading imitators of the ostrich when it comes to cooperating with the rest of the world on the possibility of a global epidemic of bird flu. They are refusing to share virus samples from infected wild birds, and they have been testy toward researchers who think they might have a disease problem.

So I'm not the only one having a problem not being able to read the Chinese.

The whole China scene is larger-than-life and utterly fascinating. I just hope it doesn't turn out to be fatal for a lot of people, too.

Posted on October 19, 2005

I Think I May Have My Epitaph: "He Was Born to Handle Books."

I love books.

People who know my family history know that this love almost assuredly has its roots in my father's love of books. Nearly all the time I knew him, he surrounded himself with books, sometimes when the family would have been better off had he spent the money on other things.

In spite of my resolve a few years ago to be freed of the care and feeding of most of the thousands of books in my personal library, I now find myself surrounded, once again, by thousands and thousands of books. This time, because of the post-modern marvels of Internet selling, one of the hats I wear is that of an online book dealer. Assisted by my associates—usually family—my company has assembled small warehouses crammed with book shelves. And books.

It is my job, for the most part, to catalogue them. You could argue, as many of my friends and acquaintances have, that this is a daft thing for me to be doing. Typically, the response is this: "You could get a high school student to do that after school hours." But really you can't. Not if you love books.

If you love books, you want to handle them, caress them, sometimes smell them. Browse their pages. Note their beauty or their imperfections. Even in the Joe Friday-like world ("nothing but the facts") of the big all-business Internet book selling services (Amazon, Alibris, ABE Books, Biblio), when you love books, you are always looking for a way to convey to a potential buyer just how strongly you feel about a book's appearance, its illustrations, its words. Its personality and its magic or its lack thereof.

So I spend probably more time than I can justify by most yardsticks repairing, cleaning the dustjackets of, evaluating, pricing, posting and handling books. Probably a part-time high school student would be much faster. I'm forever stopping to read the dustjacket promo copy, flip the pages, peruse a few paragraphs or, before I know it, a whole chapter.

Yesterday, it was a 1955 copy of Viktor Frankl's The Doctor and the Soul that stalled my progress. Frankl has had a profound influence on my life through his work, Man's Search for Meaning. The book I was looking at yesterday apparently pre-dated that one. I kept thinking I'd close it and move on. But I didn't. I kept reading and reading. Talk about a reverence for being alive! Frankl had survived the death camps of Nazi Germany. He argued against euthanasia. He argued against suicide. He argued against the fatalistic uniformity of Freudian psychotherapy. He wanted people to live responsible lives. He wanted them to have a task as big as a life itself. He wanted a life for them that they could put their hands on!

He wrote, "We venture to say that nothing is more likely to help a person overcome or endure objective difficulties or subjective troubles than the consciousness of having a task in life. That is all the more so when the task seems to be personally cut to suit, as it were; when it constitutes what may be called a mission. Having such a task makes the person irreplaceable and gives his life the value of uniqueness."

Maybe cataloguing books is one of my "cut to suit" tasks in life. I hope so. I really enjoy it.`

Posted on October 18, 2005

Can This President, His Party and His Policies Really Be As Phantasmagoric As They Seem to Be? Yup, 'Fraid So.

Two days after George Bush's re-election, Britain's Daily Mirror ran this headline, "How can 59,054,087 people be so DUMB?"

The answer is as simple as the solution to the circumstances it creates is nettlesome. And it is this: in this complex and confusing world, many Americans simply lack sufficient rational thinking skills to consistently make quality personal and collective decisions. (Of course, Americans aren't alone: it's a universal condition.)

Frightened (by the 9/11 terrorist attacks), increasingly preoccupied with keeping groceries and gasoline on hand (even the middle class has been seeing a steady erosion in its income and quality of life for many years) and convinced that if their world is going to hell in a handbasket, it is no doubt God's will, most of those 59 milllion voters no doubt thought they saw in their president a firm hand and voice for troubled times, and so they re-elected him.

And the disastrous consequences continue. The latest calamity is Mr. Bush's deliberate foot-dragging on keeping his promises to help rebuild the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. The Los Angeles Times today reported even members of the President's own party are openly questioning Bush's indifference to the need to shape what billions and billions of federal dollars are used for. The White House clearly is not making choices about what should be rebuilt. For example, in this vacuum of leadership, the Army Corps of Engineers is now rebuilding levies and reviving canals that even they admit will probably allow New Orleans to flood again in the next powerful hurricane.

What would those 59,054,087 people do if they voted today? Many might choose to vote Bush out, or they might not. We have to remember just how viserally "people of faith" resist thinking rationally. It's an instinct that goes back a long ways. Remember that Martin Luther called reason the devil's bride and a pretty whore. Granted that as this is written, Bush's approval rating is down to 38 per cent. But his "base" is still strong and still in power. And the President seems immune to learning. Clearly, America has a President who has come to believe that his personal map is the territory.

In quick-check fashion, what are key trends to watch here?

• Historically, America's national politics have swung like a pendulum. From right to left to right to left. The cycle takes many years. And it is long overdue for a turn toward the left. The swing is nearly always precipitated by disastrous policies, poor action and the internal corruption that extended power brings. The tipping point may be close.

• The American government is bankrupt, and many of its citizens are in trouble financially. A serious downturn in the U.S. economy would have severe consequences for tens of millions of Americans, perhaps more. A decision by the Chinas, Koreas and Germanys of the world not to finance the American government's cancerous, out-of-control debt any longer would probably signal the end of America's world hegemony. The reason that this has not already happened is that the arrangement has been so lucrative and convenient to the lenders, and the consequences of letting the U.S. fail are so sobering for the rest of the world. But the time is almost surely coming when enough U.S. debt is enough.

• Will inspiring and competent new leadership appear on the American as well as the world scene? Bush was the best the Republicans had to offer, and there's no one waiting in the GOP wings. You have to wonder. The Democratic possibilities seem to be weak-kneed nilly-willyies, not even sure how to be an effective opposition. In Britain, Blair is clearly a me-too-George character. Germany's leaders are, alas, hopelessly provincial and uninspiring even at home. At the United Nations, Kofi Annan has turned out to the quintessential bureaucrat and no more. Hopefully, necessity will be the mother of invention. But where's Matt Santos when we need him?

• Is it about over? Does America really matter that much to the world anymore? Was the American dream something that in finality not even this country could actualize, much less countries and peoples and cultures not enjoying the splendid isolation and remarkable confluence of lucky breaks that the people of the United States have enjoyed?

My best guesses:

1. The pendulum will begin to turn in the 2006 and 2008 elections. It may take a while, but the GOP is about to be sent to recycling (and with a little luck, a few of their top dogs will be sent to the pokey).

2. The damage done to the fabric of our American way of life by Republican policies of the past 30 years and the party's failure to prepare the U.S. for the world as we have come to know it is finally going to seep into the awareness of many politicians and many in the proletariat, and work will begin on a new (if scaled-down) social contract between this government and its people.

3. America's preeminence in the world will continue for the moment. There is a self-restorative quality built into our nature and our systems that is difficult to understand if you have not viewed it from the inside out and have not faced close up its roots and energies. Also, the candidates for replacing us aren't quite ready to challenge us yet.

4. Both Americans and the other of the world's citizenry are going to be so engaged by the demands and opportunities of the emerging technologically fecund era of explosive opportunism that the only ones who will have a clear memory of the Bush era in a few years will be those who have just visited his library.

Which, incidentally, is probably going to be built a few miles from my home and office.

Posted on October 17, 2005

Reaffirmed at the Texas State Fair: At Every Pause Along the Road Most Traveled, the Human Spirit Can Summon the Creative Spark

Sherry and I took our young grandson to the State Fair of Texas this weekend. The fair is a 277-acre behemoth of statefairism that not only boasts Big Tex, the three-ton, 52-foot-tall talking iconic statue, but the largest collection of art deco exposition buildings in the United States.

If you are into the (Clare W.) Gravesian spiral model of people's portals on the world, state fairs are authentic places to observe mind levels 2 through 4 (and sometimes 5) at work and play. And since the State Fair of Texas is a genuinely outsized event, it offers a genuinely boggling array of people living out those worldviews.

The cookware demonstrations and the homegrown tomatoes quickly get old for me, so on those rare occasions when I go to the big Texas fair, I soon find myself in my favorite building, the Creative Arts hall. Again, using the Gravesian model as a reference, this is decidedly a level 4 kind of place. Level 4 is the worldview that Graves called absolutistic and what I've often called the Loyalist portal of the mind.

At Level 4, the human mind is not expected to be a paragon of creativity. And most of what is on view in the Creative Arts hall is as uninspiring as the acres and acres of unimaginative new Level 5-inspired cars on display a few yards away. But on all my visits there, I've eventually stumbled on unmistakable evidence of just how alive and well the creative instinct is at all levels of the mind, including this one.

This year, I found what I was looking for in a display case housing the winning entries for the Glue-A-Shoe Context.

The assignment had been to take an old shoe and transform it into a piece of art. I think even the late Andy Warhol might have been intrigued with the tennis shoe that had been splayed and metamorphosed into a manta ray. There was a dismembered high-heeled shoe whose parts were artfully rearranged in a salad bowl and labeled chop shoey. Two scale model sumo wrestlers were going at it on a discarded beach sandal. Another sandal had somehow been refashioned into a magical wagon in which a Tinker Bell-like character held the reins to a pair of dragon flies. And those were merely the blue-ribbon winners.

However, these were not the most captivating displays I saw at this year's Creative Arts hall. That distinction went to a top winner in scale model dioramas. The scene depicted a Texaco gasoline station, circa the early 1950s. The scene was stunning in its imaginative completeness. Right down to the bottles in the miniature, battered vertical-door Coke machine inside the office, the electric clock on the wall (it read 10 'til 2) and the outside trash barrel filled with empty, Chiclet-sized motor oil cans. Creating this had to have required several hundred hours of riveting, loving, creative attention to detail.

Of course, you can't wade through 7,000 examples of Level 4 creativity without eyeballing a lot of kitsch. This year's kitschiest display was also its largest. A bigger-than-life-sized, guitar-pounding young Elvis Presley and three hound dogs. Carved in butter.

Posted on October 15, 2005

In These Days of Ceaselessly Impassioned Assertions by People of Faith, I'm Reminded Almost Hourly of My Favorite Quote

The late Richard Feynman, the Nobel Prize winning physicist, once confided to the audience of the BBC television program, "Horizon":

"I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it's much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.

"I have approximate answers and possible beliefs and different degrees of certainty about different things, but I'm not absolutely sure of anything and there are many things I don't know anything about, such as whether it means anything to ask why we're here, and what the question might mean.

"I might think about it a little bit and if I can't figure it out, then I go on to something else, but I don't have to know an answer.

"I don't feel frightened by not knowing things...."

Posted on October 14, 2005

A Cautionary Note to a Warm-Hearted Soul: Don't Let the Noble Instinct of Doing Good Keep You From Being Your Best

An aspiring brain-aficionada in Southeast Asia writes, in part:

"I am inclined to work for communities and not-for-profit organizations since my compassion is more for the 'underdogs' as I feel that there are so much to do for us. That is where I can add value."

My reply, in part:

"The life and professional values you outlined in your e-mail message—working with the non-profits and underdogs in our societies—are certainly worthy. The one caution I always share with people who strongly espouse them and who I think (as I do with you) are mature enough to accept and reflect on my cautionary comments without taking major offense is that such a stance can be a copout if one isn't careful. Because being noble and self-sacrificial and self-effacing is often not very powerful, and this is where the copout can emerge: by not being very powerful, one doesn't have to take responsibility for the potential of their personal power, and thus they don't end up being very useful to the underdogs and non-profits and powerless people they say they want to help."

Her reply to my reply, in part:

"Thank you for your useful remark and I took that as an advice. I like both the way you gave it and the remark by itself. And I can see that your sensor is detecting rather well. However, I have done my reflection on your remark and found it very useful. I have not been in the pool of my own blood since having been through The BrainMap. Your remark gave me a tick to re-examine my old tendency and I am in the stage of great awareness since I don't miss being in the blame game again. I wish I had known a little less of self-sacrifice. It was once my way of developing intimate relationship for too long. But I don't like soap-opera anymore.

Talking about underdogs, we are all victims of the victims. Some underdogs choose to remain victims and I am not interested in them either. Being noble and self-sacrificial is also very tempting but I rather keep that for some other moment. In the past, I was adding values to the development of the topdogs for long without having thought of anything but today, I think and feel that the system is completely out of balance and I may be able to add some value on the other side to make it up. I want to surf the systems to feel myself where I can make more impact. Of course, I will work with almost anyone regardless of their position."

It's great to see a mind make progress on the thinking skills spiral. Good work, my friend!

Posted on October 13, 2005

More on the Dutch "Mental Fitness Studio": It's a Work in Progress, says Its Creator

Jacques Groenen says one aspect of what I wrote yesterday about the new Mental Fitness Studio (MFS) venture in the Netherlands was incorrect. The prototype studio is only partially complete.

Jacques notes:

"I live in an area called 'Brainport Eindhoven' (another organisation involved is called United Brains), and this is the #1 innovation area in the Netherlands and the main target in this field of the Dutch government.

"Within 8 years this area has to be the #1 innovation area in Europe. So we need much Mental Fitness and many Total-Brain persons here. So, presently I am in the process of talking to the main innovators in government and business during which I present my total view with MFS and Total-Brain Leadership for Innovation training ánd organizational change as main ingredients. Next year, the main theme of the chambers of commerce in Holland is innovation.

"Concerning the MFS we are between the two possibilities you describe. We have a mobile part of the MFS functioning (the porch of the MFS), but it is a small part of the real MFS, which is going to be a building with about 10 training rooms with learning technologies from all over the world.

"People take a subscription and work every week for at least one hour on their integral (=total brain) mental fitness. In fact, it is a coming together of education, healthcare, creativity, entrepreneuring and entert(r)ainment. People spend hundreds of euros a month on food for their cars, this is food for their brains and minds."

Posted on October 13, 2005

Okay, Whole-Brain Advocates, Listen Up! These Dutch Folks Are Serious!

Fitness studios are invariably designed to help people take off weight. At least all the anti-flab/pro-abs places I know about have embraced that as a goal for their clients.

Now there's a concept a'borning in Eindhoven, a technologically innovative city in the south of Holland, for a new kind of fitness studio. Its initial market is primarily businesspeople. The entrepreneurs involved are using the trade name Mental Fitness Studio, and they are aiming at putting weight on at least one human organ. That is, if you consider beefing up your neurons as adding weight.

In a nutshell, says Jacques Groenen, one of MFS's founders, "An MFS is going to be a place to which people go to exercise and become 'total-brained' and mental fit. They are exercising their brains and hearts and especially the balance between parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems."

After a two-day demonstration at a leading Dutch training organization, the most common refrain, says Groenen, was a variation on this theme: "A whole new world is opening for me."

Jacques takes us on an MFS tour:

• "We have multiple rooms at our MFS location. MFS clients take a subscription to exercise once a week at an appointed time for 1-1.5 hour. We give them an MFS buddy and use e-mail to remind people that they need to do their daily exercises. People fall back into business-as-usual behavior because of deep ingrained habits in their hormonal patterns. And one-time training has little result."

• We are making use of the most advanced technological learning tools (among others, bio- and neurofeedback, e.g., muscular stress in the head has much influence on the brainwaves of a person; we also see this with children with ADHD, etc.) from all over the world that we have evaluated the last two years."

• "Limbic (emotional) learning tools are also very important and that is the reason that retraining the brain organ called amygdala is very important for emotional change in our clients. We are making new connections in the brain by means of neurofeedback based on chaos theory and self-organisation using a tool called Neurocarepro - see www.zengar.com.

• "We use Brain Technologies' BrainMap® tool for total-brain learning and organizational change and we plan to use BTC's Mindmaker 6® instrument in the near future as well, when people are freed of their stuck emotional energies and their brains are retuned to optimal beta, alpha, theta and delta states. Most people have big problems here and have difficulties to relax into alpha. Our natural state is the Shumann resonance of about 8 Hz (to train it, we use sounds from nature). During my holidays in the beginning of August I was in Slovakia to do measurements and tests with ëntrainment (coherence) between brainwaves and the Schumann resonance."

• "We also use the "making of new connections" in our approach to innovation (this time not in one brain but between different brains), so you see we have a fractal concept."

There's more on this at www.fun-da-mental.nl (in Dutch at the moment but an English version is in the works). Jacques Groenen can be reached at j.groenen02@onsnet.nu.

Posted on October 11, 2005

"The Fairer Sex" Plus Fair Turn About Equals Far More Than Just Fair Results!!

Some learning experiences are dearer than others. And some speak in spades. I'm hard-pressed to recall an example of a breakthrough learning experience that speaks more clearly or dearly than one just reported by one of my long-time associates.

She's currently teaching management and thinking skills in a university in a Middle Eastern country. In class the other day, she put four of her grad students—two men and two women—to work on a day-long online business simulation. The men insisted on working alone. When they came in 76th in the world in the online competition, they were thrilled with the outcome.

Not good enough, said their professor. They had to learn to work on these kinds of "team" problems with women, too, she told them.

"They spent several hours arguing and discussing and going through several scenarios and mental models," my friend notes. To her surprise, they ended up going with one of the women's recommendations.

The result: the mixed-gender team's results ranked No. 3 in the world!

It's only one miniscule step in this highly traditional Islamic country's march to modernity, but my colleague says the look on her students' faces testified to the moment's importance in their personal experience.

"The men looked shell-shocked," she says.

And the women?

"They were beaming."

Posted on October 11, 2005