I think in the worlld as a whole, there is an assumption about rationality, which I think is misplaced.

Human beings what ever their inteligence and educational status have emotions, ethics and morality,, we are not like “Spok ?” off Star Trek or Robots. We also have different perspectives because of our different life experiences.

Hopefully . all of us us respond to inputs and stimuli differently, pehaps like the bell corve or some other dstribution. (now theres a topic for research)

To me the world would be a very frightening place if every body behaved rationally with out emotion, ethics or morality and responded in the same way.

Yes the way we humans are makes things a lot more complicated.

We in all walks of life need to continously adapt, and elvolve our ideas and thoughts.

As some one who works in manufacturing and design. my frustration here is that we seem to stuck with a series of Scientifc Management ideas from early in the last Century and that these have dominated and perhaps hindered the way we think ever since. I am not agianst scientific Management, just think there is a lot more to it.

My education from the late 1970’s at Engineering School in Nottingham, UK was that there was a number of other “Schools of Management Philosophy” that contained some really interesting and effective insights which we have ignored at our peril.

I really appreciate you guys trying to raise the level of debate. It is truly great reading and inspiring

Kind Regards

John Beardsley

All the evidence (see Alfie Kohn’s & Deming’s work) is to the contrary that competition is the cause of improvement.

I believe this to be a misstatement of the actual case. I believe that all of our problems really are “structured and well-defined” in themselves. Apart from those who, by mental defect, truly function irrationally, we are quite capable of understanding the structure of any problem we face. We have to tools to perform this analysis and we have the understanding required. Most of the rationale was actually laid out rather succinctly, yet thoroughly, in Ludwig von Mises’ HUMAN ACTION. Essentially, we KNOW the rationale by which people act, even if we cannot decipher specific actions as being rational TO US. An action that is NOT rational to us is, to the one acting, rational, even though we are unable to understand the actor’s rationale and the actor may be unwilling or unable to articulate it.

What keeps us from solving the problems is that we — especially politicians — are unwilling to go back to the INHERENT SIMPLICITY of the problem to be found at the “root” of the Current Reality. Politicians thrive on the obfuscation available to them in COMPLEXITY, and the combination of obfuscation and complexity allows them to remain in POWER.

See http://rdcushing.blogspot.com or email me at rcushing(at)ceoexpress(dot)com for more.

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The good news is that smart and creative organizations today understand the lessons of complexity science which teach us that organizations are humanistic not mechanistic, that they operate through networks not silos, and that change is a constant which requires nurturing and development not “management” or containment. My favorite example is from US Marine Corps Training Manual MCDP6, Command and Control, which states:

“Like a living organism, a military organization is never in a state of stable equilibrium but is instead in a continuous state of flux continuously adjusting to its surroundings. Command and control is not so much a matter of one part of the organization getting control over another as it is something that connects all the elements together in a cooperate effort.”

Well said! And a lesson to corporate and government leaders still trapped in a systems version of Stockholm Syndrome, acting a lot like their philosophical captors Taylor, Descartes, and Newton.

If vouchers would create “economic or competitive” drive in educators to improve schools, as it does in every other scenario, then lets give it a chance!