I can’t tell much about how good or not the book is since I just began reading it, but I just wanted to transcribe a few interesting lines listed in the first few pages about why usually societies collapse and these are because:

• A lower degree of stratification and social differentiation.
• Less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and territories.
• Less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse economic and political groups by elites.
• Less behavioral control and regimentation.
• Less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of ‘civilization’: monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like.
• Less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery.
• Less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources.
• Less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups.
• A smaller territory integrated within a single political unit.

This, of course, aren’t the only reasons, but they represent the common factor on most of the societies we know from the past and didn’t see the light at the end of the tunnel.

Reading this list, I see a prominent deficiency and that is the lack of communication or the lack of its use. Things like less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources; less flow of information between people and institutions; less integration and acceptance of diversity. I can’t help but think that communication channels weren’t much of a priority or certainly they were overlooked.

Now, the book was written in the 1990′s when the author certainly didn’t know about the internet or even imagined how it would grow along with networks, computers, and you name it — devices of all kinds, sizes, capabilities we use today to communicate and stay in contact with everyone and everything. It seems that with the growth of social networks as tools to connect people, people with organizations, people with political parties from every one of the social stratum, we have solved a major communicational problem. Certainly today we would have solved 50% of the issues on that list simply with communication. Or maybe not because now we know too much from too many sources and in real-time. But that’s for another discussion.

However, since “civilization can die, because it has already died once*” ; what would be the reason ours will die from considering we are clearly aware of many of these issues now?

* extrated from the book which quotes Mazzarino [1966: 174]

Extracted from the book Glimmer.

Zooming is about stretching your limits without threatening your foundation. It’s about handling new ideas, new opportunities and new challenges without triggering the change-avoidance reflex.

This extract is from a book I’m reading: Shift Happens by Seth Godin and I found it an excellent concept to keep in mind for companies to embrace change and not to avoid it or fear it. This pretty much represents the modus operandi any company should take and exercise.

Expanding a bit further from the book, same chapter:

Most companies that re-engineered did so in order to make the “machine” more efficient. This usually meant laying off people. According to CSC Index, a consulting firm heavily involved in re-engineering, more than 70 percent of the employees involved in these efforts assumed that their purpose was to lead to layoffs.

Zooming is almost diametrically opposed to this position. A zooming organization isn’t worried about making today’s machine work better. It’s worried about being flexible enough to put its assets to work building tomorrow’s machine. The management of a zooming company must communicate to the people who work there that the goal isn’t to get smaller—it’s to get more flexible. Flexible companies make better use of their assets, and the first asset they maximize is their people

You can’t shrink your way to greatness

I prefer this concept better than the belief of ‘flexibility’ my teacher of Change Management at NCI is trying to impart to us which is: unions stop companies evolution and stagnates them, people lay-offs  are necessary to lower costs and also to offer extreme cheap ass services in order to beat competitors. He finds and idolizes Michael O’Leary‘s (Ryanair) for this which I find quite uncompetitive.