Blogs

Last week I attended a seminar called “Sustainable leadership” arranged by The Hunger Project in Sweden. The Hunger Project is a global, not-for-profit-organization committed to the sustainable end of world hunger. What is the connection between ending of world hunger and sustainable leadership?

If you’ve followed the three previous blogs or the Personal Futures Workbook, you should have a personal strategic plan for the next ten years. Your plan includes three parts:
• A vision— a mental image of your life ten years from now.
• An action plan composed of strategies and a timetable for execution of each strategy.
• A contingency plan—actions to take when a low-probability, high-impact event occurs.
Now is the time to do some analysis before you put your plan into effect.

The emergence of a global “She-conomy” will have a major impact on everything from education to marketing and branding to fertility levels. There are already many more women than men enrolled in and graduating from universities. Women have just overtaken men in the U.S. as the majority in the workforce.

When we last wrote about Mr Osborne’s Gamble (that fiscal tightening and monetary loosening will bring us out of recession), we left the issue of politics on one side.

A large, diverse audience packed Washington, D.C.’s Sidney Harman Hall this past Friday for the independently organized TED event TEDx MidAtlantic. “TED” stands for Technology, Entertainment, and Design, and over the decades, that focus has broadened to include pretty much every imaginable field.

Neurobiology is revealing the mechanisms that show who we are created: how we make decisions and control our emotions, how our genes shape our desires and how our personal futures are being shaped by a reward system that adapts in response to satisfying experiences.

In run-ups to elections politicians often promise high investments in infrastructure. They are willing to spend millions and billions of dollars in new road and railway projects whether it is necessary or not if only the project is prestigious.

Drought-resistant agriculture, medical scanning machines that diagnose patients with human-like expertise, microscopic factories that construct products nanometer by nanometer—these and other innovations will markedly raise the quality of human life in the next two decades, according to the three authors of 2030: Technology That Will Change the World.

The news in the UK this week has been dominated by the Comprehensive Spending Review. This is the first attempt within the OECD to match financial planning with the rhetoric of deficit reduction. There is much that still has to come out of the review, but the broad shape of the deficit reduction can now be discerned.

This third step could be titled Personal Strategic Planning, because it follows many of the same steps used in corporate strategic planning. But… personal strategic planning is a much simpler process, and it works!