Economic development work approach

This posting is an introduction to the economic development aspect of rlaexp.com

http://rlaexp.com/eco.html is a doorway to a large multi-generational, multi-topic economic development brainscape and tool kit. 

The site is primarily based on Peter Drucker's work.

He is top of the food-chain. Drucker had and has THE world-beater reputation based on an approach and method different from the rest. Remembering Drucker from The Economist. 

To get a feel for the site's depth, try a Google site search for: "management site:rlaexp.com" without the quotation marks.

You can add or substitute: leadership, innovation, entrepreneurship, knowledge, technology, careers, books, time, "information literacy", concepts, thinking or investments for management to see different search results.

To summarize rlaexp.com's broad scope:

• The changing social and economic picture
• The evolving content and structure of the economy
• From early career work to CEO work area landscapes which includes the second half of one's life
• From startup through multiple stages of organization evolution
• A system for getting from concepts to daily action — repeatedly

Together this provides a prototype life-time work approach.

The site has over 500 web pages, 1000 images, and 100 PDFs. There are literally thousands of topics to choose from.

The site consists of book outlines (some with lengthy passages), concept illustrations, harvesting and action processes, topic brainroads that concatenate quotations from a variety of sources and lots of hyperlinks between topics.

The intent of the site is to create a comprehensive bread crumb trail toward tomorrows. Imagine what someone in 1950 or 1990 had to go on.

The site gives you a menu of future facing action areas that you probably didn’t have before. It is impossible to work on things that aren’t on your radar.

The site is a prototype that can be used or modified in any way a person wishes.

The site is a result of over 30 years of full-time research and content organization. 

It originated out of my previous corporate restructuring work and involvement with over 60 organizations in a wide range of areas. 

The death and life of Asheboro, N.C.

In addition to what is available on the web site, I have a large current events database that I update daily from 90+ news sources.

What do people in various situations and communities need on their radar as we move deeper into the 21st Century — a society of organizations, a knowledge society, and a network society? How will they get it?

So Much Training, So Little to Show for It

I'm in the process of introducing the site to people in the economic development community — state economic development agencies and the chamber of commerce. The reaction so far has been underwhelming. Actually I haven't talked with anyone who knows who Peter Drucker was or knows his impact on society and the economy. From what I've seen so far they are spending money on trying to bring back yesterdayS.

rlaexp.com lives — the future is between the ears

rlaexp.com provides brainroads for creating foundations for future directed decisions — what you need to know before you decide to do or not do. There are over 500+ web pages that mainly rest on Peter Drucker's shoulders. rla = Real Life Adventures and exp = Exploration. TomorrowS aren't going to be more up-to-date versions of 1950, 1980, or 2000 and you can't get there by stacking up more TodayS.

A topical landscape view

Some concept maps and illustrations

Peter Drucker's books and some work tools

Attention: look, what do you see?

Knowledge and Technology gone wild

Managing Oneself and Living in More Than One World

The home page is a long introductory brainroad for attention directing and future directed foundation creation. Just reading is of little value without calendarization or adding the "right stuff" to your radar list.

A view of the education landscape

Recent opinions:

• Some hard lessons about college costs
• ABC This Week in Politics — Roundtable II
• Has a College Education Ceased to Provide a Reasonable ROI?

An extended landscape view

Larger

Learning has addition thoughts by Peter Drucker. Find education, teaching, and learning related topics in Drucker's books.

The future of America lies between the ears of Americans and I'm not just talking about subject knowledge.

Technology as human work

From chapter three of Technology, Management and Society by Peter Drucker

Man, alone of all animals, is capable of purposeful, nonorganic evolution; he makes tools. This observation by Alfred Russell Wallace, codiscoverer with Darwin of the theory of evolution, may seem obvious if not trite. But it is a profound insight. And though made some seventy or eighty years ago, its implications, have yet to be thought through by biologists and technologists. 

One such implication is that from a biologist's (or a historian's) point of view, the technologist's identification of tool with material artifact is quite arbitrary. Language, too, is a tool, and so are all abstract concepts. This does not mean that the technologist's definition should be discarded. All human disciplines rest after all on similarly arbitrary distinctions. But it does mean that technologists ought to be conscious of the artificiality of their definition and careful lest it become a barrier rather than a help to knowledge and understanding. 

This is particularly relevant for the history of technology, I believe. According to the technologist's definition of "tool," the abacus and the geometer's compass are normally considered technology, but the multiplication table or table of logarithms is not. Yet this arbitrary division makes all but impossible the understanding of so important a subject as the development of the technology of mathematics. Similarly the technologist's elimination of the fine arts from his field of vision blinds the historian of technology to an understanding of the relationship between scientific knowledge and technology.… snip, snip … For scientific thought and knowledge were married to the fine arts, at least in the West, long before they even got on speaking terms with the mechanical crafts: … snip, snip …  

Even within the technologist's definition of technology as dealing with mechanical artifacts alone, Wallace's insight has major relevance. The subject matter of technology, according to the Preface to History of Technology, is "how things are done or made"; and most students of technology, to my knowledge, agree with this. But the Wallace insight leads to a different definition: the subject matter of technology would be "how man does or makes." As to the meaning and end of technology, the same source, again presenting the general view, defines them as "mastery of his (man's) natural environment." Oh no, the Wallace insight would say (and in rather shocked tones): the purpose is to overcome man's own natural, i.e., animal, limitations. Technology enables man, a landbound biped, without gills, fins, or wings, to be at home in the water or in the air. It enables an animal with very poor body insulation, that is, a subtropical animal, to live in all climate zones. It enables one of the weakest and slowest of the primates to add to his own strength that of elephant or ox, and to his own speed that of the horse. It enables him to push his life span from his "natural" twenty years or so to threescore years and ten; it even enables him to forget that natural death is death from predators, disease, starvation, or accident, and to call death from natural causes that which has never been observed in wild animals: death from organic decay in old age. 

These developments of man have, of course, had impact on his natural environment—though I suspect that until recent days the impact has been very slight indeed. But this impact on nature outside of man is incidental. What really matters is that all these developments alter man's biological capacity—and not through the random genetic mutation of biological evolution but through the purposeful nonorganic development we call technology. 

What I have called here the "Wallace insight," that is, the approach from human biology, thus leads to the conclusion that technology is not about things: tools, processes, and products. It is about work: the specifically human activity by means of which man pushes back the limitations of the iron biological law which condemns all other animals to devote all their time and energy to keeping themselves alive for the next day, if not for the next hour. The same conclusion would be reached, by the way, from any approach, for instance, from that of the anthropologist's "culture," that does not mistake technology for a phenomenon of the physical universe. We might define technology as human action on physical objects or as a set of physical objects characterized by serving human purposes. Either way the realm and subject matter of the study of technology would be human work.

Amazon link: Technology, Management and Society 

Peter Drucker was a social ecologist.

1 in 2 new graduates are jobless or underemployed

Note to Class of 2012: More than half of young college graduates now jobless or underemployed

Long, long, long before their senior year students need to be doing some early career work.

The more they really know about how the world works and consequences of bad decisions the better prepared they will be. This is a part of learning.

There is an old saying: To know and not do is to not yet know.