Alex

Nor is corporate power restricted to power over the employed. Global corporations now have implicit sovereignty over people throughout the world, since they are beyond the reach of any nation-state. [...] They do so by the simple expedient of bargaining one government against another for the claimed economic benefit of their presence.

the need to rely entirely on the power of purpose, principles, and people was what brought Visa into being. It was no stroke of genius. It was plain old necessity.

When speaking of others, rarely was a person referred to by name. The language suggested object or thing, not person. There was classification of individuals by nationality, race, or religious origination, and generalizations about each class. There was reluctance to deal with others as individual human beings. There was even gr

Competition and cooperation are not contraries. They have no opposite meaning. They are complimentary. [...] Cooperation gone mad results in the mindless pursuit of equality, use of centralized force to achieve uniformity, ever-increasing coercion to sustain it, and eventual slavery. Competition gone mad results in the mind

we must get beyond numbers and the language of mathematics in order to understand, evaluate, and account for such intangibles as learning, intellectual capital, community, beliefs, and principles

Data, on one end of the spectrum, is separable, objective, linear, mechanistic, and abundant. Wisdom, on the other end of the spectrum, is holistic, subjective, spiritual, conceptual, creative, and scarce. [...] Today we are drowning in a raging flood of new data and information and the raft of wisdom to which we desperately cling is breaking

Efforts to make information conform to archaic notions of scarcity, ownership, and finite physical quantity--concepts that grew out of the agricultural and industrial age--merely lock us into old mental boxes of constraint and exploitation.

It comes down to both an individual and collective sense of where and how people choose to be led. In a very real sense, followers lead by choosing where to be led.

organizations increasingly unable to achieve the purpose for which they were created, yet continuing to expand as they devour resources, demean the human spirit, and destroy the environment