“Dear Stan,
I am a senior professional, having served as an officer of various companies. I’ve never been a CEO, but would like that opportunity. I’m interested in serving as a director on other companies’ boards, in order to expand my skills and gain a higher level of business acumen. What classes should I take, and are there other ways to prepare? How does one achieve a board seat in a private or public company?
Signed,
Ready to Step Up”
The rate of technology advancement is accelerating. It has now reached the point where changes are happening faster than our ability to not only predict them, but faster even than our ability to recognize the technology changes that have already happened. I’m speaking of the average person who attempts to keep informed of how the world is evolving, and specifically how human-created tools and systems are metamorphosing. Even those of us who spend time trying to understand and keep abreast of all the changes are woefully behind. I consider myself one of those interested, engaged students of the future. I got a wake-up call upon visiting my daughter and her husband a couple of weeks ago. I’m way behind.
We’ve all heard the term “bubble” in reference to an investing fever fueled by speculation in what participants erroneously perceive to be an infinitely rising curve of valuation. The dot-com “bubble” and the recent real estate “bubble” being modern examples of what Alan Greenspan referred to as “irrational exuberance”. We would be wise to be on the lookout for the next such bubble. But where did this term come from?
Globalization is a term that has come to mean negative things, for some reason. I’m not exactly sure when it started, but sometime in the last ten years or so, a concept that used to be viewed as beneficial somehow came to represent oppression, confinement, intolerance of diversity, condensation of power and exploitation. While I think these horrendous realities are indeed of concern, and do occur within the context of human behavior around the world, I don’t think they are the result of global trends that are typically inferred by the word “globalization”.
