COMING THIS FALL 2010

Dynamic Markets Leadership: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Business and the Hidden Soul of Capitalism
by Lorin J.B. Loverde
Volume One of New Planetary Culture: A Multidisciplinary Approach to Dynamic Fields Leadership in the Coming Eras
(Click on Title for Table of Contents)

The Global Diversity Institute is proud to have been selected to publish a milestone effort in understanding the dynamics that have brought western civilization and the economic system of capitalism to where it is today, with a forward focus on its potential to propel a global economic society toward a hopefully vibrant and evolving future. Alternatively, and less optimistically, the book also recognizes our civilization has the potential to slump into a faltering, stagnating, and eventually perhaps destructive path where the lowest common denominator presides. To what degree can we influence the direction that human society takes as a platform for its socio-economic reality?

The author comprehensively integrates a tour de force analysis of philosophical, political, economic, social, technological, and spiritual history, as well as evolution, into a realistic and usable awareness of how leaders can emerge, and are emerging, who have the standards, intuition, and values to lead the dynamic markets of today and tomorrow toward a bright and successful new planetary culture, with a foundational platform grounded in and reinforced by the dynamics of business values and operational philosophy that are emerging as "most likely to succeed". Volume I, 20 years in the making, focuses on the influence of business as a driver and the primary applicator of socio-economic factors and trends across society. This volume provides a lead off to this multi-volume series which deals ultimately, within its additional volumes, with a much broader scope of the impact of trends and dynamic forces that are providing a significant impact on human society, hoped for progress, and the shape and substance of human life in the future.

As an introduction to the themes of Dynamic Markets Leadership, we provide you here with a substantial portion of the book's Executive Summary.

Executive Summary: World Horizons and Business Leadership (All Rights Reserved)
The first volume of New Planetary Culture (NPC) analyzes and interprets two kinds of world-shaking changes already in process: (1st) hyper-acceleration of innovation and a resulting need for (2nd) ethical creativity that aligns with two forms of emergence: the emerging Directionality of the new planetary culture and its driving of the emergence of the Hidden Soul of Capitalism. The first kind of change is the trend toward Dynamic Markets, which is the forceful context that necessitates Dynamic Markets Leadership as a way to assure the business organization can keep up with accelerating change (this is the focus of Volume One).

The second type of change is Directionality, which involves the larger contexts that shape the Hidden Soul of Capitalism, including emerging changes in social reality, steering media of society, institutions, belief systems, structures of consciousness, ontology, and basic values by which we do business and live our lives. Dynamic Markets are those that change too fast for centralized command and control to keep up when attempting to make all the important decisions. Dynamic Markets will change almost everything: competitors will be much more innovative, committed, and flexible. Consumers will change their buying decisions based in part on their experience as creative workers no longer limited to narrow perspectives on what is important and what is real because in their companies Dynamic Markets Leadership spreads to all levels through distributed leadership. Technological revolutions will accelerate.

The key to leading in Dynamic Markets is simple: providers must stay ahead of the contextual change curve. Concretely, this depends on recognizing the Hidden Soul of Capitalism, which is now emerging because of the constant pressures and demands of Dynamic Market acceleration. Through Directionality the Hidden Soul of Capitalism emerges as:

(1) The result of external driving forces in Dynamic Markets that affect how we work because those accelerated changes demand organizations also change in specific directions:
a. The Co-primacy of Ethics: Customers, alliance partners, and stakeholders need to feel a comfort level of integrity in order to believe in the reliability of one provider over others, where our company and its stakeholders share the responsibilities for the Common Good and pursue the Highest Good. Through distributive justice for the whole we share the Common Good in terms of things like Corporate Social Responsibility, ecological balance, and sustainability of resources, but that is not enough. We are also driven constantly to higher goals, to make the impossible become possible by our breakthroughs beyond the horizon in which we live and share the Common Good. Part of the NPC is gaining a better vision of where we are going and the Highest Good.
b. The Role of People: To allow us to sustain competitive advantage all associates in our organizations need to care enough to give their best to the business and be ethically creative, flexibly dedicated, and able to span multiple perspectives that often seem to have contradictions. Supporting that advantage is a crucial part of Dynamic Markets Leadership.
c. The Functions of Structures and Systems: A more horizontal organizational chart with fewer levels, empowerment, collaboration, teamwork, and further something we need to use here and now from a higher spiritual plane, namely, group consciousness. That is why Distributed Leadership is an important part of Dynamic Markets Leadership.

(2) The result of external driving forces in Dynamic Markets and need for better temporal assets that affect who we are:
a. Stewardship and Fiduciary Responsibility: everyone needs to see value added to what they buy, reliability, a safe life-cycle for products, and value sustained in our quality of life for present and future generations. That is why Servant Leadership is an important part of Dynamic Markets Leadership.
b. Authenticity in Relationships: Dynamic Markets require more of our time and attention, so more people need to feel those to whom they take precious time to pay attention are acting from an authentic inner center and communicate with authentic dialogue
c. Culture and Civilization in long-term life-cycles: Contexts are the most important factors, such as the horizons, philosophies, paradigms, situations, and markets that allow interpretation and choices of what to change and how to keep adding value. Our new value definitions will decidedly affect our buying choices as customers and consumers. When we all have the new structures of consciousness needed to act as authentic Dynamic Markets Leaders, then we will necessarily choose products and services more wisely, creating new market demand.

(3) The result of our internal decisions and choices that affect:
a. The Co-primacy of Ethics is still our responsibility because we have to see where we are going, toward what it is worth going. The Hidden Soul of Capitalism is not something merely imposed on us externally and automatically by economic forces; it is an opportunity calling us to become worthy. We must remember the lessons of history that revealed in Centrism many types of evil, including Dictatorship, Imperialism, and Totalitarianism. That is why Strong Transformational Leadership is an important part of Dynamic Markets Leadership. Always remember The Calling to higher spiritual values.
b. The Hidden Soul of Capitalism is an ensouling power only if we let it be. Receptivity and openness are the other side of our own creative power. If we merely use our leadership skills to achieve new dominance, we will betray ourselves.
c. The Hidden Soul of Capitalism is now something strange and new, similar to the spirit of an era or the driving force of a new civilization. But anything can be skewed in our Tapestry of Knowledge to become selfish again if we let it. And all have life-cycles, so just as we must avoid rigidification by rejuvenating our business organizations, so also we must avoid idolatry by respecting the limits of the role of the Hidden Soul of Capitalism for the whole in our pursuit of unity through diversity.

Negative Motivators: Fear of Losing. The NPC is about the inner transformation but not a step program. The NPC is about a new context for a transformational leap, each phase tailored to the individual leader and none of the steps operationalized. We will see how Jim Collins proposed a new Level 5 leadership, but for him it was a surprise flying in the face of common knowledge; on the contrary, for the NPC Level 5 Leadership is not surprising at all; it is the logical implication of new paradigms in business, and we will look at Level 6, World Creation, and Level 7, World Building.

The thesis in volume one is that there is a new, more potent, and more ethical kind of Capitalism emerging through a new and more potent kind of spirit, and this Hidden Soul of Capitalism is the most important factor in Dynamic Markets Leadership. The period from the 1700s to 2000 AD exhibited mostly Lazy Markets that protected us from need for rapid change while we picked the low-lying fruit. Now, Dynamic Markets are emerging as conditions of constant and rapid change, which produce a negative motivation of avoiding being overwhelmed by world-class competitors, dizzying changes in demands, and endless needs for innovation. Where businesses still have the luxury of competing in Grand Lazy Markets, this book is about the future, as exemplified by Ray Kurzweil's prediction that we will witness on the order of twenty thousand years of progress in the 21st Century (as measured by today's rate of progress).(1) Where businesses already compete in Dynamic Markets, this book is about thriving in the critical and often chaotic changes of the present.

The "formula" for success is simply to become capable of changing faster than one's market context by providing the value-added products and services that people will buy. The Marketing Department is charged with making people want the company's products or services. Dynamic Markets Leadership is charged with the much larger task of creating temporal assets by distributing itself so the organization has enough vitality to keep up with and even lead the accelerating market changes. In Grand Lazy Markets competition is extremely tough but in a different way; that factor of temporal assets is obscured because a company has the luxury of enough time to lumber along with the many-layered vertical organization of Top-Down, Centralized decision making by a few executives for the many workers and leveraging of mass structures like economies of scale. The goal of DML is to create a neo-cortex of volition, creativity, and cooperation over and above the more primitive brain layers such as the emotional areas and the autonomic areas. It would be stupid for a human to destroy everything in his brain but the neo-cortex rational, visionary, creative parts. The other parts, more primitive in evolution, are crucial for patterned, repetitive, automatic activities ranging from attachments to heart beats to food digestion. The same with a company: it has its systems, its best practices, its standard operating procedures, its feedback controls. All of that is good enough as long as they do not need to be changed too rapidly in order for the company to survive when it needs to adapt. In Grand Lazy Markets the autonomic systems are sufficient because repetition is of the right procedures is needed.

In Dynamic Markets the same is true in some phases of the life-cycle, up until the moment that competitors, customers, regulators, unions, financial markets, sciences, technologies and one or all of the many governing aspects in business contexts suddenly change. At the moment that change is forced upon us, we then need a way for all of that inertial force of repetition suddenly to stop, and a new force of processes and decisions has to be able to come to the fore and lead toward a different future. How do you get a rigid organization, namely one with the inertia of habits, fixed minds, rigid paradigms, top-down dominance, and aggression toward anything too new or too diverse, to suddenly be flexible, creative, responsive at all levels, and dedicated to a new direction when the Dynamic Market thrusts a do-or-die requirement on it? Then how do you keep up when Dynamic Markets make further demands for radical change again and again? That is our future threatening to overwhelm us. Whether we face overwhelming progressive changes in the form of more competition in economic growth or overwhelming regressive changes in the form of fewer customers in economic retraction, we need something more than centralized command and control by the king (as the mistaken power of the Chief Executive Officer) to survive. That is where Dynamic Markets Leadership comes in.

A fundamental question lurking in the background of this advancing shift is how to apply to business right now the major trends emerging only over the coming centuries. These applications need a foundation of three things:

Diversity Beyond The Numbers:
Business Vitality,Identity & Ethics in the 21st Century
This book takes a critical look at the practice of Diversity Management in its current approach and presents a more comprehensive methodology that incorporates knowledge recently gained in other sciences such as identity theory, complex adaptive systems, and critical social theory. The book is aimed specifically at giving the practitioner, both internal Diversity Champions and external consultants, more powerful tools that are solidly grounded in theory to build an inclusive work environment.

This book is based on over 10 years of high impact consulting for major corporations and argues that current approaches to diversity issues tend to treat the symptoms and in many ways promote the status quo. Gary Adkins addresses the entire social constellation of forces in a business culture, looking for signs of disenchantment, chaos or rigidity. He offers the reader a combination of insights and applicable tools to optimize diversity and build business vitality.

Diversity Praxis: A Journal of Organizational Vitality and Inclusion
A journal providing an ongoing blend of theory and practice for dedicated practitioners to dialogue with and learn from one another.

The several editions of Diversity Praxis, can be accessed by clicking on the title above. On the page displayed, just click on the volume you wish to read. >br> To access the initial edition of Diversity Praxis, Click Here.

PUBLISHED ELSEWHERE

Globalisation and Creative Abrasion: Impact on Performance
by Richard Vicenzi

Published in Proceedings of the 11th World Congress for Total Quality Management
Wellington New Zealand, 4-6 December 2006
Abstract: The diffusion of technology has fostered rapid growth over the last 15 years in numerous emerging economies, leading to significant changes in business and trading relationships around the world. The results of Globalisation have been a two-edged sword that has seen both opportunity from increased access to lucrative markets, cost effective resources and rapid knowledge acquisition as well as threats from increased pressure by unprecedented sources of competition and lowered barriers to entry. Both organizations and individuals are required to continuously adapt to rapidly changing competitive landscapes in order to achieve and retain success. Globe-spanning partnerships with vendors, customers, and even competitors are multiplying. Potential obstacles to performance lurk in this unprecedented attempt to integrate cultures, languages, world-views and ethical systems.

This paper focuses on the quality of relationships as a key factor in the pursuit of organizational goals and the challenges presented by the arrival of a sizable global component into today's workforce. It looks at two established constructs for effective integration of a diverse or culturally heterogeneous workforce through the lens of a dynamic model of the adaptive learning organization, and discusses implications for quality, customer relationships, innovative capability, and employee performance and retention.

Bibliography
Summary Slides

A Tool to Assess Organizational Vitality in an Era of Complexity
by Richard Vicenzi and Gary Adkins

Published in Technological Forecasting and Social Change Fall 2000: 64, 101-113
Abstract: The evolution toward a post-industrial, or knowledge-based, economy brings previously unrecognized predicators of organizational health into focus. The authors integrate concepts from complexity theory, post-modern organizational theory, and "Knowledge Management" as a source for innovation into a diagnostic tool to measure the comparative health of an organization in terms of successfully competing in the emerging 21st century economy. Factors such as the character of leadership and trust evident in the organization, the relative influence of expertise over "position power," the level of connectivity between work groups and people allowing for the meaningful exchange and flow of information, the amount of cultural and cognitive diversity among agents in the work system, and the degree to which anxiety and stress are contained to positively impact performance levels are included in the assessment. The diagnostic tool is outlined and a case study described where the tool is used to identify appropriate interventions in different organizations that are attempting to adapt to their changing market places. © 2000 Elsevier Science Inc.