Sudhakar Krishna Rao Chaturvedi (Times of India, 26 January 2008) a Vedic scholar, teacher, writer, translator and journalist was born in 1897. At 111 years he says "I think I will live longer."  He has planned his work for another ten years. 

PC Devassia, whom I knew from very close, lived for 100 years 6 months and 15 days. This by itself is not anything great to talk about. On the day he was retiring as a professor he talked on his plans to spend his remaining 40 years. His magnum opus a meeting point of two cultures,  was written in his seventies. All those forty years were exceptionally productive, even more productive than the first forty years of work. The decision to live for a 100 years was a conscious one taken very early in life which he had made known to his son when he was in school. The position was taken very early in life, the direction was set and reflection was a continuous process. His work was his spirituality and he was religious about it.

Well, we take positions
Some of them are like positions of the ship and some like that of the lighthouse. 
My lighthouse position is, Facilitator (1981)

Making work meaningful and fun is the best medicine to live long.

Dominic Chacko Kizhkemuri, DC, www.dcbooks.com/founder.asp was born in 1914 .He worked as a teacher for over a decade, was involved in the freedom struggle and imprisoned, promoted SPCS, the writers' cooperative which created history.   He retired   at the age of 60 and started his own publishing firm, the DC Books with a capital of less than $ 200 which became a market leader in the business by the time he died in 1999

Peter Drucker, no explanations required.

The Blue Ocean Strategy [i](W. Chan Kim and Rene'e Mauborgne) is about uncontested market space, how market leaders continue to stay far ahead of competition without wasting their energy and effort on market wars. Imagine the vast unexplored space that is available to move on and the spin offs if more of us decide to adopt a blue ocean strategy in our lives.   

That would set one of the co ordinates for strategic HRM. The blue ocean space that each individual discovers around oneself is the major driver for growth and improvement, true of all of history and the drive behind all those in the Guinness book of records. Future is in the making when we see this collective blue ocean space that remains unexplored. 

+ more on BOP.. the worlds's oldest blogger, Olive Riley, passes away at 108, Seregei Buka, Isinbayeva, Dara Torres, fifth time olympic swimmer....

[i] The Blue Ocean Strategy, W. Chan Kim and Rene'e Mauborgne,2005

         Stay Hungry Stay Foolish, Rashmi Bansal,CIIE, IIM (A), 2008

Once again triggered by Meenakshi, who asks - In our time do we age out of life?

Like most questions, the answers are yes, no, and yes and no
"Death is not essential', said The Mother
Reading this, has been a milestone in my learning
Life begins when we resolve our issues with death and ageing
We are not designed to die but to live
Death is but a habit and we are breaking more and more out of this habit - people are living longer
What is time? Is it linear? A one way traffic?  An arrow of time that moves from birth to death?
This cannot be natural since nothing in nature is linear.There is an arrow of time that goes in the opposite direction - memory, how you RE-collect your past. Thoughts?  Yes. Faster than light. The sun that we see  is around 9 minutes old but your thought does not take nine minutes to reach the sun  that you see, the sun that was nine minutes ago.
As I write, my cells die and new cells are born. Two more arrows, to put it in a very crude way
In place of one, you have 4 arrows of time Now.When this  is  experienced, birth and death become simultaneous, not a journey from point A to B, birth to death. One transcends linear time and steps into eternity, become ageless
We age out of linear time, not out of life, and start living in the NOW, - eternity
When were YOU born?  MM DD YYYY? That was the birth of your body. Did YOU have anything to do with it?  YOU were born much later. When YOU RE-collected all that scattered stuff and put them all together, walked out of the shadows of   - death, linear time, your unconscious - and took that first step to eternity and continual renewal.

How old are you?

I have multiple choices to suit the questioner

I am 58. For the straights

I am 17 when I count from the birth of my SELF - when I decided to live life on my terms

15 billion (in arrow terms) years. Logic - I am as old as the Universe and everything  that went on is mapped into my DNA

> 15 billion years - because something in me will go on living for ever.

Less than 2 years , the age of the oldest cell in my body                                             

Take your pick or all of it. Have some more of your own answers.  It is always better to have as many answers, perspectives, than anyone single answer.

NAN?  What is NAN?   The Indian bread?   New Age Nonsense?

Well I could have been dead yesterday. I haven't. What greater miracle do you need to make life wonderful?

In "our times ", we can age out of time itself.  We can age out of life too. It is a Choice.

The eagle lived on the tree beside a deep well and in the well a community of frogs. None of them had ever been out of the well. Every night the granny frog told her bedtime stories to the young ones in the well. The eagle could hear the stories. One morning when the thermals had begun rising in the air, the eagle swooped into the well, grasped one little frog in its claws and rose up with the thermal. The heights and the fear of death overtook the little one. Then the eagle let go of the frog from the heights above the well. While falling back, the frog had just a glimpse of the world outside.

The eagle went back to the tree and waited for the sun to set, to hear the story of the day. What will be the story of the day?

Tell us ?

We have been collecting these stories for over 17 years now. Initially everyone connects it in their own ways.

Some identiy themselves with the eagle

Some with the frog and the fear of death

Not many with both, eagle and the frog

The big and the small

The telescope and the microscope, Hubble and the Femtoscope

Global and local

The connections in between

How mental models are formed

And revised and  improved to mental maps - knowledge

How best to continually learn

How an old world of the frog has collapsed

And a new wold born

That we are all in that well - of Nature

We will never see all of it

But we can see much more now

Than it used to be

Let us move on , not get stuck here

WE were not born when we were born since physical birth is not synonymous with birth of self. The Community Self is yet to be born.

The system at birth is comparable to the bullet that leaves the barrel of a gun. The bullet is helpless to influence its trajectory. Most systems do not go beyond this level. May be the duration is longer. Self regulation is the differentiator to qualify to be a higher level system, evolving to become aware of the position, direction and regulatiing itself to influence the outcome. Creating a more desirable future.

Oneness is the quality of the whole - the child in the womb is one with the mother and at birth is confronted by the separation, a perceived duality which is the quality of two, a linear world of many, day and night, good or bad, true or false, yes or no - the domain of problems.  The prodigal son revolts, eventually reconciles. The self evolves to resolve the contradictions, duality and recognise the connectedness - oneness.Not a return in the sense of going back since the self has moved to a higher level in terms of growth and maturity from the level of yes or no, true or false to the level of yes and no, true and false , good and bad.

This is the quality of three - trinity, the third position from which agreement, improvement and solutions are possible.

The shift is from the static and linear to the dynamic. Intelligent choices and conscious evolution follow.

The impossible becomes possible.

 

  

Level of complexity			Solution
1	2	X 2	4
2	4	X4	16
3	16	X16	256
4	256	X256	?
Level of complexity exceeds the capacity of the tool, in this case the multiplication table. The need for new tools arise from increase in  complexity		Learn the multiplication table for 256? Use a calculator, computer? Or simplify?    CREATIVITY SYSTEM THINIKING

 

Your children are not your children.
They are the sons and daughters of Life's longing for itself.
They come through you but not from you,
And though they are with you yet they belong not to you.

• - Kahlil Gibran

My thoughts are not my own. I gathered them on the way

Picked pockets, robbed people of what that they wanted to say, did not or could not

I could pick their minds

Wright brothers took us flying

WE HAVE A DEBT TO PAY OFF in terms of IPR

Gave expression to a collective longing - Life's longing for itself

Our collective longing to take off, fly, go out into space

As expressed in our dreams.

Most of us had dreams of flight when we were children

 I still do

(Last night I was travelling with Lizzie in our first car. We had a flat and then we were flying together to take a look at how bad the tyre was. The car went on and we kept on with it, flying)

If what I think is not my thinking but the universal mind thinking through me

 How can I OWN them, bottle them up, label it, brand it, hire an agent to market it

Change Masters!   (Apologies to Rossabeth Moss Kanter)

Some say, change is the only constant and let us make a difference

As if all change and all difference are in the right direction

 Changelessness too is a constant. (Values, thou shall not kill...)

When we do not mean what we say, the intention is good but the effect is bad

More of the semantic swamp!

Good to create "IPR and Knowledge Assets"

 Those who walk and talk Kaizen, continuous improvement, surprise us, the ‘change masters'

We need to globally Find /Replace "change and difference" with IMPROVEMENT.

Talk and pay attention to improvement so that real improvements happen

Because what you pay attention to GROWS

The words we use reflect the internal software, the deep structure.

We don't communicate - connect, improve - when the intent and the words are not in alignment.   

We need a new language of performance and improvement. 

We have gone to the extent of monetising the value of an additional year of life and medical expenses make sense if the returns are more than the cost!

We need something similar for books, other IP too, that adds to the semantic swamp and contributes to global warming that only if they lead to net improvements, they be published.

Most often they are a rehash of what you already know at the core of your own being which is always connected to the mind of the universe.  The rights if any should go to Nature - the source of all learning.

Thanks to the web, by the above logic, this would never have been published.

 

Potential Vs Performance

Another duality, the gate to learning

Without black we cannot make sense of white. When we put it in black and white, we put only the black. White is the context. Meaning is contextual - relative, in comparison.

Same goes for good and bad, true and false, war and peace

If performance be put in perspective we need to relate potential with performance

Quadrant NW - Ladder of infinite potential - the design

0. Ground zero. Eye, the symbol of SELF. Observer, potential begins with positioning, the compass or GPS function, mapping, beginning of the improvement project

1. Level of maps, accumulated learning 

2. The level of the clock - all simple machines without self regulation - bullets leaving the barrel of the gun

3. Systems with self - regulation, advanced machines

4. Level of the unicellular

5. Level of the plant

6. Level of the animal

7. Human - individual

8. Organizational, community

9. Learning

Potential is emergent from positioning, alignment and interdependence at levels 0-9

Quadrant SE - the manifest

The gap between potential and performance begins at the level of human, the blue ocean space of unrealized potential, WASTE

Metrics -Reduction in waste (pollution, illness, suicides) the true measure of improvement or progress

IMPROVEMENT is reduction in the gap between potential and performance, a process of continual improvement
 
Continual Renewal - direction for the journey  

 

Physiological?  - Food, shelter, clothing and you know the rest, the hierarchy of needs, reproduction, social, self - actualisation and so on. 

Maslow is misunderstood or seldom put in perspective.

Why do people commit suicide?   Life is no more meaningful, not worth the trouble.  If so the most basic need must be the need for MEANING.

If life is meaningful, then food has meaning - to keep the body and soul together

Soul is the unifying principle, that which connects, the glue, gives meaning, spirit - semantics.
The semantic swamp contributes to global warming ( let us not cut down more trees )  and creation of intellectual poverty rights.  

Symbols make it easier

The philosophy and the maths are very simple

0, 1, 2, 3, ∏

Where

 0 = nothing

1 = everything

2 = duality, the linear, static, partial truth

3 = connecting, the linear is transformed

∏ = synergy, whole > the sum of parts, dynamic, continual, real time, unending, quality of being connected, centre and the periphery

When the setting is right, the intent is expressed, the seed turns into the tree, caterpillar to the butterfly and the bullet becomes aware of its self, takes birth to eternity.  

The journey begins - transformation

"Well-nigh two thousand years and not a single new god" - Nietzsche

We see the light at the end of the tunnel and walk out of the dark hole, the prison that we built for our SELVES

Context - global or local but glocal-ness is recognised

Technology and markets need to be used as levers to enhance community

Vision – renewed continually and aligned for sustained high performance

Development is the most complex process that needs catalysts. The catalysts do not burn out in the process but in their absence the process is not initiated and sustained

Are we intelligent - as a species?  Yes and no.

We are not intelligent going by our performance.We are much more ‘endangered‘ than any other species. We are a threat to ourSELVES.We are more ill, we kill within the species without reason which no other species does and we are the only threat to life. So we need an UNPROJECT - the new Noah's ark - to protect and conserve the species.  But how will you identify a pair? What will be the criteria for selection?  If we pull it off the species and the environment will be very safe.
We have been asking (large groups of some very "intelligent people " ) what is the unique differentiator between the human and the rest of the species.  We never got the answer right the first time and without some triggering and a process of creating agreement. Unless we agree we can not achieve  community.

If we are not intelligent as a species, how can there be intelligent people around? 
We now understand intelligence so ‘much better' - with different versions of it.  We claim that intelligence can be taught. Another business is in the making. Which parent wouldn't want it?  Of all the 'intellgences' my personal favorites are the Gender and Community versions.
Why are we not intelligent?  One reason is the way we understand intelligence, without seeing abd relating the connection with the One and the Many, the whole and the parts, intelligence and Intelligences, the different or ‘differentiated versions'  and the undifferentiated.
Integration Vs Differentiation. We  need to integrate and differentiate simultaneously
We are intellgent , if we go by our potential to be intellgent, by design but not intellgent going by our history and performance. What we call as progress is similar to the UNPROJECT, UNPROGRESS
The emperor has no clothes but claims very loud that he is The Emperor
What we think as great progress, an ascent and evolutionary progress is but a descent, the  fall.
So what makes us human?

What is your home position?

6y4 ii3q qn320w3

I got the above gibberish when I shifted from my home position on the keyboard, F and J where I rest my index fingers.  When I move away from the home position, this is the result that I get. When I am at my home position, I can use appropriate levers- leverage me- to make improvements.  If I am not positioned, I create waste, a lot of hard work, stress and burnout and no improvements

Even if we are homeless we have homes on websites.  When we go off course, we can refer back home and navigatie. We understand reality through our tools. It is a long time that I have used a pen or pencil and paper. I spend most of my working time in front of the monitor and the keyboard, PC, is my most used tool. When we were hunting and gathering, we would have used more of our hands and feet and less of these tools. With settled agriculture, we became more attached to a physical location so did our mental maps of the world. The fishermen are quite different since most of them gather and they use tools for gathering.  Their mental maps are different from that of the farmer. They use the compass or GPS since it is much more disastrous if they cannot locate their home position. They could drift off and never find the shore. When we got ‘educated'  we became language and 'English centric' (Wanderer) http://wanderer7.gaia.com/blog/2008/6/being_english-centric The paradigms are changing as text is on the way out to the visual. Technology helps one to see reality as it unfolds. Reading gives way to  browsing and if one wants to capture the flea span of attention of the reader, one has to use more of the visual, youtube it.   Yet the deep structures inlfuence comprehension of reality and to coneect across divergences and barriers created by language and tools we need a 'babel fish' which would reduce the noise and help navigate the semantic swamps.

In the last 100 years we have become less earthbound in our internal horizons as well as external. We cover much more distance in a day than ever before and this possibility continues to expand leaving behind a static linear world. Technology leverages these collective leaps of learning. Perspectives change with the position. The visibility is much more from the top of the mountain but the details get blurred.  Products and solutions are designed and positioned to meet the global and local requirements  of the users or a segment of the users.     Personal and organisational positioning precedes and influences the process.  The transformaton of communities requires a critcal mass of catalytic material - individuals and  organisations.  Positioning is about those life changing decisions, the raison d'etre, like choosing a vocation and deciding to be best in that vocation, willing oneself to sacrifice one's life for it, work against all odds, make great sacrifices for a cause.

The child in the womb is blissfully unaware of its position. The terrorist is firm in his positon that the enemy deserves death (you or me) The negotiator takes middle ground ( yes and no, you and me) The catalysts take the fourth position, the home position or the lighthouse position. We feel at home and centred. One's calling or vocation becomes expression of one's self and work is transformed to fun. Here is the birth of the fully funcional self, beginning of conscious evolution, characterised by dynamic mental maps, flow, synchronicity and continual renewal. Now one can fix the direction for the journey (continual improvement) connect with the home position to the current stage (reflect) and be certain that one is on course

True community is in the making.

Bon Voyage

Sergey Bubka is my mental map for being positioned and ALIGNED for continual improvement.  http://www.sergeybubka.com/   The site has a visual of Sergey standing poised with the pole for the leap. We also have a female version of Sergey Bubka in the making in Yelena Isinbaeva. http://www.yelenaisinbaeva.com/ Sergey is not just another sports person. He continues to do what he did in the field in other realms.

The pole vaulter leverages the pole against the threshold to cross over and does it over and over to set new heights of performance. He is positioned and aligned to perform.  Every pole vaulter does the same, but Sergey is the exception. So what goes into positioning and alignment and leveraging is much more than a question of mechanical advantage

We take our cars to check for alignment. One could think of a similar service for people, organisations, communities and community (for the species).  

The top left quadrant represents the internal system, where perfect alignment between all the levels is feasible. The levels are that of Compass (Position), map, clock, thermostat, cell, plant, and animal, human, organisational and knowledge

The right down quadrant represents the external system, the world of results and performance - metrics. In an ideal situation levels will mirror each other in both the quadrants. Results will depend on how well the internal and the external are aligned across the different levels. The threshold level of performance is the benchmark against which positioning and alignment are tested and the proof of the pudding is in the eating - better and better results.

There are around 20 levels of checks to be performed and the only way to improve is practice, practice and more practice

We can learn a lot from the animals about positioning and alignment. It is natural to them
 

http://www.physorg.com/news138902073.html

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/10/061021115811.htm

For us it is not natural, it is a matter of choice.
Freewill has its disadvantages too

Guilt lubricates the economic engine and charity is the measure

What black is to white,

Is time to timelessness

And memory to forgetting

Linear time meets memory at ground zero

To beget the NEW

As the eagle soars up in the sky details get blurred

But the essential is not lost

It swoops down faster to the goal.

Knows when to strike and when to sail

To switch between time and timelessness

What to gather and to leave behind

Complete the learning so as to forget

Learn history so that history is not repeated

Both personal and collective, for the flow of life to go on

Bury the dead so that renewal rules, not death and decay

Free the ground for the dance of eternity - timelessness