Replying to LO27687 --
Dear Organlearners,
Andrew Campbell < ACampnona@aol.com > writes:
>Why has no-one (so far as I know in the public
>domain here) 'picked up' the tab I offered on the
>Enron scandal posting I wrote? Is it not a worthy
>enough as an issue to have a dialogue on then;-)
>now, in the near future...;-)
Greetings dear Andrew,
I am not so sure the demise of Enron is a scandal. But I think that it is
indeed a great tragedy which perhaps could have been prevented.
Furthermore, I have the gut feeling that several such tragedies are going
to happen this year of which many, if not all, could have been prevented.
Getting reliable information on the demise of Enron, especially here in
South Africa which is far away from the information highways, is
difficult. Nevertheless, it seems to me that a main contribution of this
demise of Enron was the unsensitivity of its managers and workers alike to
how their Mental Models dictated their actions for better or worse.
One of the worst Mental Models which a business, small or large, can have
is that its profit at regular intervals also has to increase regularly.
When it is a public business through shares and the majority of its stock
owners have the same Mental Model, then that business is heading for
difficult times, if not sheer disaster. Such a business is trying to keep
a flat entropy landscape with a regular elevation towards the future. To
level out its ruggedness, many of its workers will have to become involved
-- hire them in good times and fire them in bad times.
Should we look at the income of a privately owned businesses (and there
are some really large ones) their profit profiles show much more the
"heart beats and brain waves of the business".
Another main problem leading to Enron's demise is that its core business
was in "energy". Andrew, as you know, I have taught many times the immense
difference between the collective term "energy" and and the specific term
"free energy". Enron's core business was "free energy" and not "energy".
Many countries have specifically a department for energy affairs. I have
studied dozens of reports coming from them, even white papers, and the
lack of any distinction between energy in general and free energy in
particular is shocking. The administration of all the free energy of a
country is one of the major tasks of its government. Should you look at
all the countries with increasing budget deficits and increasing national
debts, it is in most cases that they use more free energy that they can
generate themselves. Sometimes this bubble bursts like it is now the case
for Argentina. But sooner or later we will have to expect many more such
bubbles to burst.
Money can pay only so much for free energy and then no more. The reason is
that the value of money is based on trust while the free energy of a
system is determined by its evolution, i.e. its irreversible
self-organisation in terms of its environment, close and distant. Trust
may vaporise like mist before the sun, but evolution is that which
sustains the future complexification of the system.
The kind of evolution most important for us as humans having body and
spirit, is better known as learning. It is found in learning individuals
and learning organisations. It is our best safe gaurd in a future full of
mysteries and possible calamities. The only scandal for me is when
somebody influential reckons that learning has to stand in the back of the
row of priorities.
>As life becomes more transparent a new form
>of democracy will arise. I can see it arising. All
>such emergences have lashing tails, vortices.
>There is pain in abundance at attending such
>birthings. It will be like a kind of madness. Can
>anyone here sense it upon the far horizon?
I definitely sense it. Perhaps in another round we can have a LO-dialogue
on this new form of democracy.
With care and best wishes,
--At de Lange <amdelange@gold.up.ac.za> Snailmail: A M de Lange Gold Fields Computer Centre Faculty of Science - University of Pretoria Pretoria 0001 - Rep of South Africa
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