My new favorite youtube video

motion graphics + npr personalities + bruce = awesome

Why Russell Ackoff is ninja…

Here are the top three reasons why organizational theorist Russell Ackoff is ninja:

-He is 90 years old

-In spite of being 90 years old, he is still relevant as a theorist

-Most importantly, he understands the nature of ultimate truth…that it is fundamentally resistant to being owned

If Ackoff was Buddhist, he would understand why all Buddhists must ultimately kill Buddha:

A guru produces disciples, and a discipline, and a doctrine,” he says. “If you are a follower of a guru, you don’t go beyond his thoughts, you accept his thoughts. He gives you the questions and the answers – it’s an end to thought. An educator is exactly the opposite,” he says. “You take off where he sets you up for the next set of questions. One is open-ended, the other is closed.

—

We don’t call it consulting,” he states firmly. “We make a distinction between consulting and being an educator. A consultant goes in with a solution. He tries to impose it on a situation. An educator tries to train the people responsible for the work to work it out for themselves. We don’t pretend to know the way to get the answer.

If Bruce Lee was a b-school prof, he would look like Ackoff.

—

Here’s a really interesting keynote Ackoff gave a while back on the difference between transformation and reformation and systems thinking…good stuff.

Thurman on religious experience

Howard Thurman was a friend of MLK’s father at Morehouse College and eventually went on to mentor MLK and a number of other civil rights leaders.

Thurman is a compelling voice in terms of bringing mysticism back to the Christian experience.

Here he is talking about religious experience:

“Once a religion is stated in terms of dogma…it can become the source of propoganda, it has something, a handle.”

There are strong parallels to Thurman’s ideas on religious experience with Bruce Lee’s anti-style ideas behind JKD.

For Lee JKD was an evolving project that stay just one step ahead of formulation/reification:

Do remember, however, that “Jeet Kune Do” is merely a convenient name. I am not interested with the term itself; I am interested in its effect of liberation when JKD is used as a mirror for self-examination.

—

On the religion front, Karen Armstrong is doing some interesting work in terms of mining religion for its power to transform behavior while avoiding the trappings of dogma and creed.

Here is her TED talk: