COMMENTARY

Peter Burgess

Taking Back Our World Our sense of purpose.

What we are doing is growing a company and a networked community that can both understand the challenges we face as humanity, finds opportunities in those challenges, and enables people and organizations to respond to the challenges.

Clearly, this is an enormous challenge!

As a sense of purpose, I believe it should be humanities highest priority, as our survival depends upon it.

With challenges like global warming, population trending towards 9 billion people with ever dwindling resources like oil, and energy, massive shifts in global demographics, and an ever more fragile eco-system upon which all life depends, we have to re-think everything as to how we live.

Looking at the many institutions that brought us forward through the last century to where we are now, many with their traditions of top down, central control power and management, it should be clear to those of us here that these institutions of both government and private organizations are utterly ill-equipped to both understand and respond to the challenges we face.

As a society, we can no longer afford the abuses of power and reckless personal enrichment at the expense of we, the vast majority. We have to commit to do better.

Getting there is going to be difficult. Let's not kid ourselves. But as Donella Meadows writes, we have to pick leverage points in the systems we try to improve.

It is my belief that that leverage point is through our organizations. The quality of our future is dependent on the quality of our organizations. To get to a future where our political and economic destinies are in the hands of the people, not those at the top, we need to develop new organizational models.

We already have everything we need in terms of theory, expertise, and working examples of these new organizational models.

As a company, and as a community, our purpose becomes rapidly 'pulling' to create the change necessary to adapt these new models across both the business world and the political world

Driving change in organizational models is only part of our mission, our purpose. We need organizations that can also understand and respond positively to huge global challenges.

To respond to these challenges, we are going to have to rapidly innovate.

As company and community, therefor, it's important to embed in our cultural DNA our new kinds of organizational models, innovation (creative disruption!), and leadership in networked communities.

As a new kind of company, one that is both embedded and enabled within an online social network (it is important to note that this is a company and organizational model that could not exist without a high quality social network like Google Plus. I've had this model in mind for 11 years, it wasn't until Google Plus came along that I was able to develop it as I originally envisioned it.) we are committed to leading the kind of change we are going to need to survive and thrive as a global society in the coming years. I can't think of a more exiting sense of purpose.

We have an excellent core of people that have seeded this company. I am reaching out to this wonderful Google Plus community to help us seed the kind of dedicated online community, a network of people who what to rise up to be the kind of people, the kind of network, the kind of community that can use it's collective intelligence, it's collective skill sets, it's collective spheres of influence to empower the change we need to understand our challenges, to create the innovative solutions, to empower the network of organizations that can put these solutions into action.

My own priorities over the next month is to try give everyone who has been gracious enough to invest their time in following here the fullest understanding of what it is we are developing, and how each of us can play a role.

My promise is that by joining our growing community, you will develop more as a person, we'll develop more as a community, and by our collective actions added up over a continuing journey, we'll leave the world a much better place than how we found it, and we will undermine the power base of the 1% elite. We Will Take Back Our World!

Our Mission is to attract and grow a community of people dedicated to the learning and knowledge sharing that can enable the trust and support to empower people and organizations to lead and shape a world that thrives on diversity, personal prosperity, a healthy eco-system and opportunity for all living things.

In this post, I'd like to talk more about what it means to be part of the the 'Glia' (The Social Glue of a Neural Network!!) Community, where we are going, how we're going to get there, and what we'll be doing to get us there.

The early steps.

When we think of an audaciously grand journey, a broad noble cause like 'Taking Back Our World', we have to acknowledge that it is going to take some time, and that it is going to take millions of empowered people, and evolved organizations to get there.

When we look at and think of that mission statement, and think of the enormous challenges that stand in our way, challenges that present to us opportunities that are unprecedented in human history, we will quickly realize we need leadership and innovation in our social institutions, our political institutions, our economic institutions and the outdated and bankrupt ideologies that they rest upon.

I believe we as a highly networked and organized people can do better, and I believe we can do much better.

Much of the actions we see now that are destroying our economic foundations, our social fabrics, our ties that bind are the result of what we'll come to know as Hard Power.

That reign of power, which relies on authority, control, command, centralization, coercion, and ego, that has to end. We as people, we as a society can no longer afford it.

It is too slow, too blind, too self centered to respond at all to the challenges we all face.

We as a people, who will rise up and face, and respond to these challenges and the opportunities they present to us. To do so we will rely on Soft Power, and that is the Power of Attraction.

Now, do like I do, and look around at who we have, and what we have just within our circles and networks within Google Plus. Then look at how all those nodes network into communities the world over.

As we as a learning community will continually learn, leading in a modern, highly complex, networked society requires very different skills than that of the old 20th century world.

Here's some simple principles of 'soft power' and the 'power of attraction' (or the 'Power of Pull', a book that very much helped me better formulate these ideas):

• --Be curious
• --The more you give, the more you get.
• --Win-win relationships.
• --Empower others.
• --Share resources.
• --Collaborate.
• --Be positive.

With soft power and the power of attraction, we can attract resources. If we are to transform our institutions to ones that serve us as people, we are going to need a lot of resources--that is, the capital and how we'll define capital.

The more of this capital we can attract as a community, the more we can do.

We want to attract to us:

• --social capital
• --intellectual capital
• --reputation capital
• --financial capital

As a community, the more of these resources we attract, the more we can build further community, and expand our reach deep into the fabric of society. The further we reach, the more we can build up the capabilities and empower individuals.

It is my personal mission to do whatever it takes to understand what we are building together, to provide all the resources you need to lead your own path to making this world a better place.