"Bucky"

(My Blog Action Day post re climate change.)

“Humanity is moving ever deeper into crisis – 
a crisis without precedent.”

Richard Buckminster Fuller wrote this prediction
as the first line of his introduction to his book
Critical Path, published in 1980. He was 85.

In the same year Bucky’s Dymaxion Sky-Ocean World Map, the
largest, most accurate whole Earth map in human history, was issued.

“My reasons for writing this book are fourfold,” he wrote in the foreword:
(A) Because I am convinced that human knowledge by others of what this book has to say is essential to human survival.
(B) Because of my driving conviction that all of humanity is in peril of extinction if each one of us does not dare, now and henceforth, always to tell the truth, and all the truth, and to do so promptly – right now.
(C) Because I am convinced that humanity’s fitness for continuance in the cosmic scheme no longer depends on the validity of political, religious, economic or social organizations, which altogether heretofore have been assumed to represent the many.
(D) Because, contrary to (C), I am convinced that human continuance now depends entirely upon:
(1) The intuitive wisdom of each and every individual.
(2) The individual’s comprehensive informedness.
(3) The individual’s integrity of speaking and acting only on the
individual’s own within-self-intuited and reasoned initiative.
(4) The individual’s joining action with others, as motivated only by the individually conceived consequences of so doing.
(5) The individual’s never-joining action with others, motivated only by crowd-engendered emotionalism, or by a sense of the crowd’s power to overwhelm, or in fear of holding to the course indicated by one’s own intellectual convictions.

Three decades ago, Bucky developed the World Game simulation, posing the question: How do we make the world work for 100% of humanity in the shortest possible time through spontaneous cooperation without ecological damage or disadvantage to anyone?

The results of this research showed that the premier global strategy is the interconnection of electric power networks between regions and continents into a global energy grid, with an emphasis on tapping abundant renewable energy resources - a world wide web of electricity.

The benefits of this sustainable development world power solution are proven:

* Decreased pollution from fossil and nuclear fuels
* Reduced hunger and poverty in developing nations
* Increased trade, cooperation and world peace
* Enables health care, communications and access to clean water
* Stabilized population growth

The practical limit on the distance of electrical power delivery from the time of World War 1 until the 60s was 350 miles. However 350 miles could not span the distances between two of the continent’s four national time zones. In the 60s as a consequence of new technologies of the space age, ultrahigh-voltage, super conductivity, and other technical developments occurred that made 1500 mile-delivery of electricity possible, practical and economical. This reach provided the ability to span continental time zones, whose peaks and valleys obviously differed from one another, and this meant greater profits to be derived from across-time-zone-integrated electrical energy networks. This meant that all of yesterday’s, one-half-the-time unemployed, standby generators would be usable all the time, thus swiftly doubling the operating capacity of the world’s electrical energy grid.

It was immediately evident to Bucky that it would be possible to carry the American electrical network grid across the Bering Straits from the Alaska grid to reach the extreme northeastern Russian grid, where the USSR had completed a program of installing dams and hydroelectric-power-generating stations on all their northerly flowing rivers all the way into eastern Kamchatka. About 1500 miles could interconnect the Russians’ Asiatic continent electric integrated power grid with the Alaskan grid of the industrial North American electric energy grid.

In the early years of Trudeau’s premiership of Canada, when he was about to make his first visit to Russia, Bucky gave Trudeau his first world energy network grid plan which he presented to Brezhnnev who turned it over to his experts, On his return to Canada Trudeau reported to Bucky that the experts had come back to Brezhnev with
“feasible…desirable.”

Bucky predicted that “before the end of the 1980s the computer’s
politically unbiased problem-solving prestige will have brought about the world’s completely integrated electrical-energy network grid. In CRITICAL PATH he wrote: “This world electric grid, with its omni-integrated advantage, will deliver its electrical energy anywhere, to anyone, at any one time, at one common rate. This will make possible a world-around costing and pricing system for all goods and services based realistically on the time-energy metabolic accounting system of Universe.”

Unfortunately, that didn’t happen but is beginning to happen now
as nations across the globe are linking grids. For almost two decades, GENI has pushed the proposal to link electrical grids between regions and nations with an emphasis on tapping local and remote renewable resources. In the past few months, there have been numerous announcements by politicians and business leaders with this very message, and we assert that the idea has reached critical mass and has become unstoppable.

In Europe, the "electrical supergrid" is being pushed as a backbone high-voltage network that will enable the offshore winds of the UK and Ireland to power the lights in Paris. This supergrid extended around the Mediterranean Sea will allow the abundant solar resources of the Sahara desert to power computers in Berlin. This same argument can be found in the U.S., where Energybiz Insider featured "The Super Grid: Practical or Pipe Dream?" In each case, it requires the cooperation of investor-owned utilities, municipals, cooperatives, lan downers and all levels of government. Russia is now linking to China.

In South Asia, the five nations of the South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation (SAARC: India, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka) are discussing a regional electric grid that can deliver abundant hydropower from the Himalayas to all SAARC members. With assistance from the Asian Development Bank, this kind of development can elevate the living standards of millions of people.

THE MONEY AND YOU STORY

INNOVATIVE BUSINESS PHILOSOPHY SPARKS NEW

APPROACH TO SELLING

It began in San Francisco around 1974 when New Realities magazine ran an article about a San Francisco real estate firm, Hawthorne / Stone, that, within the space of three years, was earning more per capita than any other company in America and in the same period made its three founders, Marshall Thurber, Robert Cassil and William Raymond, millionaires.

RobertCassil, one of its principals, said: “I think the secret of this whole operation is finding people who are real winners, even if they are not sure they are real winners, and letting them manifest their success here.”

Hawthorn / Stone was doing business in a new way – by creating an ethical atmosphere embracing honesty, compassion and support – an environment
that facilitated its staff success in the outside world. In short, it created a model of how a company can nurture continual personal growth, achieve economic independence for its participants, and humanise its dealings in the market place.
Thurber said of it: “…the purpose of Hawthorne / Stone was more than a real estate company...it’s true purpose was to create and play games together, transcending the economic limitations in a satisfying environment.”


School

Using this philosophy in the business world inspired Thurber and a junior partner in the firm, Bobbi de Porter, to take the technology and the principles to ‘yet another level’. Together they founded the Burklyn Business School, a new age business school modelled after their real estate firm, providing an environment of love, support and trust in an experiment that was to create a new dimension in education.

The school opened its doors on June 19, 1978. Its method of teaching was unusual to say the least. Thurber flew in Dr George Lasanov, the designer of “Suggestopedia” – or “Superlearning”, as the Americas called it – and incorporated it into the school. From the UK he brought PETER RUSSELL to lead students in a unique form of note-taking called ‘mind-mapping’ achieved with patterns and colours instead of linear sentences, The messages were also hammered home through crazy experimental games.

Graduates from Burklyn walked away with the confidence that they could succeed in business on their own. One graduate said he had gained more useful information from six weeks at Burklyn than two years at Harvard Business School.

About four years later Thurber, keen to widen his potential audience, created a five-day workshop “Money and You: Management by Agreement”. He took it across America and, with the support of his partner, DC CORDOVA, built teams of people willing to support its principles.

By the time the workshop came to Melbourne in November 1985, it had been honed down to three-and-a-half-days and contained a very powerful mix of data and games that had been learned and applied in both Hawthorn / Stone and Burklyn.

Designer ANDREAS SEDEROF who was instrumental in bringing the workshop to Australia, says: “The significant thing about Money and You is that it has evolved and become much more accurate, much more precise in its ability to find a mark with issues. One of the things with the transformational arena is that it’s very easy to get lost in it all. With Money and You, provided you are prepared to keep going whatever your limiting barriers are, then you can get results.” Andreas says it has changed the lives of more people he knows than any other transformational workshop.

In Adelaide, promoter DI McCANN, who has been in this field for 40 years, says it’s the most powerful training she knows. “It’s having its effect here,” she told us. “We have a lot of very successful business people who use the principles, find they work and after two years retain their original enthusiasm. It’s gaining momentum as more and more people hear about it. We want the name “Money and You” to resound in people’s minds and resonate with excellence, mastery, integrity and personal and professional success.”
Diane feels this course gives people choices they may not have perceived before, in the areas of both relationships and business.

Australia and New Zealand promoter, STAN JORDAN says: “Technology is changing so rapidly, it is really difficult to keep pace. Even many of the professional development courses are basically behind the times.
“Money and You” focuses on the untapped resources in people and gives strategies to create happier and more productive employees.”

It’s not all beer and skittles, however, for those who attend. Just as Marshall Thurber discovered that the Hawthorne / Stone way didn’t work for everyone, occasionally people find “Money and You” a turnoff.

For instance, a 25-year-old computer operator walked into the workshop, signed on and an hour later stormed out saying: “No ‘Yank’ is going to tell me how to run my life!”

The “Yank”, as he called him, was ROBERT KIYOSAKI, a fourth generation Japanese-Hawaiian who had been facilitating Money and You in Australia for ten years and trained many enthusiastic Aussies to lead the workshop.

He tells of his own initial encounter with Money and You. Like the young computer operator, he stormed out of the workshop in a rage and a year later came back, his problems resolved, to become its key facilitator.

Kyosaki, interviewed by Nature and Health magazine, said the solution lies in business. “Most of our problems are economics,” he says. “Business got us into the mess and, like it or not, it will have to be business that gets us out!”

But this is business with a difference. As Hawthorn / Stone discovered
people can no longer afford to make money without assessing the impact of what they are doing. “It’s because we have not been responsible for the side effects of our businesses and have dumped waste in rivers and polluted the air with coal, oil or nuclear power that the environment has been destroyed,” Kyosaki says. “ You can make a lot of money selling cocaine but there are what we call precessional effects of that – a lot of people destroy their lives.”

Precession is a concept Kiyosaki learned studying under Dr. Buckminster Fuller. “It is a generalised principle of cause and effect which he likens to the dropping of a stone in water. The stone goes straight down but the ripples go out at 90 degrees. In the same way a bee may be intent on going after honey but there is a side effect as it brushes against the pollen of one blossom and moves on to another. The precessional effect is that it cross-pollinates other flowers.

“If the bee stopped doing this work, life on this planet would end because there would be no more plants and regeneration of life,” he says.

And so with humans. Kiyosaki believes positive changes can come about only when people become clear on their true purpose in life and stop concentrating
on just surviving. He believes each one of us has a special gift that is unique, and which, expressed as something we love to do, becomes our true purpose. The precessional results of that could save the planet.”

Money and You generates in people a greater sense of wonder about themselves.
As one participant commented: “For me, of all the things I learned at Money and You, the one that stands out above all the others is the greater sense it gave me of myself – not just as an individual – although it did that too – but as an individual who has a unique and worthwhile contribution to make to society. I now know that I count and that I can make a difference. That realisation changed my life.”

Today Money and You operates from centres in China, Taipei, Kuala Lumpur, Hong Kong, Singapore, Australia and New Zealand and has 70,000 graduates. Every weekend, somewhere in the world, there’s at least one Money and You happening.

Enquiries: 
GENI – PM Dekker  pmd at geni dot org
MONEY AND YOU – Jane Jordan janej at moneyandyouaustralia dot com dot au