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Thinking/doing good

January 05, 2012Posted By Michael Doneman

 

“Doing good makes us feel good. Altruism enhances our self-esteem. It gets our eyes off ourselves, makes us less self-preoccupied, gets us closer to the unself-consciousness that characterizes the flow state”  (1).

 In other words, caring for others creates a psychological momentum and a sense of self-competence that makes us happier.  Brown argues that giving buffers stress, and involves complex hormones, such as oxytoxin and vasopressin, as well as a brain-emotion-immune nexus.

 The evidence is quite consistent that altruism, so long as it...


After a certain point, money is meaningless

December 17, 2011Posted By Michael Doneman

 

 

Just for fun, here are some thoughts from much better heads than ours …

A business that makes nothing but money is a poor kind of business. Henry Ford

After a certain point money is meaningless. It ceases to be the goal. The game is what counts. Aristotle Onassis

If ever again our nation stumbles...


Positive psychology

April 25, 2011Posted By Michael Doneman

Positive Psychology has three central concerns: positive emotions, positive individual traits, and positive institutions. 

 
Understanding positive emotions entails the study of contentment with the past, happiness in the present, and hope for the future.
 
Understanding positive individual traits consists of the study of the strengths and virtues, such as the capacity for love and work, courage, compassion, resilience, creativity, curiosity, integrity, self-knowledge, moderation, self-control, and wisdom.

Nouns and verbs

April 19, 2011Posted By Michael Doneman

Things are fast and getting faster. Whole industry groups, whole professions, are disappearing from view. Who would have thought 10 years ago that General Motors and Chrysler would go broke? What's missing, and where's the opportunity?

It's not a question that can be answered in quantitative terms, because the answer is a verb, not a noun, and nouns are the things that are disappearing. Verbs - processes, conversations, interactions - are ends as well as means, in the sense that entrepreneurs and business people are developing the capacity (and the confidence) to generate processes...


Not-Design

October 27, 2009Posted By Michael Doneman

 

 

Sitting last week in a workshop on the theme of ‘design’ I found myself uncomfortable with the tone and tenor of the offering. I realized eventually that the source of this discomfort was the assumption on the part of the workshop facilitator that ‘design’ was a manipulative process, a means of imposing one’s will on the world, of giving the world a shape related to one’s ‘picture’ of how things might be or should be.

I found myself wondering about alternative ways of practicing design which might be...


Universal Placebos

September 11, 2008Posted By Michael Doneman

A side project, and a source of considerable joy - Universal Placebos. The idea came originally from a class I was teaching at QUT. The discussion was on branding, and moved our thinking to the value of untraded intangibles. Pet Rocks. Cans of L.A. Air - things with no intrinsic value but (potentially) considerably actual and commercial worth.

My immediate interest in placebos, or more precisely, the so-called Placebo Effect, is in the realm of health and wellbeing, and our family has had recent experience with it. Ella was born with cerebral...


Incompleteness

August 29, 2008Posted By Michael Doneman

"In 1931, the Czech-born mathematician Kurt Gödel demonstrated that within any given branch of mathematics, there would always be some propositions that couldn't be proven either true or false using the rules and axioms ... of that mathematical branch itself. You might be able to prove every conceivable statement about numbers within a system by going outside the system in order to come up with new rules and axioms, but by doing so you'll only create a larger system with its own unprovable statements. The implication is that all logical systems of any...


Dancing About Architecture

August 29, 2008Posted By Michael Doneman

Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.
Laurie Anderson
 


In 1994 we stayed for a couple of nights with our friend Klaus Maier, Director of Theater von Menschen für Menschen in Nürnberg.

Not a terribly gloomy place - I think Ella had ice cream - parks, gardens, leafy walks, lakes with ducks and, quite suddenly, Monumental Monolithic Masonry, The Zeppelin Field. Staggering!

The word zeppelin is very evocative, at least to me. It's quite possible still to imagine a great airship nuzzling gigantically to the ground before us,...