Out of Our Minds. Robinson Ken

never stands still. Compared to other species, the rate of change in human societies has always been frenetic. Even so, the pace of change has been picking up considerably for the past 300 years. The eighteenth century saw political revolutions in Europe and in America. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries much of the world was convulsed by the rise of science and by the Industrial Revolution. The twentieth century was the bloodiest on record. It saw two World Wars, numerous regional conflicts and tumultuous revolutions in Russia and China. Overall, the twentieth centu

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Life never stands still. Compared to other species, the rate of change in human societies has always been frenetic. Even so, the pace of change has been picking up considerably for the past 300 years. The eighteenth century saw political revolutions in Europe and in America. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries much of the world was convulsed by the rise of science and by the Industrial Revolution. The twentieth century was the bloodiest on record. It saw two World Wars, numerous regional conflicts and tumultuous revolutions in Russia and China. Overall, the twentieth century was the most murderous in human history: it’s estimated that more than 100 million people died at the hands of other human beings. It also saw extraordinary advances in science and technology and massive cultural changes, especially in the old industrial economies.

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“No country has moved up the human development ladder without steady investment in education,” Mrs Irina Bokova, the Director-General of UNESCO, is quoted as saying at the launch of the Education for All Global Monitoring Report, Reaching the Marginalized, in January 2010. “The failure to stay competitive in the international playing field is a direct result of our failure to stay competitive in the education field,” says Jeff Beard, the Director-General of the International Baccalaureate in Geneva, Switzerland.

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In 2010, IBM published Capitalizing on Complexity, the fourth edition of its biennial global CEO study series led by the IBM Institute for Business Value. The study was based on personal interviews with 1,541 CEOs, general managers and senior public sector leaders representing different sizes of organizations in 60 countries and 33 industries. In addition, the study surveyed the views of 3,619 students from more than 100 major universities around the world including students on undergraduate and graduate programs, including MBA and doctoral students. Introducing the report, Samuel J. Palmisano, Chairman, President and Chief Executive Officer of IBM said, “We occupy a world that is connected on multiple dimensions and at a deeper level – a global system of systems.”

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Diamond, J. (2006).

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Friedman, T. L. (2007).

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Abraham Lincoln, Second Annual Message to Congress, December 1, 1862.

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Ian Pearson, British Telecom, interviewed in The Sunday Times, 4 June 2000.

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For a brief account of the origins of the Center see Lehrer, J. (2007).

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Kurzweil, R. (1999). Reproduced with permission.