By:Gayle Dendinger Issue: Conscious Capitalism Section: Letter From The Publisher
A World Where Chess Imitates Life
From studying the great gurus, as well as learning from our great ICOSA contributors, we have tapped into the creative, the charismatic, the brilliant, and the pragmatic to gather common sense, white papers, fables, parables, voodoo, statistics, studies, opinions, and possible whoppers. From these ideas we are beginning to develop the principles of Connection and Collaboration.
Three of these foundational principles are:
*
Design a strong systemic infrastructure. *
Populate with people who can and will make a difference. *
Understand the reach of every person or organization.
Abstract concepts are difficult to conceptualize, so we will periodically use metaphors to evoke a broad array of visualizations by likening an idea to something a little more concrete and perhaps more fun.
One set of metaphors we will refer to will include symbols used by the Native Americans. The spider web was used in a previous issue as we discussed interconnection and intercollaboration in terms of a spider web with its concentric rings representing various geographies and the radii strands representing sectors.
Another set of metaphoric conceptions will discuss goal oriented
activities in terms of a living game of chess. In the case of this article:
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Principle one above gives us the board, *
Principle two provides the players, *
Principle three helps us understand, tap into and multiply the reach and power of the players.
The Game of C & C is a very high level game and is not played just for fun, but for very high stakes. Our opponent is not the traditional opposing white or black army but the real enemies we face such as ignorance, poverty, war, and overpopulation.
The chess analogy applies closely to the far reaching work done by the organizations in this edition of ICOSA; in the strategy and game play they used to address the larger issues facing our world. Effective strategy can be seen in the story of Kickstart International by selling a product to help poor farmers in Africa make a profit and be lifted from poverty. Atlas Copco’s initiative, Water for All, demonstrates that access to clean drinking water can change the lives of millions. It can also be seen in the work of Ato Yohannes Gebregeorgis,the librarian turned activist and Founder of Ethiopia Reads, who diligently works to bring his homeland out of poverty through education and literacy programs. Or maybe, it’s MillerCoors who empowers its employees to make a difference in the communities where they work and play.
These organizations used these and other principles to consciously and collaboratively make a difference. Their conscious capitalism, the topic of this issue, is not solely focused on profits but on something bigger, something greater than us – the chess game of life. It’s up to all of us to plan and make our next move.