Stepping Higher - Reflections on the Knowledge Age

A funny post on the KM4Dev network , which suggested that "maybe all these social community sites could be merged into one called, say, MyFlickeringFace", caught my attention today. In fact, considerations regarding a global meta-network, which consolidates all existing social networking platforms, are already under way. And the big IT players like Microsft, Google, etc. are very eager to get the lead in this. There was an interesting article in SPIEGEL Online this week (unfortunately only in German) which tries to grasp what's happening there at the moment. For me as an indivdual user this is very ambivalent. One one hand, I hate to have to maintain all these different applications and accounts in parallel (Private email, Google, del.icio.us, facebook, xing, skype, youtube, flickr and many more specialised portals and communities) and desperately long for a one-stop shop where several (or all) of the above services are integrated and ALL the people I want to liaise with...

Some weeks ago, I had to write a few paragraphs on how I would define good leadership and management. The following revised essay is the result of this exercise: When the 51 founding members of the United Nations convened in San Francisco in 1945, the signed UN Charta marked a clear shift from unilateralism and colonialism to multilateralism. The main basis for this development was the growing consciousness that the existing global challenges can not be faced by one power alone. The distinctiveness of this new international system of collective security was not characterized by one nation claiming leadership but by a peer structure with equal rights and responsibilities. In its own way the UN system thus appears as one of the many faces of the transition process from a modern to a postmodern society. Why is this important with regard to leadership and management? Because unlike the modern characteristics of enforced rules, clear hierarchies and strict boundaries, the post-modern era is...