Drugs crisis in schools - practical steps to take now

UK Prime Minister Tony Blair today suggest schools should be encouraged to test pupils for drugs - a proposal I made in The Truth about Drugs as a practical measure to encourage abstinence from drug use (if used wisely and sensitively, with pupil and parent approval).

THE FUTURE OF ASSET MANAGEMENT

This presentation is just one of a huge number of resources on my site about financial services, banking and the future of the insurance industry.

Free books

In partnership with ACET International Alliance and Operation Mobilisation, we have just authorised an additional printing of 55,000 copies of "AIDS and You" for free distribution to church leaders and project workers across Africa and Asia in countries worst hit by AIDS.

This book contains practical guidelines and information about how to start sustainable, community-based prevention and care programmes, as well as a rationale for sensitive, effective Christian action to save lives and support those affected by HIV and AIDS.

Huge growth in traffic - website statistics

This week over 50,000 pages were visited in a single day. At least 1% of US web users have visited my web pages since 1996 - of which this web log is a new extension.

1 in 550 Americans searching the web in a busy month comes here for answers. Around 50 million words requested in a single 24 hour period by 16,000 individual visitors who spent 1,900 hours on site.

Over 3,500 book chapters are downloaded some days - more than half a million over the last few months.

Human Cloning - how human cloning is carried out - human cloning latest news and videos about human cloning technology, human embryos and embryonic stem cells, reasons against human cloning

E-mail review received today on human cloning pages above:

comments: Hello, I'm currently working toward an MA in Applied Anthropology at Oregon State University. We're reading a book called, Taking Sides: Health and Society and having class debates and discussion on the topics within. I am participating in a cloning debate next week and have found your Website and book incredibly helpful! I wanted to say, keep up the great work!
Thank you, Carissa

The Future of Medicine, health care industry, medical technology, hospital management and private health care services - Dr Patrick Dixon for Siemens Medical

Future of Insurance Industry - financial services trends (marketing, customers, products, services, strategy, leadership, change management, risk management) - by Dr Patrick Dixon for Aviva

Huge number of conference lectures and keynote speeches - slides and a videos - all available online, given to clients such as Microsoft, IBM, ABN AMRO, UBS and Credit Suisse on future trends

books.htm: "'Futurewise' has just been published in 3rd edition (English, Estonian and Latvian - with Russian to follow soon).

Free copies of 'AIDS and You' are available now in English, Spanish and Russian, in bulk, to organisations for distribution in developing countries - from ACET International Alliance website. French, Romanian, Czech, Turkish, Portugese, Swahili, Urdu and Hindi editions will also soon be available in bulk free of charge for organisations working in Africa, Asia, Latin America and former Eastern bloc countries, due to generous partnership with OM and other organisations. A new English edition of 'The Truth about AIDS' will also be available soon on the same basis."

Human cloning latest news

Dr Dixon comments to BBC, IRN, Press Association on latest news of human cloning breakthrough

Korean and US scientists today claim human cloning progress - Woo Suk Hwany of Soeul National University in Korea announced that he had succesfully cloned healthy human embryos, removed embryonic stem cells and grown them in mice. Just a couple of weeks ealier, Dr Panos Zavos made another of his frequent cloning announcements about attempts he and others are making to produce healthy cloned babies. The Korean and US teams are using human cloning technology to try to create stem cell lines which can be used to study disease.

While they are opposed to the abuse of human cloning technology to produce babes, their own cloning advances are making life easier for people like Zavos. Either way, most stem cell research is shifting rapidly away from human embryo cloning and use of embryonic stem cells, to adult stem cell development. Embryonic stem cells are controversial to use (many countries have banned the work), hard to grow, hard to control (can become cancerous), are rejected in the body unless made to order for an individual by cloning, or used in an immune protected site like the brain. That's why the makers of Dolly the Sheep ran out of human cloning money and went out of business. In comparison, there is no shortage of commercial funding for adult stem cell research which is showing spectacular results in treating mice and rats with stroke, heart and spinal cord damage.


Press Association copy:

"Dr Patrick Dixon, an author and expert in the ethics of human cloning, dismissed the idea that today’s announcement marked a breakthrough.

He said: “Except in tissues like the brain, there are huge problems with rejection of these embryonic stem cells if they are introduced into adults.

“It is very difficult for them to grow properly and very difficult to control them,” he said. "The idea that this offers a real breakthrough is based on a scientific nonsense.

“But in this supposedly spectacular benefit lies a serious risk that this technology will be abused.”

He cautioned that developments in these techniques would be “handing a gift” to controversial scientists such as Dr Panos Zavos and Clonaid intent on cloning human babies.

Dr Dixon said embryonic stem cell research was being overtaken by advances using adult cells. "Human cloning technology using embryonic stem cells is very last century. We do not need it.

“It is being overtaken rapidly by the spectacular advances in tissue repair using adult stem cells taken from the person who is unwell.

“Clinical trials are already showing results in people with heart failure while animal studies have shown successful repair in brain after stroke, heart muscle, spinal cord and other tissues.”

Human cloning latest news

Motivation

Motivation - The Reason for the Crisis

Surveys show there's a huge crisis of motivation in most large corporations, which is why they continue to spend billions of dollars each year on motivation courses, training in motivation, meetings to boost motivation, incentives to strengthen motivation, meetings to analyse problems in workforce motivation, tools to measure motivation, mission statements and so on. Problems in recruitment, productivity and retention, problems of commitment to teams and corporate agendas.

But the motivation gap is fundamental. People are passionate - but mainly about life outside of work. Indeed the very phrase "work-life balance" tells us that most people think that work is the opposite of life. So how did we get to be in such a motivational crisis?

Motivation has moved on and left most corporations behind

One thing is clear: motivation is changing. Just look at the current obsession with work-life balance, which is now a powerful force in every corporation, number one or two career priority for the majority of executives in the US, UK and Japan. Forget the old days when ambition meant rushing up the career ladder. Today the great dual ambition is to have a satisfying job and a fulfilling personal life.

Or take the growing motivation for community action: 60% of all US workers give time each year to work for causes they passionately believe in. The average time gift is 200 hours. If each hour given by a US citizen was charged out at the average industrial wage, you would be talking about an industry as large as 4.5% of GDP or 12% of the Federal budget.

And other countries are similar, whether people are rich or poor, in Western Europe or East Africa Despite all the gloomy pundits some years back, community motivation remains very much alive. But these motivation changes are rarely reflected in corporate policy - or if they are, in a very superficial way. That's because CEOs and senior teams are still over-influenced by last-century management ideology about efficiency, bottom-line profit, shareholder value, return on equity and other motivation - killing fixations.

Management Gurus – high priests of confusion ?

You’ll find that management theory is still mainly built on two things: psycho-theories from one or two centuries ago and also case histories of organisations. Both are rooted in the past, can be based on subjective interpretations of data, and rarely concentrate on motivation. Case histories rapidly date as our world changes – just look at old business books and count the case examples of companies that now don’t even exist, or are basket cases, or riddled with recent scandal - and the old psycho-theories raise many questions. Life in the third millennium has moved on a long way from unproveable nineteenth century introspections about unconscious motives and desires.

You’ll find great business ideas formed often many decades ago about the nature of organizations, team management, excellence at work and the rest. All vital and important things without which no business can survive, but very little that grabs you by the throat when it comes to passion, commitment and motivation.

Hey – if there was, we wouldn’t all be in this mess.

Without management experts we would all be the poorer, with lower productivity, inefficient structures, bad organizations and wasted resources. However it is a historical fact that management fads come and go faster than ever – often in less than a decade - leaving tens of thousands bruised, bashed and confused by each one that sweeps into their organization. You just have to look at a list of business titles published over the last five decades to see that. And these fads actually undermine motivation.

Bashed by all the latest fads

Core competencies, empowerment, balanced scorecard, adhocracy, action learning, 360 degree appraisals, the learning organization, career anchors, champions, decentralization, vertical integration, quality management, re-engineering, down-sizing, psychological contract, mission statement, portfolio working, management by objectives, managerial hierarchies, just-in-time, lateral thinking, emotional intelligence and work/life balance.

First are four top turn-of-the-century gurus: Peter Drucker, Tom Peters, Michael Porter and Gary Hamil. Each has had a huge impact on business thinking today but are not so strong on motivation..

Between them these giants of corporate thinking have contributed a huge amount to corporate efficiency, productivity and effectiveness, generating wealth for millions, contributing to the economy and to society.

What about passion for living?

Great leaders, great visionaries, passionate about their messages – but what do they tell us more generally about human passion for life?
What do they tell us about why people act as they do? The choices they make? The things they feel strongly about? The culture we live in and the changing lifestyles choices people are making?

Of course, all of them have addressed every topic under the sun at one time or another on platforms or in writings, but what happens when you look at the main thrust of their influence?

Peter Drucker

The problem is that Drucker says everything about managing a corporation but far less that captivates the human spirit. Almost nothing about managing personal life as a whole – or about work / life balance or broader motivation issues.

Tom Peters

Tom Peters talks of excellence in companies, and also talks about passion in leadership but says almost nothing about excellence of personal quality of life, why personal commitment to workplace goals is falling and why for most people, their strongest sense of motivation is for the work they are not paid to do, the things they do outside of work, simply because they believe those things are worthwhile.

Michael Porter

Michael Porter talks of being competitive, but people are more than links in a value chain. He has a good understanding of company survival, but a relatively poor understanding of personal survival and of what people are looking for in life. Motivation is hardly at the heart of what he writes or says.

Core competency has become a widely accepted concept, encouraging corporations to focus on strengths. However, finding a company’s core competency, or even changing future corporate history does nothing to motivate me to get out of bed in the morning.

The world’s leading management gurus, on whom hundreds of thousands of management consultants base their work, are relatively silent when it comes to motivation, and are nowhere when it comes to finding one single unifying factor that drives all human action.

And we find the same when we review dozens of other widely respected gurus of management theory. Here are a few more popular buzz-words:

Actions are not the same as understanding passion that drives these actions. Strategy does not necessarily provoke personal motivation. Leadership can encourage motivation but only if it understands what makes people passionate. What's the point of a balanced team if people can’t care less? Leaders doing the right thing is often not the same as having a fired-up workforce. Passion is based on more than mere ideas. Since when did anyone at work get really get excited about a structure? Quality of products and services is hardly the core motivation for individual life, for what we do or what we buy. Re-engineering of the corporation is not the same as re-engineering people’s motivation. Objectives do not provide people with meaning and ultimate sense of purpose. Team psychology is almost irrelevant to question of personal passion and aims in life. “Company-wide quality management” is not the same as connecting with what people feel strongly about. Global branding does nothing to motivate. There is more to motivating people than having great style.

Most recognised authorities on management score low on motivation with the exception of Charles Handy, Edward Schein, Elton Mayo, Elspeth Ross Kanter, and Douglas MacGregor. And most of those who scored high are dead, or retired, and most of their works were published decades ago.

Why corporations have been given such a narrow view of motivation

Why the problem? Well one obvious reason is that he who pays the piper calls the tune and management consultants by definition are asked in by corporations to improve their bottom line profitability, not to massage the inner needs and motivation of their employees, except as a profit-enhancing exercise.

So its hardly suprising that we get on the whole a very narrow view.

One thing is clear: there is one mega black-hole of fresh thinking about motivation, about what really makes people tick, about why people act as they do.

Harness all the passions people have and they will follow you to the ends of the earth.

Motivation

Future of marketing - one hour video

Future of marketing - global business and consumer trends: "Keynote speech by Dr Patrick Dixon for Finland Marketing Federation in Helsinki, audience of 500, plus many other resources on the future of marketing and consumer trends: direct mail, network, email, strategies, ideas, relationship marketing, market research, consumer reports, campaign slogans.

Themes: branding, successful brands, new consumer values, slogans for the third millennium, direct marketing in the mobile digital age, how to reach target groups more effectively, product placement, designing and testing future advertising campaigns, image-building, corporate identity, selling into developing markets, understanding consumer preferences and behavior."

Future of banks and financial services - major challenges - Web TV interview with Dr Patrick Dixon Futurist: "Internet banking, banking trends, free internet banking, internet banking uk, compare internet banking, online banking internet banking security information, future of electronic banking, online banking internet banking security, history of internet banking, advantages of internet banking, offshore internet banking, internet security online banking, national internet banking, the history of internet banking."

Future of Banking and Financial Services

See huge number of resources on the future of banking, insurance industry trends, risk management, internet banking, security issues, investment banking, retail banking and private banking.