shared worldview

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pages: 330 words: 59,335

The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success by William Thorndike

Albert Einstein, AOL-Time Warner, Atul Gawande, Berlin Wall, book value, Checklist Manifesto, choice architecture, Claude Shannon: information theory, collapse of Lehman Brothers, compound rate of return, corporate governance, discounted cash flows, diversified portfolio, Donald Trump, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Gordon Gekko, Henry Singleton, impact investing, intangible asset, Isaac Newton, junk bonds, Louis Pasteur, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, NetJets, Norman Mailer, oil shock, pattern recognition, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Richard Feynman, shared worldview, shareholder value, six sigma, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, Teledyne, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, value engineering, vertical integration

This single-minded cash focus was the foundation of their iconoclasm, and it invariably led to a laser-like focus on a few select variables that shaped each firm’s strategy, usually in entirely different directions from those of industry peers. For Henry Singleton in the 1970s and 1980s, it was stock buybacks; for John Malone, it was the relentless pursuit of cable subscribers; for Bill Anders, it was divesting noncore businesses; for Warren Buffett, it was the generation and deployment of insurance float. At the core of their shared worldview was the belief that the primary goal for any CEO was to optimize long-term value per share, not organizational growth. This may seem like an obvious objective; however, in American business, there is a deeply ingrained urge to get bigger. Larger companies get more attention in the press; the executives of those companies tend to earn higher salaries and are more likely to be asked to join prestigious boards and clubs.

The right capital allocation decision varies depending on the situation at any given point in time. This is why Henry Singleton believed flexibility was so essential. As a group, these CEOs faced the inherent uncertainty of the business world with a patient, rational, pragmatic opportunism, not a detailed set of strategic plans. TABLE 9-1 A shared worldview Their specific actions stemmed from a broader, shared mindset and added up to nothing less than a new model for CEO success, one centered on the optimal management of firm resources. Although the outsider CEOs were an extraordinarily talented group, their advantage relative to their peers was one of temperament, not intellect.


pages: 215 words: 61,435

Why Liberalism Failed by Patrick J. Deneen

classic study, David Brooks, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, income inequality, intentional community, Lewis Mumford, mortgage debt, Nicholas Carr, plutocrats, price mechanism, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Steven Levy, the scientific method, Thomas L Friedman, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

Given the extent to which this basic divide shapes the outlooks of nearly every politically aware person living in an advanced liberal society today, it seems almost unthinkable to suggest that it is far less than it seems—and indeed that the apparent unbridgeability of the chasm separating the two sides merely masks a more fundamental, shared worldview. The project of advancing the liberal order takes the superficial form of a battle between seemingly intractable foes, and the energy and acrimony of that contest shrouds a deeper cooperation that ends up advancing liberalism as a whole. The modern American landscape is occupied by two parties locked in permanent battle.


pages: 325 words: 67,076

Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself by Nedra Glover Tawwab

delayed gratification, microaggression, shared worldview, work culture

When couples become parents, their relationship is less romantic, and they become more distant and businesslike with each other as they attend to their kids. Mundane basics like keeping kids fed, bathed, and clothed take energy, time, and resolve. In an effort to keep the family running smoothly, parents discuss carpool pickups and grocery runs instead of sharing worldviews or their thoughts on presidential elections. Questions about their day are replaced with questions about whether the diaper looks full. These changes can be more profound than people realize. Fundamental identities may shift from wife to mother or from lovers to parents. Beyond sexual intimacy, new parents tend to stop saying and doing the little things that please their spouses.


pages: 255 words: 75,172

Sleeping Giant: How the New Working Class Will Transform America by Tamara Draut

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, always be closing, American ideology, antiwork, battle of ideas, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, creative destruction, David Brooks, declining real wages, deindustrialization, desegregation, Detroit bankruptcy, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, ending welfare as we know it, Ferguson, Missouri, financial deregulation, full employment, gentrification, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, machine readable, mass incarceration, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, obamacare, occupational segregation, payday loans, pink-collar, plutocrats, Powell Memorandum, profit motive, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rent-seeking, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stock buybacks, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, union organizing, upwardly mobile, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, young professional

But the day after the training, he called Návar to let him know that the members loved it, and were “pissed” at what they had learned. Návar is doing good old-fashioned consciousness-raising, and for the progressive movement, the loss of unions playing this role is a severe blow to building the kind of shared worldview among the working class critical for rebuilding political power. And that kind of work is gaining more traction across the labor movement. In February 2015, the AFL-CIO launched a Labor Commission on Racial and Economic Justice. Carmen Berkley, director of Civil, Human and Women’s Rights at the AFL-CIO, is leading the initiative, which has the full participation of the AFL-CIO’s Executive Council.


pages: 209 words: 80,086

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

Being middle class is not only to stand somewhere between the rich and poor but is also defined by occupation linked to a lifestyle package, including a decent salary, career prospects, and a comfortable standard of living. There is little sense of a relationship between people in different social classes or between those in the same class living in different countries. It is far removed for Karl Marx’s idea of a “class in itself ” let alone a “class for itself ” sharing worldviews with political significance. To date, in most of the studies of the global middle class, it means little more than a growing class of consumers who offer new market opportunities to Western companies. The connection between the middle classes in developed and emerging economies hardly figures in their accounts because the American middle class is part of the global rich.


pages: 300 words: 87,374

The Light That Failed: A Reckoning by Ivan Krastev, Stephen Holmes

active measures, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Andrei Shleifer, anti-communist, anti-globalists, bank run, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, borderless world, Brexit referendum, corporate governance, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, disinformation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, kremlinology, liberal world order, mass immigration, Mikhail Gorbachev, Neil Armstrong, nuclear winter, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, the market place, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Twitter Arab Spring, WikiLeaks

Beyond these commonalities, Putin and Xi have no shared conception of what a good society looks like. Their actions are driven by national interest and national dreams, shaped by pride and resentment at the humiliations inflicted by Western hands, rather than by a universally exportable ideology defining a shared world-view. And while both Chinese and Russian leaders openly argue that Western-style liberalism would not suit their societies, they have now become confident (or overconfident) enough to pretend that Western liberalism has failed just as humiliatingly as communism failed three decades ago. To say that the rise of China marks the end of the Age of Imitation is to say that there will be no return to a global ideological confrontation between two great powers each imposing its social and political model on a group of vassal states and trying to persuade peoples everywhere to adopt its own goals, objectives and vision of mankind’s future.


pages: 627 words: 127,613

Transcending the Cold War: Summits, Statecraft, and the Dissolution of Bipolarity in Europe, 1970–1990 by Kristina Spohr, David Reynolds

anti-communist, bank run, Berlin Wall, Bretton Woods, computer age, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, Deng Xiaoping, failed state, Fall of the Berlin Wall, guns versus butter model, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, liberal capitalism, Mikhail Gorbachev, military-industrial complex, mutually assured destruction, Nixon shock, oil shock, open borders, Ronald Reagan, Ronald Reagan: Tear down this wall, shared worldview, Strategic Defense Initiative, Thomas L Friedman, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Both President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger were convinced that the United States had to end its post-Korean War policy of treating ‘Red China’ as a pariah state. ‘We simply cannot afford to leave China outside the family of nations’, Nixon insisted in 1967. ‘Communist China is a major fact of international life’, declared Kissinger the following year; he visualized the world moving from a bipolar era to one of multipolarity.9 This shared worldview prompted their opening to China in 1971–2; though tactical calculations about pressing the Soviets to the negotiating table also played a part. At the practical level, Kissinger acted as the secret go-between to set up the unprecedented meeting between the American and Chinese leaders in 1972.


Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World by Naomi Klein

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, anti-communist, anti-globalists, autism spectrum disorder, benefit corporation, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blood diamond, Boris Johnson, Boycotts of Israel, Cambridge Analytica, capitalist realism, ChatGPT, citizen journalism, Climategate, contact tracing, coronavirus, COVID-19, crisis actor, critical race theory, dark matter, deep learning, deepfake, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, George Floyd, glass ceiling, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, hive mind, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet Archive, Jeffrey Epstein, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, lab leak, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, mass incarceration, medical residency, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, neurotypical, new economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Parler "social media", pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, phenotype, profit motive, QAnon, QR code, Ralph Waldo Emerson, randomized controlled trial, Rosa Parks, Scientific racism, Scramble for Africa, shared worldview, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, smart cities, social distancing, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, tech bro, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, TikTok, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce

(The grift goes back to the original paper by Wakefield: when he published it, he did not disclose that his research had received partial funding from a grant secured by Richard Barr, a lawyer who represented people alleging harms from the MMR vaccine, or that Wakefield himself had applied for a patent for a different vaccine and thus stood to potentially profit from the discrediting of the MMR vaccine.) In this convergence of worlds, we can see more than a shared infrastructure of misinformation: there is also a shared worldview, a shared mindset, a shared way of seeing people as either normal or deviant, pure or tainted, successes or failures. And even, as in all doppelganger stories, real or impostors. “Boom—the soul’s gone from his eyes.” That’s how Jenny McCarthy described the effect of a vaccine on her autistic son.


The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community by David C. Korten

Abraham Maslow, Albert Einstein, banks create money, big-box store, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, clean water, colonial rule, Community Supported Agriculture, death of newspapers, declining real wages, different worldview, digital divide, European colonialism, Francisco Pizarro, full employment, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, God and Mammon, Hernando de Soto, Howard Zinn, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, joint-stock company, land reform, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Monroe Doctrine, Naomi Klein, neoliberal agenda, new economy, peak oil, planetary scale, plutocrats, Project for a New American Century, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, sexual politics, shared worldview, social intelligence, source of truth, South Sea Bubble, stem cell, structural adjustment programs, The Chicago School, trade route, Washington Consensus, wealth creators, World Values Survey

All through history, people thought the way they saw the world was the way the world really was — in other words, they saw their worldview as the true worldview and all others as mistaken and therefore false.4 In our first encounters with people from different cultures, we are likely The Opportunity 77 to experience them as weird, difficult to understand, and possibly dangerous. Through extended intercultural experience, however, we come to see the deeper truth of culture as an organizing construct that defines a shared worldview essential to social coherence. Coming to understand the nature of culture is the essence of the critical transition from Socialized Consciousness to Cultural Consciousness described in chapter 2. The spreading awakening of Cultural Consciousness is of particular importance to us in this time of rapid change in the human circumstance.


pages: 692 words: 189,065

The Human Swarm: How Our Societies Arise, Thrive, and Fall by Mark W. Moffett

affirmative action, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, California gold rush, classic study, cognitive load, delayed gratification, demographic transition, Easter island, eurozone crisis, George Santayana, glass ceiling, Howard Rheingold, invention of agriculture, invention of writing, Kevin Kelly, labour mobility, land tenure, long peace, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, Oklahoma City bombing, out of africa, phenotype, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, the strength of weak ties, Timothy McVeigh, World Values Survey

Sure, we might not have completely trusted any new kids at first, but given satisfactory appearance (the jersey), and behavior (including how they got that shirt), they would likely have been quickly identified as part of the group even by the players who didn’t know them. As for societies, markers add up to an indelible awareness of who we are, yoking people who haven’t met to a shared worldview even when those traits do not require our attention. During the average moment, our markers are so familiar and expected that we notice them no more than we see the sky’s precise shade of blue. Yet we hunger for them when they are absent. This is why, when starved for others “like us” on a trip abroad, we seek out a bar, restaurant, or hangout of people from our nation, and greet the expatriates there, somehow familiar though unknown to us, as old friends.


pages: 685 words: 203,949

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload by Daniel J. Levitin

Abraham Maslow, airport security, Albert Einstein, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anton Chekhov, autism spectrum disorder, Bayesian statistics, behavioural economics, big-box store, business process, call centre, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive load, complexity theory, computer vision, conceptual framework, correlation does not imply causation, crowdsourcing, cuban missile crisis, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, deep learning, delayed gratification, Donald Trump, en.wikipedia.org, epigenetics, Eratosthenes, Exxon Valdez, framing effect, friendly fire, fundamental attribution error, Golden Gate Park, Google Glasses, GPS: selective availability, haute cuisine, How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?, human-factors engineering, if you see hoof prints, think horses—not zebras, impulse control, index card, indoor plumbing, information retrieval, information security, invention of writing, iterative process, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, language acquisition, Lewis Mumford, life extension, longitudinal study, meta-analysis, more computing power than Apollo, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, optical character recognition, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, phenotype, placebo effect, pre–internet, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, shared worldview, Sheryl Sandberg, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, statistical model, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, traumatic brain injury, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, ultimatum game, Wayback Machine, zero-sum game

The philosopher John Searle says the mechanism by which indirect speech acts work is that they invoke in both the speaker and the hearer a shared representation of the world; they rely on shared background information that is both linguistic and social. By appealing to their shared knowledge, the speaker and listener are creating a pact and affirming their shared worldview. Searle asks us to consider another type of case with two speakers, A and B. A: Let’s go to the movies tonight. B: I have to study for an exam tonight. Speaker A is not making an implicature—it can be taken at face value as a direct request, as marked by the use of let’s. But Speaker B’s reply is clearly indirect.


pages: 870 words: 259,362

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

The images from the male version remain particularly strong – the teachers (often Oxbridge-educated) in their long black gowns, the boys in their caps and blazers, the undeviating rigour of the whole performance – but possibly the best account we have is of Stockport High School for Girls, which the daughter of an engineering draughtsman, Joan Rowlands (later Bakewell), left in 1951 after seven moulding years: I was overwhelmed by a body of women resolved to shape and instruct me in their shared world-view. They were a cohort of the army of self-improvement, steeped in the same entrenched, spinsterly values of learning, duty and obedience, tempered with a little laughter when exams weren’t too pressing. The school motto set the high-minded tone: Self-reverence, self-knowledge, self-control, These three alone lead life to sovereign power