Humanity Wins
A Strategy for Progress and Leadership in Times of Change
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- $4.99
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- $4.99
Publisher Description
Humanity Wins is a thoughtful and affirming examination of how we can adapt systematically, as individuals and as a society, to the staggering changes occurring in the world around us.
As global change accelerates, our political and social systems are barely keeping pace. Venerated institutions at every level, from the family to national governments, are struggling to operate under rules designed for a world that no longer exists.
Reinhard Mohn, the innovative entrepreneur who built Bertelsmann, Inc., into the fourth largest media company in the world, argues that the new world we are creating demands new rules, new strategies, and new systems. Just as business has undergone a radical transformation in the last twenty years, moving from centralized corporate hierarchies to decentralized dynamic organizations, so must society. Mohn shows how social institutions can adapt the best of what business leaders have learned -- and avoid repeating their mistakes.
Ultimately, Mohn, an elder statesman of the global economy, makes a moving case for a new, ethics-based, dynamic world order and provides concrete models for putting his ideas to work. We can adapt to the changes we have wrought, Mohn writes. This is how humanity will win.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
How might government best respond to a world of ever-accelerating change? That's the question that Mohn, the German media magnate (and great-great-grandson of Carl Bertelsmann) considers in this slim volume. His answer? Governments should become more like businesses. First Mohn outlines the dilemma: corporations have responded to the demands of global competition by reinventing themselves; control from above has given way to the flexible decentralization of responsibility and function, and employees, overseen by capable and enlightened management, are motivated to innovate. Meanwhile, the democratic governments of the West, he charges, remain hierarchical monoliths incapable of rapid change. More concerned with popularity than progress, politicians promise much but deliver far less; they preside over a population alienated from government and devoid of a sense of community. Largely unaccountable, big government centrally rules to maintain the status quo. If, however, governments were to follow the lead of business, decentralizing and privatizing their functions and reporting to the public in a clear, coherent way so their efficiency could truly be judged, all the difficulties would be solved. Mohn seems to be offering a viable prescription for a humane re-creation of the modern state, but his confusing and convoluted writing makes it difficult for readers to draw conclusions. He often substitutes aphorisms for analysis--there is, for example, a "deficit in development in many areas of life forces"--and fails to marshal the intellectual depth and rigor his ambitious undertaking requires.
