Indeed, the spirit of the age we live in seems to have us moving more and more towards recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness. That said, recognition of interconnectedness needs to be followed up by practical action to account for that interconnectedness. You asked specifically about power, charm and effectiveness. I certainly don't think that a casual glance at what Baha'is have accomplished would answer that which is why I suggested a deeper investigation. Suffice it to say that we are not in a hurry (mostly) as developing a global civilization is not something that happens in mere decades! I suspect that fossil fuels, the environment and many other things will become crises that we deal with (for better or worse) before a "golden age" of civilization is established. But I do believe strongly in the power of individual action to make a difference, in the power of communities to make a difference... and even in the power of institutions to make a difference.

Pretty simple.

I'm not deeply knowledgable of the TM movement but based on what you have described, it does seem to be a reflection of this "spirit of the age". I also agree that that our ability to act collectively is pretty poor. But I also think that it is improving (sloooowly) and that there is real hope for humanity. Compared to the 19th century, we are experts at collective action. Compared to what we can imagine, we still have a long way to go!

Answer: Baha'u'llah.

Please consider investigating this deeply and using your _reason_ to do so. For the last 150 years, followers of Baha'u'llah have quietly been building a sustainable, unified, world civilization that acknowledges the value of science, art _and_ spirit, that recognizes that individuals, communities and institutions all need to develop, that is based on principles such as truthfulness, unity in diversity, elimination of prejudice, equality of men and women. The purpose of the teachings of Baha'u'llah is to unite all the races and peoples of the world in one universal cause and one common faith.

I agree completely. Some in-house studies that I have been privy to have shown 2-1 or 3-1 productivity difference between good co-located teams and "good" virtual teams. Creating a true, high-performance virtual team is incredibly hard emotionally, incredibly time-consuming, and costs a lot in terms of tools and travel. If this is being done for convenience of the team members or for cost savings, it's a bad idea. The only good reason to have distributed teams is if there is a compelling strategic reason that trumps the hit you will take financially and morale-wise.

That said, one thing that is worth trying is to create an environment as close as possible to what you would get with a co-located team. To do this, here are some things to try:

1. Set core hours (at least 3) every day when everyone on the team, regardless of time zone, will be at work simultaneously.

2. During core hours, use a good video conferencing tool (e.g. Office Communicator), in an always-on state for all team members - be in the same space at the same time.

3. During core hours, all team members agree to forego the use of headphones or anything else that would prevent them from instantly being aware of something happening with any of the other team members.

4. Have a live update task tracking tool that all team members use. (A wiki does not work because you have to refresh to see updates. Cardmeeting.com is a decent virtual wall that has live updates.)

5. Have a second (or third) monitor for every team member that is dedicated to the always-on communication tools (video conferencing, task tracking). These always-on tools should _never_ be covered by anything else.

Basically, these suggestions are designed to maximize the quality, bandwidth and minimize the latency of communication among the team members.

Most of my storage is in my brain. I'm pretty sure that even with 3+ TB of disk based storage, my brain is bigger, and it's certainly more active :-) I had to vote "obscure", but I'm not sure that's an accurate description of my brain!

I can't prove it, but I believe that people in the US _are_ some of the most oppressed in the world. The problem is that the oppression is subtle: consumerism. It is pervasive and it is not considered oppression (by most people). This is far worse than overt oppression where people are conscious of the oppression and can make choices about when and how to struggle against the oppression.

Maybe the explanation is simple: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradox_of_hedonism

That's why time boxes are so important. By doing a breakdown into tasks that are _estimated_ to be one day of work or less, inside of a 10 day iteration, then you have effectively created finite variance in your estimates. This is an important part of the method. As well, you have to keep some other variables constant, all of which are under the control of the team/management.

Basically this is the slope of the line of estimated remaining work over a fixed timebox (such as an iteration or sprint). It's based on an application of the Central Limit Theorem and therefore it requires a few things to be in place in order to be accurate. I'm hoping to do a presentation on Commitment Velocity at the Agile 2010 conference in Nashville (link is to my session proposal).

This goes far beyond IBM's employees. Many other large organizations are strongly influenced by IBM still. In my work as a process improvement consultant, I have seen many people using the Lotus environment, particularly in financial institutions. Does this mean that they too will start using ODF?

As well, as a Mac user myself, and for others using non-MS systems, it will be nice to be able to tell people that IBM uses OpenOffice.org (which will be the shortcut way of telling them that they are using an in-house customized version...) as an incentive / emotional proof that OOo is viable for their own use.

I was really interested in sleep stuff when I was in college. A bunch of friends and I started a club called the "8 Year Club". We figured out that if we could train ourselves to work with just 4 hours of sleep per night, we could gain back 8 years of extra "life". We were really excited about this and figured that if we could support each other, we'd be able to get through the tough part and make it a real habit in our lives. We stopped after about a week.

You said:

Reason, which is the only mechanism through which we ever make progress...

Music, drama, storytelling, paintings, sculpture, dance, video games, comics, movies, child rearing,...

Nope, no progress coming from those. I guess you must be right - reason is the only mechanism.

Yup. Sure does! Of course, you might want to consider it a model rather than THE system. Another interesting thing: operates entirely through voluntary donations exclusively from members. There are no taxes in the sense of forced payment to the government. There are definitely prescribed systems for the donations, but they are _always_ left to the conscience of the individual members.

Mishkin.