There is an empty chair at the conference table of business professionals, a not assigned place that increasingly demands for the presence of a new type of integration manager. The demands for an ever-increasing specialization, imposed by the modern world, are bringing out with great emphasis the need for an interdisciplinary professional who understands the demands of specialists and who is able to coordinate and to link actions and decisions. This need, often still ignored, is a direct result of the growing complexity of the modern world and the fast communications inside the network.
“Complexity” is undoubtedly the most suitable paradigm to characterize the historical and social model of today’s world, in which the interactions and connections between the various areas now form an inextricable network of relations. Since the ’60s and’ 70s a large group of scholars – including the chemist Ilya Prigogine and the physicist Murray Gell-Mann – began to study what would become a true Science of Complexity.
Yet this is not an entirely new concept: the term means “composed of several parts connected to each other and dependent on each other“, exactly as reality, nature, society, and the environment around us. A “complex” mode of thought integrates and considers all contexts, interconnections, interrelationships between the different realities as part of the vision.
What is professionalism? And who are professionals? What can define a professional? <…>
<Read More…[by Fabio Marzocca]>
In the perennial search of the meaning of life and the fundamental laws that govern nature, man was always faced – for millennia – with the mysterious concept of emptiness. What is emptiness? Does it really exist in nature? Is emptiness the non-being, as theorized by Parmenides?
For centuries man has hunted, he brought the animals to pasture, cultivated fields and sailed the seas without any kind of tool to measure time. Back then, the time was not measured, but only estimated with vague approximation and its pace was enough to dictate the steps of the day and the life of man. Subsequently, for many centuries, hourglasses accompanied the civilization with the slow flow of their sand grains. About hourglasses, Ernst Junger writes in “Das Sanduhrbuch – 1954” (no English translation): “This small mountain, formed by all the moments lost that fell on each other, it could be understood as a comforting sign that the time disappears but does not fade. It grows in depth”.
with the Whole and they represent the most pristine prototype of the human being. From birth and for the first years of life, the child is the mirror of our species, who carries in himself the primary elements and the roots of evolution, without conditions or interference.
The “accelerated” world of the Western or “Westernized” countries seems to be fed by an insidious food, which generates a kind of psychological dependence: anxiety. The economy of global markets cannot help it, it has a structural need of it to feed their iron logic of survival. The anxiety generated in the masses of consumers and in market competitors is crucial for Companies fighting each other and now they can only live if men are projected to objective targets continuously moving forward, without ever allowing them to achieve a stable destination.
All the elements making up the majority of the categories of everyday life (feelings, emotions, opinions, values, quality, etc.) cannot be defined in a unique or exact way. Let’s try to define an event that causes severe pain: a hammer blow on the finger? The loss of a loved one? Tooth extraction? It is evident that the answer can vary in a very consistent way, based on the subjectivity of the individual, the environment, boundary conditions and the general context. This is because the “Strong Pain” is a fuzzy set (which we will call SP), characterized by a function of “degree of membership” which maps the elements of a universe in a real continuous interval between 0 and 1. In practical terms…
Julien Ries’ anthropological research showed us that, already more than two million years ago, Homo Habilis looks like Symbolicus, with aesthetic sensibility, sense of symmetry and consciousness of creativity. Gilbert Durand confirms that the specific activity of man, the identity card of Homo Sapiens, is the symbolic activity, an essential part of his creativity. Then, man is creative at the moment when his first activates his imaginative feature.
The first widespread use of the binary code was the Morse code alphabet. For decades, this communication system allowed to transmit information over long distances, between ships in the ocean and the mainland, between one continent and another, and today its use is still active in emergency situations. In its disarming simplicity (connect or interrupt two electrical wires), this system proved to be the shortest way to transcribe an alphabet.