April Newsletter 2010

April 2010 Newsletter Articles:

Why we send these newsletters and why do we bother writing the way we do?
By Yoram Yahav

Yoram Yahav

“Such notes makes me feel even stronger about the need to continue writing from the heart and if one such short article where I shared my most intimate thoughts helps others, then it is worth it.”
We have been writing these newsletters for over six years. It started as an after thought when a friend told me that it would be wise to enrich others with the lessons we learned at TIM and now at Yoyah.

Since then, we have grown and our mailing list includes people from over ninety countries representing a wide variety of thoughts and roles. Recently, a friend asked if my newsletter section, (other sections are featured by Prof. Shlomo Maital and more) which resonates to some extent an emotional non-conventional writing, gets the type of response I would expect.

We do receive indeed an overwhelming amount of responses every month so I decided to approach two conservative executives in the States and England and asked for their honest opinions. I thought one of the responses reflects the reason why we write the way we write: More…

What we can learn from Greece’s crisis?
By Prof. Shlomo Maital
“Greece is not wise.  Hopefully it will be clever.   But don’t bet on it. What can we learn from Greece’s debt crisis?  This is the question raised by Paul Krugman in his recent New York Times column.”
It is an “I’ve painted myself in the corner” problem.  Greece is in the EU, adopted the euro (abandoning the drachma) and now cannot devalue its currency to boost its economy.  It is stuck with the euro.  It could withdraw from the euro zone, but that would cause a huge run against Greek bonds and stocks.  Greece cannot raise interest rates, because those are now set by the ECB, the European Central Bank.

Greece cannot ‘inflate’ to reduce the debt burden, as other nations have done in history, because, frankly, what Greece needs to do is deflate,  lower its wages, prices and costs in order to become more competitive within Europe.  But if it deflates, the debt burden becomes much more onerous, rather than less so.More….

The rise of information, the decline of knowledge and why we need foresight now?
By Debbie Meltzer
“Some are hailing Strategic Foresight as the meta-discipline of the 21st Century:  The degree of volatility affecting technology, economics, environmental sustainability and idea-creation increasingly calls for a new set of skills to navigate possible, probable and preferable futures…”
The other day, while chewing on a badly charcoaled barbequed chicken, my cousin, a current affairs TV editor lamented about the new generation of researchers: “Media researchers today she said are merely information agents – they simply relay data. They seldom use learning skills to make sense of what they download at the whim of a click.” And to think – we the public willingly consume these pulverized sound bites slickly packaged by my cousin and her colleagues every time we switch on the box….

This reminds me of one of Jefferson’s famous old comments: “the one who reads the newspapers is worse off than the one who reads none at all.” So much for today’s information super highways! Sure, they opened us to roaring torrents of data. But in hindsight they haven’t stopped a global financial crisis, prevented massive climate change, halted an oncoming debt crisis or cured poverty. Why? Because just having data streamed at our head is meaningless unless we start filtering it! More…