What I Meant To Say ...

... is what I said.

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This past week I had occasion to share an appendix from my book.

To understand the context of the Appendix, you do need to read the book, but that isn’t what this is about, rather it is a graphic that emerged from something that Venkatesh Rao wrote about in 2011 where he mapped the ‘4 forces of nature’ to ‘the human world’.

To catch you up, the 4 forces of nature are beautifully summarized by Randall Munroe at XKCD.

Reproduced with permission under Randall’s Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.5 License.

Venkatesh took that core idea and wrote about the 4 human forces; culture, politics war and business. He even produced a handy dandy graphic - which for me, didn’t do it, so I came up with my own interpretation by first switching out ‘war’ for ‘conflict’ and then mapping the 4 forces on to a 2*2 grid. (Heh. I’m a ‘recovering consultant’ - my ‘2*2s’ will be the last habit I kick as I move through ‘the program’.)

Anyway, back to the plot …

I sent the appendix and got an email back;

You think religion is part of culture?

Ummm no, yes, maybe, it depends … wait .. how did religion get into the conversation? And the asking of that question reminded me of this wonderful image that I once stumbled over.

My apologies, I cannot provide you a source. It just is. If I find it, I will add.

To answer the question, yes I do believe that Religion is part of culture … and conflict and business and politics. You just have to look around to understand that.

But I also believe that religion is absolutely not part of culture … and conflict and business and politics.

I know you understand.

Which brings be to today’s conclusion …

I know this one is outside of the usual People First fayre, so there isn’t really a specific ‘recommendation’ or action plan to help you navigate these waters … except to say that this ‘substack’ is pivoting … but that’s ok. Right?

If you want to help - please do share and share wide with family, friends, colleagues and your social networks. It will be greatly appreciated, gratefully accepted and I thank you in eager anticipation.

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