Last Saturday the International Documentary Festival Amsterdam was officially opened with the screening of Episode 3, Renzo Martens ‘piece of art’ about poverty in Africa; Congo to be precise. The screening left no one untouched I guess. People were mad, astound, nauseated, sad, or felt powerless. For a documentary to do that, is quite an achievement I think. Afterwards the creator commented on his documentary, and one remark caught it all to my opinion. On a question about his intentions with the film, Martens replied: “well, there’s no real difference between there and here, it’s just different lifestyles.”

As we were visiting the Leaders in Dubai conference this week, Tom Peters, one of the keynote speakers mentioned a famous quote made by legendary auto executive Lee Iacocca: “as goes General Motors, so goes the nation“. He had made the remark years before the current crisis, but with the dooming bankruptcy of the automobile giant, the quote seems to cast a dark shadow on the United States. Will GM indeed go bankrupt and what will that do to the States? Obama feels GM needs to be saved, helping the company with additional funds to survive. And as it so happens, that was the topic of a recent discussion we had with our friends at Coburn Ventures…

Yesterday I met up with Doug Neal, who was introduced to me by Pip Coburn, one of our longtime partners in discussions on change. Doug is research fellow at the Leading Edge Forum, and has a focus on innovation through technology. Recently he has been working on developing a holistic view around the challenges and opportunities of sustainability issues. He’s concluded that if we were able to reduce all computer power use to zero, we would have solved only 2% of the problem. So the question now is how can IT help to address the other 98%?

Last Tuesday Kishore Mahbubani lectured at Felix Meritis in Amsterdam. For those of you who have not heard him talk, or are unaware of the basic premise of his book ‘The New Asian Hemisphere‘ check out this episode of the Dutch TV-show Tegenlicht. Mahbubani argues that Asia will be one of the new world dominating powers, because they have now implemented the 7 pilars of Western wisdom. It was a terribly organized event, but still Mahbubani’s idea’s provide for a nice perspective on the growth of Asia. Was it provoking? Not really, to my opinion…

A couple of weeks ago while traveling I picked up a copy of the Harvard Business Review that had an article in it about creativity at Pixar animation studios written by co-founder Ed Catmull. Although written as an article, to my opinion it might as well have been the most valuable strategic document of the company. Why? Well, it’s a detailed description of the creative process inside the animation studio. And as we often say: the future is not empowered by technology, but by creativity.

Last week I talked to various people, amongst them John Gray, Charles Leadbeater and Daniel Cohen. All interesting talks about society, technology and of course, the economy. I all asked them if they thought we’d come to the end of an era. Namely the end of capitalism. Yes, they all answered, we’ve come to the end of capitalism in the sense of the ‘financial capitalism’: the system that has lead to the build up of tremendous wealth creation in the financial sector. But we are still far from the eradication of capitalism as the ideology on which a society operates…

Last week I talked to various people, amongst them John Gray, Charles Leadbeater and Daniel Cohen. All interesting talks about society, technology and of course, the economy. I all asked them if they thought we’d come to the end of an era. Namely the end of capitalism. Yes, they all answered, we’ve come to the end of capitalism in the sense of the ‘financial capitalism’: the system that has lead to the build up of tremendous wealth creation in the financial sector. But we are still far from the eradication of capitalism as the ideology on which a society operates…

I’m not an economist. I don’t understand anything of market crashes and credit crisis, failing banks, why they’ve failed and what the solution to ‘the problem’ is. I have however been in media and marketing for a while now. I’ve talked to many people in the advertising business and media industry, all struggling to captivate an audience or to spread their message. Somehow I’m getting the impression that we are witnessing the biggest viral marketing event in the history of media. Unfortunately it’s not the kind of campaign anybody is waiting for…