Date of issue : Saturday 23rd 2003f August 2003

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This is a virtual magazine for the thinkers and doers of the 21st century.
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Editor: Mario Raich, Ph.D.

This are tough times. On one side the world is permanently on the bring of a recession. Many countries have to address fundamental issues and problems, that will change the social environment.
On the other side the EU heads for the biggest enlargement since the beginning. This will change the landscape of Europe more than most people can foresee. The development of technology has got such a momentum that the biggest changes are still ahead of us. The hottest item today is nanotechnology. Nanotechnology has the potential to change our world and our life completely. Nobody can shy away from it!

Nanotechnology is applying the science of the small. Inherently multi-disciplinary, it brings together physicists, chemists and biologists who are studying, researching and engineering ever smaller and smaller structures. Although still in its infancy, a variety of applications already exist. Nanotechnology is destined to grow rapidly into a global, multi-billion-euro market. It encompasses precision engineering as well as electronics - materials as well as biomedical applications. Science at the nanoscale - measured in billionths of a meter - is technology on the atomic scale.
http://europa.eu.int/comm/research/growth/gcc/projects/in-action-nanotechnology.html

Since ages thinkers and philosophers are debating whether there is something like the real world outside of our mind, or if this are mere illusions.
What we get are just perceptions from the world outside us and from within.
The fact that we are using the language, build on words to describe the world does not make things easier. Words are only vehicles conveying our understanding of what we see and of what we think.
We all have our own individual vision of the world and we don't have automatically a shared reality with other people.
Language is a wonderful tool for communication, but it is also very limiting. Every time we try to express our emotions or feelings we experience this limitation.
It is difficult, sometime even impossible to transfer information between people, because information is not just stored in our brain like in computer, it is woven into a very individual context.
I am inclined to think that we recreate the information from the perceptions and the information we have already in our brain. Like knowledge that is never transferred or transmitted, but is recreated in our mind based on the knowledge that has been made public and the knowledge we already have stored.

Reality comes from 'real', 'actual' and 'true'. It is opposite to fiction, fantasy, dream and 'false'. Today we have in addition to this the 'virtual reality'. The question is, is the virtual reality something different from the physical or the mental reality?
Is virtual reality different from fiction or fantasy? The virtual reality seems to be digitized interactive knowledge and fiction. Because what is the difference between a book and the 'stuff' on the web? The book is printed and exists in physical form, the 'stuff' on the web is digitized and exists in electronic form. The main difference is the accessibility (global access) ease of transmission, the space they need, the immense capability of storage and the invisible form of the 'stuff' on the web. But does the fictive world described in a book exist outside the mind of the writer or the reader? Does the virtual world exist when nobody is accessing it through an access tool?
Never the less he 'virtual reality' is a very significant new element in our life!
Is there anything else having a deep impact on our perception of the world? It seems that the important 'other' things are the knowledge society and the knowledge economy. They are reshaping the world around us and our understanding of the world.
This transformation has also a big effect on our perception of the future. Our perception of the future is similarly dynamic and changing permanently like the world around us.
Our view of the world is becoming more organic and holistic. We are leaving behind of us the linear and hierarchic perception of the world.

It seems that we are only able to discover the world around us bit by bit. We are limited by our conceptual capability. We see only what we are looking for.
Anything that does not fall into our view of the things gets played down or ignored.
It takes a lot of creativity, courage and persistence to perceive the difference, the misfits an the exceptions to our view of the world.
It seems that we are so concerned to link our perceptions to our world view, that we are discarding anything that could disturb our understanding of the world. We are not well equipped to deal with the different and the exceptions!
I wonder what a world it would be, where the exceptions would be the rule.
Maybe is everything what we perceive and everything we understand limited by the capability of pour perception an dour understanding.
We all have our own perception and understanding of reality, but a part of it is common. It is the part expressed by our science, our culture and the society we are living in.
This part of the reality is definitively changing.

It looks like the 'open thinking' described earlier will be the best way to deal successfully with the emerging 'New Reality'.

The 'bad news' of the New Reality is certainly the fact, that if you have a good idea, somebody else has certainly already focused on it. And if you thing that something is impossible, at least a dozen projects are working on it.
The 'good news' are that everybody is in such a hurry, that he has no time for quality and everything becomes superficial. Therefore the second movers can often avoid expensive mistakes of the pioneers and deliver higher quality.

We are creating our own reality. We shall therefore never forget hat we usually confined to our 'own-reality-box' and believe that this is the real world, and that everybody else perceives it the same way. Some people even force their own reality on other people. Some of the worst nightmares of the human history are due to this. Just think about all the crimes and wars caused by religion. Think about the fallacy of the nazis and the fallacy of communism.

We have a wonderful opportunity to learn from the mistakes of the human history and to do it better, but reality is never exactly what you expect.

The world is much more complex that the human mind can imagine it!

We live in an age where several strong forces are shaping the human society and the economy. Just to name some of the most important: Globalization, new Technology, Information and Knowledge. We can watch how the traditional world is crumbling and how a new world is emerging.
In this paper we have looked at the effects of Globalization on the Corporate Culture.
It becomes evident that a new culture, the 'global culture' is developing. It looks like also that in the near future we will have four major political and cultural centers linked through economic globalization, but with distinct models of the corporate culture based on its cultural roots. The 'global' corporations will be originating from all four centers.
People have dreams, corporations too. They call it “visions”. The global companies have the vision of a world open to trade, without barriers for the movement of capital, goods and services and people as well. But every “global” company looks at it from its origins. Since the majority of the global companies today has US roots, it is not surprising, that the US vision of the is dominating. This leads to sometime strong reactions. We will see more violent actions in the years to come. It will take at least one to two generations for the world to stabilize.
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