Op Ed: Personal Dialog Attack
Violates Principle of Purpose

Corporate Social Responsibility has been under study by the writer since the early ‘70s.

Walt Kelly's most famous creation is "Pogo".

(BEND, Ore.) - “We has met the enemy, and he is us”, stated Pogo, in what has become a world-famous situation-summary now seen as directly applicable to many open channels designed for shared learnings.

The rapid growth of Internet offerings, both source and ongoing channels offering interchange and participant comment, has made Pogo’s painful findings into highly current common/sense.

What is also highly evident is what we must do about it, of ourselves, by ourselves and for ourselves - in these same channels now open to us via 21st Century technologies never known before.

(Necessity for public statement offering obvious answers to the needs demonstrated right here in this channel in recent days, was proven via “seen with own eyes” for many readers, prompting this professionally-prepared report for your convenience.)

What is happening within these new technological channels --and Salem-News is also suffering from the same phenomenon --is foreseen in the key “founding-fathers/type” statement widely-applied for learning-media/channels.

THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE was originally conceived and carried through to improve all levels of group communications.

Written by Peter M. Senge, now Senior Lecturer, MIT/Sloan School of Management, and founding partner of Innovation Associates, this famed summary of many studies, over several past decades, resulting in the author’s renowned and resounding summing-up, is “by no means theoretical” nor the result of works “produced by non-participant academic non-doers.”

In 1990, FORTUNE Magazine’s review stated: “Forget your old, tired ideas about leadership. The most successful corporation of the 1990’s will be something called a learning organization.”

FORTUNE Magazine is itself a major bastion of capitalism and surely not open to any accusations of either socialist or Marxian leanings.

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Every study included in the author’s work is a strong field exercise carried out at actual working levels, involving humans in heavy-issue and other group communications activities.

Most involve actual “workers learning on the job how to do better what must be done to produce, ship, market and manage actual production involving standard business processes, usually within the corporate format.”

This seminal book, now famed worldwide, involves direct-action at many large cooperative/conglomerate levels, providing the practical principles for much wider wise-actions assisting and strengthening the shared-learnings concept wherever now required in 21st Century application of new-and-proven learning/knowledge.

That concept -”now proven not only effective but even eventually profit-producing”-- has become a demanded, widely used learning resource guide internationally, and universally among many nations.

The book is in fact among the basics from which the now-also historic Boston Summit On The Future Of the Corporation In The 21st Century.

Held not to bury capitalism but to recognize and remedy its many world-experienced difficulties and dangers, driven by the definitely overwhelming fascistic dangers now highly evident from and within corporations everywhere, the recent Summit sessions set new historic events in a famed American Revolution context.

Faneuil Hall is wellknown as “The Cradle of Liberty”, site of civic debate since 1742, involving many of the Founding Fathers and others famed for democracy-development; and definitely never known for any level of “socialist” sympathies, understood and studied even then.

Can you image Ben Franklin’s response if any such irrational, irresponsible silly clamor had ever reached his ears? Who knows, with old Ben --he might just be tuned in, somehow, from somewheres...!!

The Summit is the culmination of three years full bore work and cooperating involving hundreds of leadership participants from civil society, government, labor, corporate management, academia --now being put into practice as the 21st Century working level of Corporate Social Responsibility, an ongoing theme for Salem-News, under study by the writer since the early ‘70s.

It is our privilege to bring you this report, offsetting unprincipled statements traceable to sources known to have serious conflict-of-interest complications. It is also a well-recognized professional journalistic responsibility to do so, in the face of malignant attack intended to damage a key process of our democracy.

Would you buy a used vehicle from a seller steadily refusing to identify self-and-self/interests? Business location and personal information re salesman and colleagues? Background knowledge, training, experience from which to serve you well?

Why do so for key ideas on which democracy was founded, and must still maintain its balance to become even more progressive?

Fear and name-calling are among the oldest --and now becoming the weakest-- tricks-in-the-book left to “those others” Pogo was clearly reporting found at work.
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Reader’s Note: Pogo is the lead character in Walt Kelly’s famous comic strip first appearing in 1948, famed for its satirical social and political commentary in that coruscating medium.

The seminal book is THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE: The Art & Pactice of The Learning Organization; Peter M. Senge; Doubleday/Currency; 1990; ISBN 0-385-26094-6

The major new findings and conclusions of the Faneuil Hall-based Boston Summit on The Corporation were overviewed in a preceding Op Ed here (12/1/07). A second Op Ed discussing and documenting the Summit’s Six Principles for Corporate Redesign will follow shortly. Source for the Summit report materials is info@corporation 2020.org or website www.corporation2020.org.