From vision to action: Framing the Leitbild concept in the context of landscape planning

Reviewing landscape developments in the last decades evidently shows that in the future most pressing changes can be expected for the land surface. This indispensably calls for strategic approaches based on visions and transdisciplinary creativity. Hence, this paper critically reviews the Leitbild concept, an idea on spatial planning which has been widely discussed in the German-speaking planning literature but which has received scant attention elsewhere. Although the term has been translated as a ‘vision’, this paper shows that the concept is far richer in its content than these casual translations suggest. The paper shows that it defines a particular paradigm for landscape planning that embodies a transdisciplinary approach in which lay-people and experts develop both goals and strategies for realising their joint visions. A systematic overview of the key characteristics that make up the Leitbild approach is provided and set in relation to already available approaches for decision makers. Although there are similarities between the Leitbild approach and other planning and decision-support tools, such as Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA), Strategic Impact Assessment (SEA) and Sustainability Impact Assessment (SIA-sust), the paper shows that the particular combination of issues considered when developing a Leitbild makes it distinctive. Through an iterative process, the development of a Leitbild allows new approaches to spatial planning in which space and place can be considered as a social construct, and in which the values and understandings of local actors can be better represented.     

From affirmative action to affirming diversity

Affirmative action is based on a set of 30-year-old premises that badly need revising. White males are no longer dominant at every level of the corporation (statistically, they are merely the largest of many minorities), while decades of attack have noticeably weakened racial and gender prejudices. At the intake level, affirmative action quite effectively sets the stage for a workplace that is gender-, culture-, and color-blind. But minorities and women tend to stagnate, plateau, or quit when they fail to move up the corporate ladder, and everyone's dashed hopes lead to corporate frustration and a period of embarrassed silence, usually followed by a crisis-and more recruitment. Some companies have repeated this cycle three or four times. The problem is that our traditional image of assimilating differences-the American melting pot-is no longer valid. It's a seller's market for skills, and the people business has to attract are refusing to be melted down. So companies are faced with the task of managing unassimilated diversity and getting from it the same commitment, quality, and profit they once got from a homogeneous work force. To reach this goal, we need to work not merely toward culture- and color-blindness but also toward an openly multicultural workplace that taps the full potential of every employee without artificial programs, standards, or barriers. The author gives his own ten guidelines for learning to manage diversity by learning to understand and modify your company's culture, vision, assumptions, models, and systems.     

Transforming corner-office strategy into frontline action

When CEOs push decision making out to the far reaches of an organization, good things happen: fleeting business opportunities are seized quickly and workers are motivated to innovate and take risks. But it's tricky to achieve both decentralized decision making and coherent strategic action at a company. If everyone is a decision maker, things can spin out of control. In this article, Bain consultants Orit Gadiesh and James Gilbert explore the concept of the strategic principle--a memorable and actionable phrase that distills a company's corporate strategy into its unique essence and communicates it across an organization. If it's devised and disseminated properly, a strategic principle can empower employees to seize business opportunities but also focus everyone in an organization--executives and line managers alike--on the same strategic objectives. The authors outline the three defining characteristics of a good strategic principle--it should force trade-offs between competing resource demands, it should serve as a test for the strategic soundness of a particular action, and it should set clear boundaries for employees to operate within even as it grants them freedom to experiment. They explain how managers can create a strategic principle, how they should test it, and when they should revisit it. The authors present real-world examples of how companies use their strategic principles. For instance, they describe how South-west Airlines stopped flying to Denver after it measured the high costs of providing flight service in that part of the country against its strategic principle of offering customers short-haul air travel at fares competitive with the cost of automobile travel. This tool is increasingly useful in today's rapidly changing business environment, the authors conclude, and it is likely to become even more crucial to corporate success.     

The kinesthetic speaker. Putting action into words

Speeches and presentations offer an interesting catch-22: executives don't want to spend long hours creating them, and people don't want to sit for long hours listening to them. Ultimately, though, executives can't live without them. That's because a good speech or presentation has the power to inspire people to act on the speaker's behalf and create change. Author Nick Morgan, a longtime speech-writer and speaking coach, says what's most often lacking in today's speeches and presentations is what he calls the "kinesthetic connection." Many good speakers connect aurally with their audiences, telling dramatic stories and effectively pacing their speeches to hold people's attention. Others connect visually, with a vivid film clip or a killer slide. Some people do both, but not many also connect kinesthetically. Morgan says the kinesthetic speaker feeds an audience's primal hunger to experience a presentation on a physical, as well as an intellectual, level. Through awareness of their own physical presence--gestures, posture, movements--and through the effective use of the space in which they present, kinesthetic speakers can create potent nonverbal messages that reinforce their verbal ones. In this article, Morgan describes techniques for harnessing kinesthetic power and creating a sense of intimacy with an audience--a closeness that is more widely expected from speakers since the advent of television. For instance, kinesthetic speakers should make use of audience proxies--individuals in the crowd who serve as representatives for the others. Ultimately, the author says, a speech or presentation offers something of great value to business executives: it's the best vehicle for winning trust from large groups of people--be they employees, colleagues, or share-holders.     

The vision trap

At Mentor Graphics Corporation, Gerry Langeler was the executive responsible for vision, and vision, he discovered, has the power to weaken a strong company. Mentor helped to invent design-automation electronics in the early 1980s, and by the end of the decade, it dominated the industry. In its early days, fighting to survive, Mentor's motto was Build Something People Will Buy. Then when clear competition emerged in the form of Daisy Systems, a startup that initially outsold Mentor, the watchword became Beat Daisy. Both "visions" were pragmatic and immediate. They gave Mentor a sense of purpose as it developed its products and gathered momentum. Once Daisy was beaten, however, company vision began to self-inflate. As Mentor grew more and more successful, Langeler formulated vision statements that were more and more ambitious, grand, and inspirational. The company traded its gritty determination to survive for a dream of future glory. The once explicit call for effective action became a fervid cry for abstract perfection. The first step was Six Boxes, a transitional vision that combined goals for success in six business areas with grandiose plans to compete with IBM at the level of billion-dollar revenues. From there, vision stepped up to the 10X Imperative, a quality-improvement program that focused on arbitrary goals and measures that were, in fact, beyond the company's control. The last escalation came when Mentor Graphics decided to Change the Way the World Designs. The company had stopped making product and was making poetry. Finally, in 1991, after six years of increasing self-infatuation, Mentor hit a wall of decreasing indicators. Langeler, who had long since begun to doubt the value of abstract visions, reinstated Build Something People Will Buy. And Mentor was back to basics, a sense of purpose back to its workplace.     

A vision of futures studies

The article looks at futures studies from the point of view of the author who has spent over 30 years in the field, with special reference to the World Futures Studies Federation. It suggests that visions are essential for conducting futures studies and education in futures studies is vital for preparing future oriented new generations. The author points out that around the world women are developing silent alternatives to the present societies geared to conflict and violence; this may lead to non-violent changes of which many are not aware. Futures studies will also benefit from examining futures of cultures as we seem to be developing a new culture of peace.     

高利贷:从国际到国内的思考

在互联网上搜索一下，关于高利贷的内容有60多万条!据统计，从1502年到1875年关于高利贷的书籍、文章和相关史料就多达3000多件。很显然，这是一个十分复杂和具有感情色彩的话题，也是让经济学家和史学家流连忘返的肥沃土地。 人类社会自从产生借贷关系以来，关于高利贷的争论从来没有停止过。早在公元前1800年巴比伦法典     

Internationalisation and a post-development vision

The best futures concepts are simple and can be taken up by many people to help create much-needed shifts in perception.[1]However, the change process is not easy. Futures concepts and techniques continue to challenge my thinking and my work in the professional development of academic staff. From a basis in multicultural education and cross-cultural curriculum development, this article explores some issues of internationalisation of education within the context of a post-development vision of the future.[2]Despite the current emphasis on internationalisation as educating for profit, it remains an opportunity to develop education with the planet in mind.     

Enacting the vision for sustainable development

Utopia, as a concept, is now used with varying intentions, engendering semantic confusion. When substituted with the notion of visioning, it can be also problematic, if sometimes for different reasons. An implicit engagement in visioning is examined in a community-based futures process for creating a strategy for the sustainable management of natural resources in the Mary River catchment, in Queensland, Australia. It is found that visioning, if it can be binding and impelling for common-interest groups, can be just as unrealistically utopian, or as slippery as the scaly creatures it is trying to protect, when applied afresh to a community exploring change from a variety of initial ideals and needs. It may be seen as an emergent property of active learning.     

The death of the urban vision?

Debate on the future city has changed greatly in the last 20 years. From visions of a distant, orderly and mobile Utopia, peopled with enlightened ‘modern man’, concerns have become more sporadic and less coherent, determined by economic recession and the need to preserve existing urban social fabric rather than with the need to plan holistically for the city of the future. However, there should be no return to the earlier modernist visions, which lacked sufficient social understanding (as illustrated by failed experiments with highrise flats in the UK). Planning for the city of the future must be based on realistic societal needs.     

走向混业经营--迎接入世后金融业面临的挑战

加入WTO后 ,金融业如何迎接挑战的问题 ,迫在眉睫。混业经营的焦点和难点是打通商业银行和证券机构之间的藩篱。真正的挑战是在过渡期之后 ,尤其是修改商业银行法之后。我们必须利用好这段时间 ,熟悉游戏规则和进行人才准备 ,开发金融产品新品种 ,提高市场覆盖面 ;展开全方位实验 ,扩大混业金融集团的覆盖面     

来自公司

中国人寿注册资本10亿人民币设立财险公司中国人寿保险股份有限公司日前宣布,已与母公司中国人寿保险(集团)公司订立发起人协议,设立中国人寿财产保险股份有限公司,注册资本总额为10亿元人民币,中国人寿将出资4亿元,持股40％母公司出资6亿元,持股60％。新公司的筹建已获中国保监会批准。国寿财险主要经营保险业务,包括财产损失保险、责任保险、法定责任保险、信用     

来自丹麦IFU

从1987年至今中国已成为IFU最重要的投资国之一.IFU协同丹麦及中国公司在中国创建了40个项目.我们的投资涉及多种工业领域,包括生物化学、远洋货运、汽车配件、医疗保健、供热、印刷、顾问、食品、服装、家具等等.     

来自公司

财政部财政科学研究所首届MPAcc学员毕业典礼暨学位授予仪式隆重举行2007年10月22日,财政部财政科学研究所首届MPAcc学员毕业典礼暨学位授予仪式在北京市新知大厦隆重举行。财政部会计司司长、全国MPAcc教育指导委员会副主任刘玉廷,财政部财政     

来自公司

中信资源斥资9740万美元买下印尼油田51％权益；中石化拟发债融资约200亿元斥35亿购集团资产；华润收编华源8家公司于旗下；中国互联网投资额创下历史新低；用友软件拟实施股权激励计划。     

来自公司

跨国并购成境外投资主力 民企逐步成为生力军；中海油22亿美元购尼日利亚海上石油开采许可权；中石化加快私有化；中石油和印度公司中标加拿大在叙利亚油气资产；兴业银行引入境外战略投资者两年后资产翻番。