One of the advantages of helping others learn English is that I get to learn while I do it. I have learned unexpected stuff about high finance, human resources, and leadership development. Beyond that, the 'learners' frequently give me new cultural insights and a deeper understanding of the Turkish language. While teaching is possibly an unusual way to learn and expand one's horizons in new areas, it is a quite enjoyable one.
In the last two weeks, I've gone through an article titled 'Beyond the heroic CEO: the changing challenge of leadership' which was required reading for one student. Peter Hawkins says a number of useful things in this article, but I particularly appreciated the section about the challenges this world faces today and the ways in which we should approach them. While you certainly may not agree with all of the challenges he mentions (I don't), the vastness of the challenges facing the world is hardly overestimated, and a huge proportion of the world's population sees these issues as serious struggles which need answers. He writes:
The challenge would be great if we were just facing global warming or population explosion or technological interconnectedness or the volatility and fragility of the financial markets or the exhaustion of accessible oil supplies or the extinction of species at a rate 1,000 times greater than ever before; but we are not. We are facing a world where all of these challenges and many more are happening in a systemically complex web of interconnecting forces, at an exponentially accelerating rate so that no expert can possibly understand the whole pattern, let alone know how to address it. (emphasis mine)For a fascinating example of how the world's 'next tallest building' actually interacts at a greater or lesser level with each of the issues which Hawkins mentions, check out this article (and its accompanying video) which I came across completely separately.
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