David Korten
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Dr. David C. Korten is an author and an outspoken critic of corporate globalization. He is probably best known as the author of the book When Corporations Rule the World. His most recent book is Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth.
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[edit] Personal life and early career
David Korten was born in Longview, Washington in 1937 and is a 1955 graduate of Longview's R. A. Long high school. He received a Master of Business Administration and PhD from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. He served during the Vietnam War as a captain in the United States Air Force.
Korten is married to Fran Korten, publisher of YES Magazine. He has two daughters and two grand daughters and lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington.
[edit] Korten's models
In When Corporations Rule the World, Korten used two models to describe humanity's relationship with Earth — the "cowboy" model and the "spaceship" model. According to the cowboy model, most people view Earth as having plenty of resources to support the human race and believe that these resources are constantly being renewed. In reality, says Korten, Earth is more like a space capsule in that resources are much more limited and steps must be taken to renew them actively.
[edit] Career and main body of work
He served as the Harvard Business School adviser to the Nicaragua-based Central American Institute of Business Administration. He subsequently joined the staff of the Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project to strengthen the organization and management of national family planning programs.
In the late 1970s, Korten left US academia and moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly 15 years. There, he served as a Ford Foundation project specialist, and later as Asia regional advisor on development management to the United States Agency for International Development (USAID).
His work in Asia gained international recognition for its pioneering contribution to the development of strategies for transforming public bureaucracies into responsive support systems dedicated to strengthening community control and management of land, water, and forestry resources.
Disillusioned by what he came to see as an inability of USAID and other large official aid donors to strengthen community control over their natural resources, Korten broke with the official aid system. His last five years in Asia were devoted to working with leaders of Asian nongovernmental organizations on identifying the root causes of development failure in the region and building the capacity of civil society organizations to function as strategic catalysts of national- and global-level change. Korten came to believe that the crisis of deepening poverty, growing inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration he was observing in Asia was also being experienced in nearly every country in the world, including the United States and other "developed" countries. Furthermore he concluded that the United States was actively promoting—both at home and abroad—the very policies that were deepening the resulting global crisis. For the world to survive, the US must change.
He returned to the US in 1992 to help advance that change. He has since had a leading role in raising public consciousness of the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, equity, and environmental health.
Korten is co-founder and board chair of Positive Futures Network, which publishes YES! A Journal of Positive Futures, a quarterly magazine, a board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, an associate of the International Forum on Globalization.[1], and a member of the Club of Rome.
[edit] Bibliography
- Getting to the 21st Century: Voluntary Action and the Global Agenda (1990)
- When Corporations Rule the World (1995 / Second Edition 2001)
- The Post-Corporate World: Life After Capitalism
- Globalizing Civil Society: Reclaiming Our Right to Power
- The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community. Berrett-Koehler. 2006-04-28. ISBN 1-887208-07-0.
- Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth 2009 Berrett-Koehler ISBN 9781605092898
[edit] See also
[edit] References
[edit] External links
- David Korten website
- People-Centered Development Forum
- Great Turning Initiative website
- YES! A Journal of Positive Futures
- Video of David Korten with the Dalai Lama during filming of the documentary Dalai Lama Renaissance[1]
- Conscious Choice - The end of Business as Usual 2007 article on Korten, his work, and an assessment of the significance of "The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community
- "What Can We Learn from the Antiglobalists?" - 5,000-word discussion and critique of Korten's book The Great Turning
- "The Betrayal of Adam Smith" by David C. Korten
- The Great Turning – A reference website for the Great Turning book and a resource list for the Great Turning movement
- The Great Turning Navigators' Wiki
- Manifesto on Global Economic Transitions at the Center for a World in Balance
- The Story of David Korten by Our World in Balance
