Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millenium

Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium is an eloquent call for fundamental social change in the face of the overwhelming challenges facing humankind at the start of the new millennium. Well-known futurist Robert Theobald argues that we must adopt new goals for the 21st century if humankind is to continue to inhabit the planet. Challenging the current dogma of maximum economic growth, globalization and international competitiveness, Theobald maintains that our whole notion of 'success' requires a complete overhaul: that the required criteria of success for the next phase of human social evolution are ecological integrity and a respect for all of nature, effective participatory decision-making, and social cohesion based on profoundly changed concepts of justice. These radically changed goals force us to radically reconstruct our communities. Reworking Success documents the steady slide of 'successes' into failures that characterize the latter part of this century, and then describes the new role that citizens are adopting in helping to create new kinds of success today and in the future. Reworking Success was originally written to be broadcast nationally for a prestigious annual Canadian lecture series. The author adopted an unusually democratic and participatory process in developing the lectures by placing the texts on the Internet for public input and feedback which he then incorporated into the final work. Robert Theobald is a speaker, consultant and writer who has been on the leading edge of fundamental change issues throughout his forty-year career; he has worked with business and labor, education and health, government and local communities. Widely published, he is the author of over 25 books that deal with change, economics, and related issues, recent titles including Turning the Century (1993) and The Rapids of Change (1987). A British citizen, he has lived in several countries, and now resides in New Orleans. 128 pages.