Basic info can be found at bio and vita
Currently I am titled Distinguished Visiting Scholar at Stanford’s Media X Project. I am President of the privately held Shakespeare and Tao Consulting, and do some private practice of philosophical psychoanalysis. I’ve just finished the draft of a book, GardenWorld Politics. Now to find a publisher.
My goal is to use the education I’ve had to make a better world. Blessed with great teachers, Wilson Parkhill, David Kreps, Melba Carpenter, Linus Pauling, Richard Feynman, Alfred Stern, David Eliot, Paul Feyerabend, Karl Popper, Jonas Langer, Jean Piaget, Jerome Brunner, Giorgio De Santillana, Jerry Lettvin, Erik Erikson, Erich Fromm, Michael Maccoby, Eric Trist, Napier Collyns.. and through books, Kenneth Burke, Ernst Cassirer, Eric Voegelin, Martha Nussbaum, Philip Mirowski, Roberto Ungar, Keith Hart… and many others, I can only feel humbled - and energized. I’ve been blessed by being able to cross institutional lines. From physics at Caltech, where I became more interested in the personalities of scientists then the science they spoke so passionately, Oppenheimer helped me get to Berkeley where I did my doctoral dissertation in child development on Irony, related to rhetoric. My first two years was supported by a grant from Carnegie on what were then (1961) called “teaching machines”, and wrote some programs to teach metaphor. Meeting Feyerabend gave me a grasp on the realities of science, and Erik Erikson’s visiting year gave me renewed interest in psychoanalysis. I took Kroeber’s last course, sat in on courses by Kuhn and Popper, and thoroughly enjoyed myself except for the then new Tolman Hall, one of the worst academic buildings I’ve ever been in. I was fortunate to live in a Maybeck house in Kennsington during those years, made more interesting with the Free Speech Movement and the heart moving thought of Mario Savio. I spent two years on a post doc at Brunner’s Center For Cognitive Studies at Harvard, and had some influence with my Irony dissertation, and taught a seminar in the School of Architecture called “Using drama theory to understand architectural spaces.” I developed a life long abhorrence of the narrow academic approach to cognition. I turned down Jim March’s offer to head the about to open psych department at Irvine, I felt I was just too innocent. I also got to know Riesman and Erikson, and met Michael Maccoby and out of the mix came an interest and invitation to go to Mexico with Erich Fromm at his Psychoanalytic Institute at the National University. Also got married. Working with Fromm and especially Maccoby gave me a sense of psychoanalysis as a means of social investigation. Living for a few years in Mexico gave me a crucial sense of cultural difference, and the rough politics of 1968. After working on the interviews and on the research team that led to Maccoby’s The Gamesman, we were invited to start consulting. Consulting on my own led to forays into organizations as diverse as the World Bank, the White House, Gore’s National performance Review and Reinventing Government, the State Department, Volvo, MIT, Bell Labs, The World bank, TransCanada Pipeline, and many others. Three wonderful children, Aaron, Rebecca and Seth, and now three grandchildren. Along the way, besides living in Mexico I spent long periods in Italy, France, India, Greece, and Japan, and traveled through Scandinavia and North Africa. In stops in between I was a professor in Mexico, Santa Cruz, Catholic University in Washington (another boundary crossing), and The Washington School of Psychiatry.I was invited to join an on-line computer conversation in 1983, that was one of he earliest and most brilliant ensembles, run by the Western Behavioral Sciences Institute. This led me to become a partner at Metasystems Design, where I pioneered in using computer conferencing software to support consulting projects. I learned from Harrison Owen about Open Space, and started blending those techniques. I was also integrating my drama theory thinking into understanding the drama of organizations, and working with executive teams to discover the drama they were in as a way of redesigning the plot, so to speak. I had watched the rise and fall of “Work Humanization” and the decent of “Knowledge Management” to relatively low level skill harvesting. I started spending time with Napier Collyns and GBN and learned first hand about scenarios, and integrated scenario work into my more active participatory approach to work change, especially with senior teams and overall strategy development. Married again for eight extraordinary years.
Then on a quirk, after hearing client’s anxiety about Y2K in 1998 I wrote a paper, “Who will do what and when will they do it”, which led into deeper strategic consulting about y2k, which led me to the back end mechanics at the Wall Street journal, the Washington Post, the Pentagon, the Greek government and more. I wrote a newsletter called y2k week that was widely read. (I wish I had the audience now).
All along the way I have taught when the opportunity arose, and keep my private psychoanalytic practice, which has been along with consulting a realm of action and reflection, getting to know society through its living lives. I keep looking for a way to create the right kind of broad based social strategy think tank/retreat center, and am currently the Director of the Warnecke Institute for Architecture, Art and design, which integrates my past interests past in a quite thorough way.
I’ve thoroughly enjoyed time spent living in the large space between science and the humanities, and less intensely, in theatrics, classical guitar, painting, dance, swimming, tai chi, yoga, and currently live in one of the most beautiful places, where the Russian River opens out towards the sea…
But the future calls… especially my current book projects, GardenWorld Politics, about the possibility of a political agenda we would all vote for, if it were offered, and Gods, Dreams, Loves and Other Projections, and The Future of Consulting, Also a text book on Psychology for the Social Sciences and Humanities. Stanford’s Media X Project brings me back to thoughts about technology and society.
