The Role of Productivity in Community Success - The Jesuit-Guarani Cultural Confluence (Paperback)

(Note: This material appeared previously in Chum For Thought: Throwing Ideas into Dangerous Waters by the same author.) This historical essay, drawn from the deepest jungles of Uruguay in South America, examines the creation of a flourishing culture and economy that lasted for almost two centuries. It explores the guided development of a virtuous web of social and economic controls that mixed the philosophy of Catholic Jesuit missionaries with the traditions of the native Guarani peoples. An unprecedented experiment in progressive community-building may have once created that rarest of cultural treasures - a functional and stable utopia... ended only by outside pressures of conquest and exploitation. This is a living parable for our changing world, now suffering from seemingly-intractable political, cultural and economic turmoil... and struggling to be born into a tenuous future on uncertain threads of hope and despair. Rapid introduction of technology, educational systems, health care systems and social order have succeeded before - balancing competition and consumption in a new kind of community - and might be made to work again as we seek to create our own new economy. In this startling synthesis, Mr. Satterlee brings together and introduces: historical records, the social theories of the Catholic Church, the management theories of Peter Drucker, the psycho-social theories of Don Beck's Spiral Dynamics Integral, and the economics ideas of William Lewis and the McKinsey Global Institute on the power of productivity.