The announcement last week that Bill Gates would, over the next two years, relinquish day to day oversight of Microsoft made me think about history and the future.  The first thought of course was that in some way it was the end of an era. The second thought was, well, what era, where does that fit historically, and how will it be described in history books in the future? The third thought was that there might be some precedent to Gates’ decision worth investigating.

The Transition into the Information Age

When Gates founded Microsoft with Paul Allen in 1975, the United States was …

This is a departure from most posts here as it is not ruminations about some event or trend or prediction about the future gleaned from developments in the world.  Instead it is taken from a personal experience that was unique, pleasant and perhaps an idea to be embraced by individuals and companies alike.

To set the scene, one which is all too familiar to most readers, I was sitting on a United Airlines plane at O’Hare, waiting to pull away from the gate for the 4:30p departure to Newark.  The full plane was soon told that, due to a fast moving …

The post today is an interview I recently did with Nonprofit Online Learning Update, which is being published on-line today. The interviewer was Jeff Cobb, a leader in the field of on-line learning for non-profits. Non-profits provide an incredibly valuable function in today’s world and can be even more influential in the future as they can become networks of like minded people, organized around ideas, issues, professions and agendas.

As the biographical note at the top of the interview points out, my father, Cyril O. Houle was not only the man who most popularized the phrase ‘life …

“The political party, as currently defined in America, feels like an out of date, anachronistic apparatus whose value is in the past, not the present and certainly not something aligned with the future.  If it is to survive, it must reconstitute itself or crumble under its own dead weight.”   -www.evolutionshift.com 5/31/06

When I set aside any personal and political points of view and look at the state of electoral politics and the two party structure in the United States, I absolutely believe the above statement to be true.  As mentioned in earlier posts, we are in one of those historically