The Space of Possibility

Karen-Claire Voss is a voice I've just discovered by courtesy of Shelley Mitchell. I've written of Shelley in an earlier blog - she is the founder of The Actors Center of San Francisco and gained fame and kudos for her one woman performance of Talking with Angels. Shelley embodies the roots of acting as the act of communication between human beings. Her performance of Talking with Angels showcases what acting can be at its very best: communicating via heart, body and soul.

We have so much to learn from this meaning of the craft of acting.

Contrast that to the term "Customer intimacy" as its used in business today.

Can we really take that to mean that a business is really committed to developing authentic meaningful relationships with their customers?

Acting has suffered from the same deterioration in meaning.

From a supreme act of communication, acting now conjures up images of "faking it" "emotional manipulation"

We in business must be careful when we use terms like customer intimacy that there is genuine intent and real operational heft supporting such a claim.

'Ware! A customer tricked is a customer lost.


Now, back to Karen-Claire Voss who speaks wisely from Istanbul, Turkey having survived the wilds of Berkeley "methodolatory". She calls us to action to search for a world of joy and adventure; She sees the university as a space of possibility: (I have interjected spacing and bolding on her original words found at the link above)

"All thinking men and women,
whether directly involved with education or not,
need to make a conscious effort
to rediscover the vision of education
as a process characterized
not only by rigor, but by wonder;
not only by closing, but by opening.

Far from being a romantic, irrelevant fantasy,
this vision is critically important.
Without it, all of us inevitably lose sight of what real education means.

....developing countries like Turkey, Rumania, and the former Soviet Union....particularly (poignantly, painfully)
susceptible to being seduced by an image of education
as the mere acquisition of technical skills of one sort or another
...thinking of the gathering, classification and organization of data
as being the same as .... the seeking of wisdom
....the mere fact of complexity as being the same as quality"

For more on Karen-Claire Voss see http://istanbul-yes-istanbul.co.uk/index.html
For more on Shelley Mitchell see http://www.shelleymitchell.org/