Category: Inequality
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WICKED7: Where do the US Presidential candidates stand on solving the world’s most urgent problems?
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR and PHILIP KOTLER Which candidate offers the best chance of actually working on the world’s most urgent problems? Which candidate would make things worse? Let’s give the US Presidential candidates the Wicked7 assessment – clarifying their positions on the seven most urgent problems facing us today. Wait, what is the Wicked7 assessment?…
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Water Under Siege: Corporate Control vs. Community Rights
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR Jef Teugels invites us to explore the critical issues surrounding modern water management, focusing on the increasing commercialization of water and its implications for equity, sustainability, and indigenous rights. DOWNLOAD PDF >> Teugel’s essay – Water Under Siege: Corporate Control vs. Community Rights – examines how corporate interests and governmental policies almost…
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Israel’s Chance to Turn Carnage into Peace
BY JEFFREY D. SACHS Israel is running out of time to save itself—not from Hamas, which lacks the means to defeat Israel militarily, but from itself. Israel’s war crimes in Gaza, verging on the crime of genocide according to the Center for Constitutional Rights, threaten to destroy Israel’s civil, political, economic, and cultural relations with the…
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Steel Pulse: “Only One World (Wicked Problems)”
On this, the last day of COP26, Grammy-winning legends Steel Pulse have a message for us: we must come together to tackle the world’s wickedest problems – because there is no Planet B. What can we do to bring people together in our communities? How can we unite across the walls of hate and mistrust…
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Webinar: Population & Migration
With us for the webinar – a group of dynamic Palermitans: – Leoluca Orlando. As Mayor of Palermo, Orlando’s extraordinary vision and courage has changed our understanding of immigration, tolerance, and the fight against corruption. – Claudio Arestivo. A co-founder of Moltivolti – a unique regenerative business – which serves as an example for the…
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WEBINAR: “Health & Livelihood”
Join us as we welcome: Stuart Hart – a leading authority on the implications of environment and poverty for business strategy. Hart is the Founder and President of Enterprise for a Sustainable World Bob Freling – Executive Director at Solar Electric Light Fund, Freling developed the “solar village development model” – a wholistic community-based approach to development.…
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Hate & Conflict – The Business of War
By Karthiga Ratnam There are people dying If you care enough for the living Make a better place for you and for me… Hate, Conflict, War, Genocide. Have you ever stopped think why they exist? Who profits from it? There is such callousness to war. People casually say things like “war is men dying and…
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WEBINAR: “Power & Corruption”
REPLAY >> Join our guests as we discuss – “Power & Corruption” with: Obiageli “Aunty Oby” Ezekwesili, a former vice president of the World Bank (African Region), co-founder and founding director of Transparency International, co-founder of the #BringBackOurGirls movement and has also served twice as Federal Minister in Nigeria. Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, the Founder and Honorary…
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How do we stop the cycle of intergenerational hate and conflict?
By Aryssa Yoon, David Sehyeon Baek and Karthiga Ratnam Two households, both alike in dignity (In fair Verona, where we lay our scene), From ancient grudge break to new mutiny, Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean -Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare This prologue of Shakespeare’s infamous love story about the star-crossed lovers – Romeo and…
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Death of Nature – The Impact of Oil Spills on Our Oceans
By Aryssa Yoon and Karthiga Ratnam Drake’s Folly. That’s what started the race for oil. The year was 1859. Edwin Drake successfully drilled for and found crude oil. Until then, companies would collect oil only through oil seepage. This would happen naturally. The town called the oil well Drake’s Folly because of the failure of…
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The Lost Children of the Philippines
BY KARTHIGA RATNAM, EMERALD PASFIELD, AND ARYSSA YOON “She listened to the silence. Her first thought was relief. He’s gone. Her second thought was utter devastation. He didn’t kill me.” ― Catherine Brusk, What Love Washed Up Have you ever been stuck in an elevator for a few minutes? You must have experienced a feeling of helplessness,…
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G7 is more united but not effective enough to tackle the world’s biggest problems
BY Natasha Lindstaedt, University of Essex When the UK hosts the G7 summit in Cornwall between June 10 and 12, it will be the first intergovernmental meeting of the world’s seven wealthiest democracies since before COVID. Playing host for the seventh time, the UK is in a slightly stronger position than in 2019, due to…
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The Roots of LGBTQIA+ Discrimination
BY KARTHIGA RATNAM AND ARYSSA YOON “It is absolutely imperative that every human being’s freedom and human rights are respected, all over the world.”– Jóhanna Sigurðardóttir The right to live. It is guaranteed in most constitutions and in the universal declaration of human rights. But today it seems that basic human rights are stifled. How…
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WEBINAR: “Hate & Conflict”
Hate is taught. What can be done to unlearn hate and build a just society? Join Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar with special guests Siyabulela Mandela and David Hinds (of Steel Pulse) as they discuss the third Wicked Problem – Hate & Conflict. Members of the Wicked7 Working Group will help us with the discussion.…
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The Movement of Movements: A Last Chance to Save the Planet?
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR, KARTHIGA RATNAM, & PHILIP KOTLER On this, the 90th birthday of Philip Kotler, we ask the world to come together to save the future. One way to do this is to build a “movement of movements.“ It’s time to put aside our toys – our ideologies and guns – and look at…
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Today: Webinar on Inequality
Join Philip Kotler and Christian Sarkar as they kickoff the second challenge: Inequality. The webinar includes a special presentation by Karthi Ratnam and Aryssa Yoon on Gender Inequality and Climate Change.
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Plastics and The Death of Nature
BY SUSI WEISENEGGER Interested? Here’s how you can participate >>
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The Impact of the Death of Nature on Gender Inequality
BY KARTHIGA RATNAM & ARYSSA YOON Climate Change. Environmental Degradation. Extinction Emergency. We have all heard the terms. The problem with climate change or the death of nature is that it’s usually tightly integrated with a host of other problems. We are focusing on the impact of climate change on gender inequality. To understand gender…
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The Powerlessness of the UN
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR The only power the United Nations has is the “power of persuasion” – and that doesn’t seem to be working too well. Here’s a profound interview with UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres about everything from climate change to vaccine nationalism (h/t Naveen Srivastava): Besides powerlessness, a second powerful idea we hear about is…
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Food Waste and The Death of Nature
Our second “map” of the World’s Wicked Problems is about the impact of food (production, handling, storage, consumption) on Nature… Interested? Here’s how you can participate >>
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Webinar: How Jobs-to-be-Done can help solve the unmet needs of society
Here’s the replay of the webinar ‘How Jobs-to-be-Done can help solve the unmet needs of society’ with Strategyn’s Tony Ulwick:
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Mapping the World’s Wicked Problems. Kickoff – April 1, 2021
The Wicked 7 Project is mapping the World’s Wicked Problems to understand the causes and then see how we can work together to find solutions. We have divided the World’s Wicked Problems in to seven categories – Death of Nature, Inequality, Hate & Conflict, Power & Corruption, Work & Tech, Health & Livelihood, and Population…
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The Unmet Needs of Society: Introducing Multi-stakeholder Jobs to be Done
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR, ANTHONY ULWICK and PHILIP KOTLER In his e-pamphlet — Rebalancing Society — Henry Mintzberg points out that a balanced society can be thought of as “sitting on a stool with three sturdy legs: a public sector of respected governments, to provide many of our protections (such as policing and regulating); a private…
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The Moral Intelligence of Ruby Bridges
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR The Moral Intelligence of Children by Robert Coles. Still relevant today. By refusing to face history, we are forced to live it again. How do children learn right from wrong? How do we teach values in a world that prizes profit over all else? It may just come down to a “questioning…
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Latin America: inequality and political instability have lessons for the rest of the world
BY DIEGO SÁNCHEZ-ANCOCHEA, University of Oxford In a landmark speech about social mobility in 2013, the then US president, Barack Obama, warned against the problem of growing inequality in the starkest possible terms: The combined trends of increased inequality and decreasing mobility pose a fundamental threat to … our way of life. He was talking…
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It’s Time to Depoliticize Decision-Making
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR & PHILIP KOTLER UPDATE: On the day we published this article, Texas Governor Gregg Abbott lifted Texas’ mask mandate – declaring the state 100% open for business. Health experts warned it was too soon. Texas Was Warned a Decade Ago Its Grid Was Unready for Cold reads the headline in Bloomberg Green…
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12 Tools to Reduce Income and Wealth Inequality
BY PHILIP KOTLER A major problem in American capitalism is the growing level of income and wealth inequality. America continues to have persons suffering from poverty, homelessness and hunger while eight billionaires own half of the nation’s wealth. Working class real wages remain where they were in the 1980s, while the rich who own 80%…
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High-Tech Holistic Medicine: Closing The Gaps Between Sick-Care And Whole-Person Care
BY TRISHA SWIFT In America, sick-care is “doing business as” health care, which is precisely why our health care system is so costly, error prone and fragmented. To be healthy, we must begin to look at ourselves as a whole person and account for all the things that make us unique. This is a different…
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What is Food Insecurity?
BY CAITLIN CASPI, University of Connecticut Among the many striking images from the pandemic is an aerial photo showing cars in seemingly endless rows lined up at a food bank in San Antonio, Texas. A jarring awareness of food insecurity in the U.S. has accompanied the health and financial concerns brought on by the COVID-19…
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In 2050, there will be more plastic in the oceans than fish
BY JEF TEUGELS Introduction: Made in Belgium On November 17, 1909, the Belgium-born Dr. Leo H. Baekeland explained Bakelite at the Franklin Institute (Baekeland, 1910). PlasticsEurope, the Association of Plastics Manufacturers, describes Bakelite as the first real synthetic and mass-produced plastic (PlasticsEurope, 2020). However, plastic is a form of fossil fuel since natural resources like gas…
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From corona anxiety towards a new Enlightenment – Why a return to normal is not a meaningful option
BY GUIDO PALAZZO Why do societies collapse? Jared Diamond (2005) finds a rather simple, but frightening, explanation. When we are in a crisis and we do not know what to do, we tend to reinforce established routines. Sometimes, those routines make things worse. These might even be the driving force of the crisis and, as…
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The Wicked 7: The APO Interview
Watch: The Asian Productivity Organization’s David Sehyeon Baek interviews Christian Sarkar >>
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How to See: When Narratives Create Reality
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR AND PHILIP KOTLER In this video – more timely today than ever – James Baldwin explains that “reality” depends on our point of view: How you view the world is largely shaped by where you are in it. The cultural narrative we believe in dictates our understanding of reality: This makes our…
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Interlock USA: COVID, Racism, the Economy, and Climate Change
BY CHRISTIAN SARKAR & PHILIP KOTLER The USA is showing us how wicked problems are interlocked. How one feeds the other and the next and the next. In a society where power is corrupt, society loses its legitimacy. Not only is the social contract shredded, but so is our Constitution. The news is making our…
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Mapping COVID-19 as a Wicked Problem
CHRISTIAN SARKAR & PHILIP KOTLER One way to map a wicked problem is to begin with a process of discovery. Begin with the current, observable facts and ask “why?” – going backwards in time to create a chain of causality. Remember, each cause is also an effect. To predict what will happen going forward in…
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Towards a Virtuous Economy
CHRISTIAN SARKAR & PHILIP KOTLER If anything, COVID-19 has opened our eyes to the startling weakness of our current economic system – both in the US and around the world. The “new normal” is simply another way of asking – what does a recovery, a return to business-as-usual look like? The economy was already failing,…
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Selecting the Wicked 7
CHRISTIAN SARKAR & PHILIP KOTLER The process of selecting seven wicked problems was not one we took lightly. In our book on Brand Activism, we asked: What are the most urgent issues facing society? How did we get here? What are the root causes? What must be done now? How can we find common ground?…
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What is a Wicked Problem?
CHRISTIAN SARKAR & PHILIP KOTLER To begin, here’s the article which introduced the world to the concept of “wicked problems” >> Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning by Horst W.J. Rittel and Melvin M. Webber. In it, we learn about the 10 properties of a wicked problem: There is no definitive formulation of a wicked problem. Wicked problems have no stopping rule. Solutions to…