Reworking Success

Reworking Success: New Communities at the Millennium is an eloquent call for fundamental social change in the face of the overwhelming challenges facing humankind at the start of the new millennium. Well-known futurist Robert Theobald argues that we must adopt new goals for the 21st century if humankind is to continue to inhabit the planet. Challenging the current dogma of maximum economic growth, globalization and international competitiveness, Theobald maintains that our whole notion of "success" requires a complete overhaul: that the required criteria of success for the coming millennium are ecological integrity and a respect for all of nature, effective participatory decision-making, and social cohesion based on profoundly changed concepts of justice. These radically changed goals force us to fundamentally reconstruct our communities. Reworking Success documents the steady slide of perceived "successes" into failures that characterize the latter part of this century -- such as the super-rationalization of industry which has created massive unemployment and the over production of data resulting in an "information glut" -- and then describes the new role that citizens are adopting in helping to create new kinds of success that are truly moving us toward a better world. Reworking Success was originally written to be broadcast nationally for a prestigious annual Canadian lecture series. The author adopted an unusually democratic and participatory process in developing the lectures by placing the texts on the Internet for public input and feedback which he then incorporated into the final work.