The Airportline: Observations

In my thesis I write about values. Both personal and organizational values. I'm trying to find a link between them and what that link might mean. The current financial crisis can also be connected with valus, or lack of them. If this is produced by the capitalistic system or other factors is hard to say. It's probably a mixture. Fareed Zakaria, host of the excellent CNN show Zakaria GPS and editor of Newsweek, discuss the state of capitalism in his long, but very interesting article, The capitalist manifesto. He finds several reasons for the current meltdown, and he point to the aspect of values in the change that now needs to happen:

Most of what happened over the past decade across the world was legal. Bankers did what they were allowed to do under the law. Politicians did what they thought the system asked of them. Bureaucrats were not exchanging cash for favors. But very few people acted responsibly, honorably or nobly (the very word sounds odd today). This might sound like a small point, but it is not. No system—capitalism, socialism, whatever—can work without a sense of ethics and values at its core. No matter what reforms we put in place, without common sense, judgment and an ethical standard, they will prove inadequate. We will never know where the next bubble will form, what the next innovations will look like and where excesses will build up. But we can ask that people steer themselves and their institutions with a greater reliance on a moral compass.

Today I went to Sweden. I stayed four and a half our, it was windy and everything was closed. Saw a giant skyscraper (Turning Torso), it was cool, then it rained and was windy and then we had some cinnamon buns and Swedish coffe. People talked with weird dialects. Everything was still closed, its the day after Midsummer the woman in the Tourist Information told me. I got a Dagens Nyheter and this weeks Newsweek, the we took the bus back over the bridge, to a sunny Denmark. We looked back and saw Sweden, in clouds and empty.