An inspiring piece from Helen Major about how to face up to—and ultimately overcome—the frightening failure of economic and political institutions that is currently threatening our future.

For several decades, anything that produced wealth was approved, regardless of much else. The economy was ‘high’ on the addictive drug of executive stock options, double-digit growth in paper profits and deregulation. Now the ‘high’ has ended and we have to face the ‘cold turkey’. Conventional thinking won’t show us the way out of the mess it caused.

Peter Vajda reflects on those who have spent many years, dollars and energy on primping their outside, when what they’re looking for is on the inside. At mid-life, many people are no longer experiencing fun, peace or joy. They’re at the point where they are starting to feel a need to explore their legacy, many for the first time. What do you want out of life? What qualities do you want your life to represent most? Why not take a moment to consider where to go next?

A risk is always a risk. A big one is riskier than a small one. Acknowledge that and you’re at least forewarned that your strategy may well go wrong. Pretend you’ve found a way to make it a near certainty and you’ll probably bet the farm on it—then have to run to the tax-payer to bail you out.

John Fletcher reflects on the value of money as an incentive and why we need to rethink our relationship with monetary rewards. “Give somebody an incentive to be stupid and they will be stupid,” he writes. “Give somebody a large incentive to be stupid—like allowing them to borrow thirty times the capital of their bank to gamble with—and they will be extra-stupid.”

Nina Simosko says we can all use these turbulent times to determine acceptable risk tolerance for ourselves and our organizations. Performance under pressure is a true leadership prerequisite. Anyone who cannot cope with tough times has no claim to being a leader at all.

When the history of these times are written, people will once again marvel at human stupidity and the power of the herd instinct. They’ll ask the same question they always do: “How could anyone be so dumb?” The answer will also be the same: “Those who don’t think and allow fashion to rule their lives climb to the top in good times and take us all into the abyss a few years later.”

Peter Vajda thinks most people don’t really want to heal: they just want less pain and suffering, ideally through some magic ‘pill’ to take away the symptoms and leave everything normal again. The culprit is the ego: that part of your mind that constantly tries to make you who and what you say you are—even if that means staying with the pain rather than changing your persona.

The last few decades have seen endless parade of new management fads and panaceas. The evidence seems to be that none of them actually make things better, even though they may give the business that use them a higher publicity profile. I suspect that’s because they are either applied mechanistically, used as a substitute for thought, or given only lip-service by employees already wearied from past exposure to management faddism.

Douglas Ross explains why he threw away his seven-step, sure-fire, principle-based problem solving methodology in favor of watching his son learning to stand up; and why we all have everything we need right in front of us to solve the problems we face.