David Korten American writer, former professor at Harvard Business School Date of Birth: . Country: USA

1. Early Life and Career
2. Harvard Business School and Beyond
3. Work in Southeast Asia
4. Activism and Advocacy
5. Post-Corporate World
6. The Great Turning

Early Life and Career

David Korten was born in Longview, Washington, in 1937 and graduated from R. A. Long High School in 1955. He went on to earn an MBA and PhD from the Stanford University Graduate School of Business. After graduating from Stanford in 1959, he worked in developing business schools in low-income countries, starting with Ethiopia. During the Vietnam War, he served as a U.S. Air Force captain, performing teaching and administrative duties in the United States; and was a visiting professor at Harvard Business School for five and a half years. While at Stanford in the 1950s, he married Frances Fisher Korten, with whom he lives on Bainbridge Island near Seattle, Washington.

Harvard Business School and Beyond

Korten spent five and a half years as a visiting associate professor at Harvard Business School, teaching in Harvard's middle management, MBA, and doctoral programs. He also served as a Harvard Business School advisor to the Central American Institute of Business Administration in Nicaragua. He subsequently joined the staff of Harvard Institute for International Development, where he headed a Ford Foundation-funded project on strengthening the organization and management of national family planning programs.

Work in Southeast Asia

In the late 1970s, Korten moved to Southeast Asia, where he lived for nearly fifteen years, working as a Ford Foundation project officer and then as USAID's Regional Advisor on Development Management in Asia, which involved regular travel to Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Indonesia, and the Philippines. Korten has written that he became disillusioned with the formal aid system and devoted his last five years in Asia to "working with leaders of Asian NGOs to identify root causes of the region's development failures and to build the capacity of civil society organizations to act as strategic catalysts for change at national and global levels." He came to believe that the poverty, rising inequality, environmental devastation, and social disintegration that he observed in Asia were present in much of the world, including the United States and other "developed" countries. He also concluded that the United States was actively promoting—both at home and abroad—the very policies that were exacerbating the resulting global crisis.

Activism and Advocacy

Returning to the United States in 1992, Korten has helped raise public consciousness on the political and institutional consequences of economic globalization and the expansion of corporate power at the expense of democracy, justice, and environmental protection. Korten is co-founder and board chair of Positive Futures Network, which publishes the quarterly magazine YES! Magazine. He is also an honorary board member of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, a former faculty member of the International Forum on Globalization, and a member of the Club of Rome.

Post-Corporate World

Building on arguments advanced in his 1995 book When Corporations Rule the World, Korten expands on themes. Establishing the dysfunctionality of current economic systems on several grounds: the impoverishment of the majority of the population, the necessity of endless expansion of credit leading to currency debasement, and the limits of energy and material resources, he provides a context for discussing alternative visions and explores possible pathways for their establishment.

The Great Turning

Korten's 2006 book The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community argues that the development of empires some 5,000 years ago led to a skewed distribution of power and social benefits among the small portion of the population that controlled them. He further argues that corporations are the modern-day version of empires, both being social organizations based on hierarchy, chauvinism, and dominance through violence.

The growth of powerful advanced technologies in combination with the control of corporate and national empires is described as increasingly destructive to communities and the environment. Korten postulates that the world is on the cusp of a perfect storm of converging crises, including anthropogenic climate change, post-peak oil, and a financial crisis induced by global economic imbalances. They will precipitate a profound transformation of the current economic and social order.

Korten believes that these crises offer an opportunity for profound change that could replace the paradigm of "Empire" with that of "Earth Community." Acknowledging the potential for this possibility not to be realized, Korten hopes for and advocates for an "Earth Community" based on sustainable, just, and caring communities that embody values of mutual accountability and stewardship.