The Ernest Becker Foundation

“Quite simply, a masterpiece,” says Warren Bennis. What dazzled Bennis, one of the most influential scholars today in the field of managerial leadership, is a breathtakingly brilliant book called The Connective Edge: Leading in an Interdependent World (Jossey-Bass, 1996) written by Jean Lipman-Blumen, the Bradshaw Professor of Public Policy and professor of organizational behavior at the Peter F. Drucker Graduate School of Management, Claremont Graduate University.

The featured speaker for the April 9th meeting of the Foundation was author and political scientist Walter T. Anderson, who spoke on the topic “Constructing Reality in the 21st Century.” Anderson opened his talk with a lengthy quote from Ernest Becker to the effect that while human striving is motivated almost exclusively by social fictions of their own making, nevertheless it is both amazing and potentially liberating that human beings have been able to take a step back, analyze their own motives, and recognize the fictional character of their own hero systems.

Gang and youth violence mediator Jim Hernandez participated in several days of discussions with school children, teachers and parents in Anacortes, Washington over the week of March 15th. Susan Woolsey, who had worked hard with local school and youth group directors to assure that Jim's visit would come about, writes: "Jim is really talented! He tells wonderful existential-type stories that captivate 5th and 6th graders along with older children, and result in their begging for more! He is also a very good artist and has developed a whole series of cartoons and coloring pages to emphasize his Life Skills."