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This chapter has six sections. I summarize and refine key themes I explored at length during 25 years in three editions of Productive Workplaces. In Flying Lessons section, I describe how the invention of the airplane changed life on earth, not least my own. In Life Lessons section, I discuss how flying influenced my consulting career. In Myths section, I describe beliefs that I abandoned as I learned my trade. In The Future Never Comes section, I explore what it means to encounter the future as having already arrived. In Afterthoughts section, I sum up what learning to fly has to do with learning Organization Development consulting. The section Postscript contains excerpts from my dialogue with Bill Pasmore, a colleague who also flew airplanes and sought to improve workplaces.

Although researchers and multilateral agencies recognize that no single model of corporate governance exists, this has not stopped the push for a one best corporate governance model. Research recognized institutional factors, including culture, affects the nature of corporate ownership structure and consequently on disclosure, transparency and enforcement practices. Drawing on East Asian examples, the chapter argues that a focus on ‘market’ principles alone fails to account for the contextual effects of Asian political, historical and institutional forms which moderate corporate governance systems and practices. This chapter suggests that there is the need to consider the extant effects of ‘culture’ on corporate governance.

This chapter addresses commentary about constitutional law and politics in this current era of a conservative domination of the judiciary.¹ Its primary concern is the different ways in which a working majority on the Court and its judiciary of appointees by Presidents Reagan, George H. W. Bush, and George W. Bush might be conservative,² and the different ways in which domination might take place.³ The frame for the chapter is what I call an “indifference thesis” for analyzing constitutional law and politics. Stated boldly, the thesis is that there should be a commentary distinguished by an interpretive attitude that distrusts, and intentionally resists, analysis based on preconceived notions about the strengths and weaknesses of any constitutional law and politics, be it conservative or left-liberal.⁴ Perhaps, to many readers, an indifference thesis for commentary appears methodologically odd, if not politically perverse. Therefore, the first order of business is to try to make the thesis less odd and perverse by explaining its provenance and attributes.⁵