Doug Carmichael

Currently working on strategic issues with The Institute for new Economic Thinking. Lead a group, Serious Conversations, in Palo Alto, an experiment in conversation without agenda. Engaged in a project,  Reengineering the economy,  in the engineering department, Stanford,and a continuing member of the Philosophy Reading Group  at Stanford. Numerous consultations about scenarios,  and “Open Space.” The Stanford Strategy Studio is dormant after a broad range of experiments on how to have more intelligent meetings, stressing the drama of such meetings and the use of graphics. Current projects have emerged from the Studio experience.Increasingly relevant seem my experience with The National Performance Review under Al Gore and the Clinton White House.

My path has gone through but not abandoning physics to psychoanalysis to consulting to political and economic perspectives and strategy. The driving issue is: how to have a better life, how to have a better life for all, how cultures change, because if ours doesn’t, we are in trouble.

–   Study the masters, not the pupils, said Neils Abel

I currently live on the Russia River in Sonoma County, California. Born in Manhattan where I spent my early years, moved to California at 15 gaining a certain physicality, lived in Mexico where I gained a certain at-homeness with a more emotional life, all the while moving from physics to psychoanalysis, which looks like a big change but wasn’t.

I had wonderful teachers along the way: Parkhill and Krebs at Collegiate, Feynan, Paulng, David Eliot, Hallet Smith at Caltech, Feyerabend, Schorske, Chris Alexander, Popper at Berkeley, Jery Lettvin and De Santillana , Kenneth Burke and IA Richards, David Reisman and Erik Erikson  Harvard/MIT, Erich Fromm and Ramon Xirau in Mexico, Marrian Eckert  and John Koskinen in Washington DC. Lots of friends, several relationships, three wonderful children, four grandchildren, and I like the arts. I paint, play a little Bach on the guitar, read a lot of literature and history, think about poetry, and love architecture.