About the Li Po websites.

Our websites, mostly in Dutch, were founded to enable free exchange of practical and usable information, knowledge, literature and experience on Result Directed Functioning (RDF) and Result Directed Management (RDM), between managers, teachers, academics and students. In fact, RDF and RDM are effective approaches for management processes and developing skills in professional environments. This was an idea that once originated in a very practical project in a large Dutch university teaching hospital. We also thought that useful knowledge should be shared, not stored away in a locked cupboard, so we made all our activities visible and open to others. The results were gratifying. We kept on learning, are learning still today.

We tend to look at what is happening in daily practice and in reality, but there is a philosophy too. Good practice may come first, but a serious scientific approach must be nearer than next. However, professionals, managers and their fellow workers often do not have sufficient information and exact guidelines available for their daily tasks. While interacting with others they have to improvise. And they have to act, simply to survive or to let others survive. That is where our result directed approach fits in. It is founded on sound social science. But as far as it is very practical, we also like to see it as "good scientific poetry" in the terms of Richard Dawkins. Somewhere underneath our result directed approach we accept the existence and practical usefulness of a principle of "selfish as well as unselfish co-operation" between humans.

Well, we are concerned about the survival of good labour conditions and good management. We like to create and support work that motivates and satisfies because the worker is good at it and likes to do it, because it stimulates his creativity and development and because the result is something that has meaning and/or is visibly useful to others. Also we like human products and human results to be simple and elegant. And we think our result directed approach opens possibilities to reach those goals while free and open discussing conditions and possibilities on the way.

We know we are not the only ones thinking that way. So our world should be great to live in. But in reality our world appears to be otherwise.

As a consequence we want to know why mankind does not seem to reach some of its most common goals and we are interested in practical, working solutions for reaching those targets. We believe that everybody is able to realise small changes in his environment. Small changes and little nudges that by and by create some minimal modifications to patiently slide the overall cultural landscape in a for humanity more profitable direction than bare economic theory and management practice today seem to provide.

All the great problems we encounter nowadays are human made. So it will be a task for humans to solve them. For that we are in terrible need of real tough but artful science. We believe that the science we need must be supported by art and that real art must be connected with science. Science and art both should be connected to ethics and philosophy. Adult as humanity nowadays is, it shall have to replace childish beliefs and other beautiful myths for strong moral principles as guides for responsible adult behaviour.

This means that we have to use a clear and simple language to communicate with each other about our hopes, intentions, goals and acts.

Language, that is all what our LiPo sites are about.