David C. Korten
Author, Lecturer, Engaged Citizen

Turning Points

People often ask me "What was the turning point in your career?" My answer may be useful to young people contemplating their own futures.  In our rapidly changing world our careers are defined less by carefully considered career plans than by the unanticipated critical choices we make along the way.

    My career has been defined by four truly defining choices. Each one set the stage for the next, leading me to a place as different as it could be from anything I could have imagined in my youth. Life is not about achieving predetermined goals. It is about engaging in life, listening to your inner voice, and being willing to from time to time leap off a cliff in pursuit of a new challenge. I identify four defining career choices in my life. Note that what follows serves as an addendum to my biography.

Going International

I was born in 1937 into a conservative, white, upper-middle-class family in Longview, Washington, a small timber-industry town of some 25,000 people. I grew up in splendid isolation from the diversity of the world I would one day come to experience in its exquisite variety. In my childhood and early youth I rarely saw a person of a different race and don’t recall ever meeting a Buddhist, Moslem, or Hindi. I had an aunt who was Catholic and there were rumors that my grandmother sometimes voted for Democrats. That was about the extent of my contact with exotic peoples. As the eldest son, everyone assumed that one day I would take over the family retail music and appliance business as my father had done from his father and I would live out my days in the town of my birth.

    Then in 1959, in my senior year at Stanford University, a curious thing happened. Very conservative and an active Young Republican, I was deeply fearful of the spread of Communism and the threat it posed to the American way of life I held dear. I noticed a two-unit course on modern revolutions in the course catalogue and decided that might give me some useful insight into the threat. I was thus exposed to the idea that revolutions are a response to poverty.

    In one of those rare, deeply life-changing moments, I called my parents and told them that I had decided to devote my life to ending poverty by bringing the knowledge of modern business management and entrepreneurship to those who had not yet benefited from it. They never really understood the life I choose and probably thought I was a bit crazy, but they gave me their total support--for which they have my eternal gratitude.  It was the one truly dramatic turning point in my life.

Leaving Academia

Up until 1978, with the exception of two and half years of military service, my professional base was in academia. Fran and I left our faculty positions at Harvard University and arrived in Manila on December 31, 1997 to take up our new assignments with the Ford Foundation. We have never since chosen an academic institution as our primary base.

    Leaving academia proved to be the most intellectually freeing experience of my life and an essential step on the path to my ability to see through the myths of Empire culture and become a champion of the truths of Earth Community. Liberated from the narrow academic silos and often-trivial theoretical and methodological debates of academia I was able to look at the world afresh and to learn to know and understand reality on its own terms.

Breaking from the Establishment

My break with the establishment involved a transition of several years. I left my assignment with the U.S. Agency for International Development (AID) in 1988. A few months later, I wrote an invited paper for a conference of Asian NGOs on the Asian development experience. My paper focused on the inherent dysfunction of foreign aid and spelled out the inherent dependency creating consequence of funding development with foreign exchange. I had not been able to see this dynamic until I left AID. I frequently recall this experience as a stunning example of how what we are able to see depends on where we sit.

    For several years, I focused my attention on strengthening the roles and strategies of nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) engaged in development work. I believed at the time that they were the potential key to deeper system change—until I realized that they were unable to criticize or change in any consequential way the system on which their own funding depended. Gradually, the realization dawned that change would have to come from outside the establishment through broadly based citizen movements, as demonstrated by the civil rights, women's, and environmental movements.

     The defining event in my break with the establishment came in January 2004 when I was invited to participate in what turned out to be the founding meeting of the International Forum on Globalization. The participants were all from nongovernmental or nonprofit organizations, but with a difference. All were from nonprofits in the business of challenging the establishment. It was a turning point. From that time I have focused my energy on working with organizations engaged in movement building.

     Back in the United States Fran and I developed a friendship with Vicki Robin, co-author with her partner Joe Dominguez, of Your Money or Your Life and a leader of the voluntary simplicity movement taught people how to achieve the freedom of financial independence through moderating their material desires and being smart in how they spent their money. Somewhere around 1994, I declared my financial independence --- some would call it taking earlier retirement --- which has given me the freedom to follow truth wherever it might lead without concern for the impact on my own funding. I began to find my public voice beyond the confines of the relatively small circle of activists challenging conventional development wisdom. The publication of When Corporations Rule the World followed in late 1995 and secured my position in the then emerging global resistance against corporate globalization that some of us refer to as the living democracy movement..

Returning to the United States

By 1991, Fran and I had pretty much decided that Asia was home and assumed we might remain there indefinitely, until a fateful visit to India during which I had a conversation with Smitu Kothari, a leading Indian intellectual and activist. Smitu and I had become close friends and colleagues. During our conversation, he said to me, “You and Fran came out to Asia from the United States to help us. We appreciate that. We believe that during your years here you have learned what our real problem is. If you really want to help us you now need to return home and teach what you have learned to other Americans."

    Smitu was referring, of course, to the fact that the United States is the problem—our expropriation of the world’s resources to support our profligate consumption and our promotion of a development model that is spreading social and environmental devastation throughout the world. Fran and I thought long and hard about Smithu’s words. In 1992, we returned to the United States and turned our attention to promoting change at home based on what we had learned during our years abroad.