Chapter 1
How Dialogue Gap Arose
We need to continue dialogue with our customers and consider making changes depending on their needs.
—Atsushi Saito, President, Tokyo Stock Exchange1
Malaise of the New Millennium—A Call to Arms
In the 1960s I spent summers as a boy living in an old converted ice house built to store ice for refrigeration through the hot summer months in the Laurentian mountains north of Montreal. By the 1960s electricity had done away with the need for an icehouse and it had been converted into a living space, still with walls a foot thick and a door so low adults regularly hit their heads on the way in.
Typical of most boys in their preteens my imagination was in overdrive at night living in the forest at the side of Lac des Iles. I often found myself staring at the ceiling wondering what those strange noises were beyond the safety of my bed. Mosquitoes make recognizable sounds as do moths hitting the screen, but when squirrels scratch at the wood or bats wriggle around inside the roof the sounds fill your imagination with more sinister creatures and you find your senses moving into overdrive. You begin seeing and hearing more than you normally would.2 It isn’t that your senses improve but rather your presence and your attention forces out everything else until all you are noticing is that which you are focused on or in my case, scared about.
With senses fully activated and now wide awake the scratching sound had stopped so I focused my attention on the ceiling ...
