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Filmed on Monday April 19, 02021

Alexander Rose

Continuity: Discovering the Lessons behind the World’s Longest-lived Organizations

Alexander Rose is an industrial designer and has been working with The Long Now Foundation and computer scientist Danny Hillis since 01997 to build a monument scale, all mechanical 10,000 Year Clock. Rose speaks about the work of The Long Now Foundation all over the world at venues ranging from the TED conference to corporations and government agencies.

As the Executive Director of Long Now, Rose founded The Interval and has facilitated a range of projects including The Organizational Continuity Project, The Rosetta Project, Long Bets, Seminars About Long Term Thinking, Long Server and others. He is author of Works in Progress and The Clock of the Long Now: prototype one mechanical drawings.

One of Long Now’s founding premises is that humanity’s most significant challenges require long-term solutions, including institutions that caretake and guide the knowledge and commitment needed to work over long time scales.

However, there are a limited number of organizations that have managed to stay stable over many centuries, and in some cases, over a millennium. Long Now has been informally tracking these organizations for years, and in 02019 formed The Organizational Continuity Project to study long-lived institutions more formally.

Alexander Rose, Long Now's Executive Director, discusses how The Organizational Continuity Project hopes to discover the lessons behind these long-lived organizations and build a discipline of shareable knowledge that will help contemporary institutions, companies, and governments develop into robust, long-lasting structures. In turn, we hope these institutions will be better equipped to address civilizational-scale problems with multi-generational thinking.

We've moved our talks to a virtual format, and to share them with a wider audience, the live streams are now public on the Long Now Live Stream page and YouTube, Facebook and Twitter.

We continue to release media from all of our talks and you can follow the series by subscribing to the podcasts, watching the videos and highlights and connecting with Long Now on our social channels.

Long Now is able to continue our work thanks to the ongoing support of members and donors. Please consider joining our global community of long-term thinkers. Membership starts at just $8/month and takes two minutes to set up. Special one-time donations are also appreciated, and all of your support will help us foster more long-term thinking. Thank you so much.

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SALT Summaries Book

$2.99 Also available as a paperback book

Condensed ideas about long-term thinking summarized by Stewart Brand
(with Kevin Kelly, Alexander Rose and Paul Saffo) and a foreword by Brian Eno.

Seminar Sponsors

David and Abby Rumsey • Kim Polese • The Kaphan Foundation • Garrett Gruener • Scorpio Rising Fund • Peter Baumann • Brian Eno • Greg Stikeleather • Cameo Wood • Ping Fu • Peter Schwartz • Lawrence Wilkinson • Ken and Maddy Dychtwald • Future Ventures • Ken and Jackie Broad • AtoB • WHH Foundation • Stewart Brand and Ryan Phelan • Jackson Square Partners Foundation • The Long Now Members

We would also like to recognize George Cowan (01920 - 02012) for being the first to sponsor this series.

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