Changing thinking, changing systems

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Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared on Twitter this past week.

“The challenge of the coming century is to change the value system of society. ~ Vaclav Havel” via @BillMcKibben

“Intellectual property is an oxymoron. Ideas can’t be owned. Instead, governments grant exclusive licenses to them.” ~ @JohnRobb

“Mechanization best serves mediocrity. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright” via @OurFounder

Working Smarter: Most popular posts of 2011 via @JayCross

Working smarter draws upon ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more. Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines.

The following are the top items from featured sources based on social signals …

Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works (tech can’t shape policy on tech if they don’t show up) @MelissaPierce [same in all democratic nations]

This weekend I read a post titled “Dear Congress: It Is No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works.” The author, Joshua Kopstein, is right: it’s not ok to not know about something before legislating or regulating it. The confessions by members of Congress that they are “not nerds” is frustrating at best because these guys, the guys that are regulating the Internet can’t tell a server from a waiter.

And so a post is born, sympathetically climbing the charts at Reddit and HackerNews, telling Congress to get a clue. But the problem is that that post won’t do any good. Few if any members of Congress will read it, and those that might certainly won’t read it and decide that it’s time for them to brush up on understanding how the Internet works as well as a professional that works on the Internet.

How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much – Forbes – via @AdamHartung

There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”

Working smarter, daily

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My blog functions as my outboard brain, a place to get half-baked ideas out in the open and work on them in public. It’s also a repository of thoughts and notes I use in my daily work. I often refer to a blog post instead of writing the same email a dozen times. However, it can be difficult to find a single post amongst the more than 2,000 here.

Recently I’ve been using Working Smarter Daily as a more intelligent front-end for my blog. WS Daily consists of what members of the Internet Time Alliance have identified as essential reading, assisted by the curation of Jay Cross and aided by a layer of intelligent filtering based on social signals. It’s more than a mere aggregation of blog feeds, though.The comprehensive topic search function yields interesting results from 42 different perspectives, on everything from culture to complexity.  You can also look at a single author (Source=Harold Jarche) and then filter. Filtering can be single or multiple terms. For example, here are my feeds for Innovation, Collaboration & Network:

 

This is one more, rather powerful, tool for my personal knowledge management processes that makes my life a bit easier. Getting things done is the final measurement in determining if any PKM system works. My thanks to Xyleme for sponsoring Working Smarter Daily again for 2012 and giving me and others another way to seek, sense and share.

What the network saw

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Instead of comments, many people are using other media to indicate what they think about a web page or blog post, as Doc Searls discusses in Comments vs. Likes, Tweets, Shares and +1s. The online conversation keeps moving and in some cases it’s no longer a conversation, just a signal, like a nod or wink.

I’ve looked at my posts this year from the perspective of how often they were mentioned on Twitter.

Here are the top eight (this blog is in its 8th year).

Social Learning, Complexity and the Enterprise (April) One of my longest posts. As our work environments become more complex due to the speed of information transmission via ubiquitous networks, we need to adopt more flexible and less mechanistic processes to get work done.

The New Knowledge Worker (October) How do we get to a state of enlightened organizations in a transparent environment providing meaningful ways for people to contribute to society?

Social Learning for Business (January) An elevator pitch, in 10 sentences, for social learning, which is what really makes social business work.

Social Learning for Collaborative Work (May) We collaborate because we have a reason to do so (such as in the workplace). We learn socially because we are wired to do so.

Network Thinking (December) Network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships.

Working Smarter through Social Learning (February) Artificial boundaries that limit collaboration and communication only serve to drag companies down and create opportunities for more agile competitors.

Social Learning: The freedom to act and cooperate with others (August) One current theme in workplace and education circles is to “blend” social with the formal and structured. But social learning is not a bolted-on component of our formal educational and training programs.

Training Departments Will Shrink (July) We are in a management revolution, testing out new models such as the social enterprise, democracy in the workplace, chaordic organizations and networked free-agents.

Obviously social learning was a theme that received a lot of attention. It was also interesting to note that one of my longest posts was the most tweeted, though I wonder how many people actually read all of it.

I learn a lot via Twitter, which I share on my Friday’s Finds, and my network has incredibly expanded thanks to Twitter. It seems that some of what we have lost in direct feedback, we have gained in network diversity. There are still people who take the time to comment here or write their own blog post in reaction to one of mine. Thanks to all of those conversations this past year and thanks for all the tweets, folks :)

Learning in Complexity

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Here are some of the thoughts and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@johnrobb – “If you aren’t inventing the future and taking your lumps for doing it today, you are going to be steamrolled by it later.”

@webestime – “Simple rules lead to complex behavior. Complicated rules lead to stupid behavior”

@transarchitect: “Emergence: It’s not magic … but it feels like magic.” via @SebPaquet

“History is a race between education and catastrophe. ~ H. G. Wells” via @iain2008

@TeenThings – “Things I learned in school: 1. How to whisper 2. How to text without looking 3. How to look like I’m thinking.”

@CharlesJennings – “in a complex world, continuous learning is the only option available to us” – Globalization, Complexity & Change

Many transactional jobs are being substituted with technology. Machines can replace a checkout clerk at a supermarket and can log deposits and dispense cash, but they can’t replace a marketing manager or an advertising campaign.

The implications of this trend for CLOs are clear. The challenges of jobs that deal with high levels of complexity and tacit interactions are best addressed through the development of core skills and capabilities, not through trying to teach sets of processes or facts.

@StevenBJohnson – How research works in an age of social networks (or at least how it works for me) [highly recommended post #PKM]

Very few of the key links came from the traditional approach of reading a work and then following the citations included in the endnotes. The reading was still critical, of course, but the connective branches turned out to lie in the social layer of commentary outside of the work.

@GSiemens: “Brilliant article on what happened w/ crash of Air France 447:  last paragraph is relevant in all human-tech systems” – Popular Mechanics

But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane’s avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted? What’s the most pressing threat? What’s going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.

Evolution of Social Business panel – by @BillIves

Andy said that social media did not change their culture. It exposed it and this is what they needed. They needed to move away from control.  Hearing the complaints is even more helpful that the complements because then you can address them.  Some companies are not ready for this. The CEO recognizes this.

@ourfounder – “If people want a set of processes that will not change in the future, that is a trap” – Evolving Web

 In most human endeavor today, certainly in knowledge work, but increasingly in manufacturing, we do not operate in the complicated domain, we operate in the complex domain. This is a domain where business process or team process can change from moment to moment. The speed at which new products can come to market, the decoupling of the production of an object from its design and sales, and the rate at which the markets and technologies change make any stolid process unsustainable and dangerous.

Network thinking

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Curtis Ogden at The Interaction Institute for Social Change provides a very good summary of the differences between network-centric and hierarchy-centric thinking, called Network Thinking:

  1. Adaptability instead of control
  2. Emergence instead of predictability
  3. Resilience and redundancy instead of rock stardom
  4. Contributions before credentials
  5. Diversity and divergence

One major challenge in helping organizations improve collaboration and knowledge-sharing is getting people to see themselves as nodes in various networks, with different types of relationships between them. Network thinking can fundamentally change our view of hierarchical relationships. For example, using value network analysis, I helped a steering group see their community of practice in a new light, mapped as a network. They immediately realized that they were pushing solutions to their community, instead of listening to what was happening. Thinking in terms of networks, networks, networks lets us see with new eyes.

1. Adaptability instead of Control

Here are some recommendations for moving to a new social contract for creative work:

  • Abolish the organization chart and replace it with a network diagram (some new tech companies have done this).
  • Move away from counting hours, to a results only work environment (with distributed work, this is becoming more common).
  • Encourage outside work that doesn’t directly interfere with paid work, as it will strengthen the network (such as Google’s 20% time for engineers).
  • Provide options for workers to come and go and give them ways to stay connected when they’re not employed (like Ericsson’s Stay Connected Facebook group). Build an ecosystem, not a monolith.

2. Emergence instead of predictability

As we learn in digital networks, stock (content) loses significance, while flow (conversation) becomes more important – the challenge becomes how to continuously weave the many bits of information and knowledge that pass by us each day. Conversations help us make sense. But we need diversity in our conversations or we become insular. We cannot predict what will emerge from continuous learning, co-creating & sharing at the individual, organizational and market level but we do know it will make for more resilient organizations.

3. Resilience and redundancy

A professional learning network, with its redundant connections, repetition of information and indirect communications, is a much more resilient system than any designed development program can be. Redundancy is also a good principal for supporting social learning diffusion. There is always more than one way to communicate or find something and just because something was blogged, tweeted or posted does not mean it will be understood and eventually internalized as actionable knowledge. The more complex or novel the idea, the more time it will take to be understood.

4. Contributions before credentials

Programmers might call this, ‘you are only as good as your code’. Credentials and certifications often act as blinders and stop us from recognizing the complexity of a situation. As Henry Mencken wrote, “For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

5. Diversity and Divergence

My approach to working smarter starts by organizing to embrace diversity and manage complexity.  Diversity is a key factor in innovation and I’ve yet to find an organization that does not want to improve innovation.

Everyday experience is not the same as it was

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The learning and development field has a lot of good research on how to support workplace performance. Tom Gram has some excellent posts and resources that discuss performance by design. His most recent post, Everyday Experience is Not Enough, summarizes what it takes to support workplace learning. It’s definitely worth reading and following the links to other resources.

Some of the best learning approaches that work well in helping people challenge their current skill levels fall into that fuzzy middle ground between formal and informal learning (see this post for a continuum of learning experiences) and can include the following:

Designing, fostering and supporting work experiences that develop expertise is an emerging role for the learning professional. That role is to assure that people are working in a setting where they can challenge and develop their knowledge and skills. You can’t make them learn but you can help surround them with the resources they need to learn. This approach to learning is truly a partnership between the individual, their managers and you as a learning professional. In doing that work you are practicing and developing your own expertise.

I agree with Tom. But I have a sense that things are changing and our interconnectedness is shifting the ground rules, without being so kind to inform our institutions or professional associations. Tom starts his post with his own admonishment of those “social” folks:

A core tenet of informal and social learning is that we learn through experience. It’s the elephant in the 70-20-10 room. It’s often used as an admonishment to formal learning. Advocates of the most laissez-faire approaches informal learning suggest that given the right tools (social anyone?) employees will do just fine without all the interference by the learning department, thank you very much.

Like I said, I agree with Tom, and highly respect his work. But there’s stuff happening that isn’t following all our best practices based on years of research. Cases like children learning at the Hole-in-the-Wall (HiW), without any guidance. Peter Isackson has described the subversive nature of social learning in the HiW experiments:

It seems to me that the fundamental key to the success of HiW is the notion of “self-organized groups” who learn on their own. If education is to become truly non-invasive, as Jay suggests, it must refrain from defining both the goals and the means to reach them, entrusting the groups with this task. If educational gurus (authorities) notice that a group is neglecting what is considered “essential” in the curriculum (for whatever reason, whether it’s basic security, survival or inculcating an existing set of values), the group could be challenged to account for why they may be neglecting a certain topic or reminded of the interest in pursuing it. Respecting the self-organizing group and its decision-making capacity is the sine qua non of success. It also happens to be the absolute opposite of the organizational principles of traditional education and training.

John Seely Brown (JSB) often tells the story of a group of young surfers, The Grommets, who learn by watching videos of those who are better and constantly improve their skills through practice and collaboration. This Singapore Educational Consultants’ review sums it up [more links at bottom of the article]:

According to JSB, The Grommets underwent these stages in their pursuit of excellence:

a) Deep collaborative learning with/from each other;
b) A passion to achieve extreme performance and a willingness to fail, fail, fail on the way;
c) Accessing and learning frame by frame the best surfers around the world via videos of the pros;
d) Use of video tools to capture and analyze each of their own improvisations;
e) Pulling the best of ideas from adjacencies: wind surfing, skate boarding, mountain biking, motor-cross and others;
f) Accessing spikes of capabilities around the world – leveraging networks of practice around the world; and
g) Attracting others to help them around the world

The Grommets are a case of self-directed learning done collaboratively. Cognitive apprenticeship is now available for the taking because many experts are narrating their work, or are being captured by video while doing their work. This phenomenon will continue to pervade our society. We’ve all gone mobile now. We’re getting continuous feedback from our networks, as The Grommets and even the kids at HiW did. It’s not uncommon today for a 12 year old to have an international network. These can often act as learning networks. More and more people will be coming to your workplace with their own feedback systems already in place.

I think the game has changed. I’m not a social learning, laissez-faire, utopian but I am seeing fundamental changes with networked learning. The learners now own their networks. Workplace learning will change as well, and it will change how work gets done. People are creating their own narratives. Today, content capture and creation tools let people tell their own stories. Weaving their stories together enables serendipitous learning at the adjacencies. Gamers, hackers, The Grommets and HiW learn by:

  • Sharing their stories.
  • Knowing there is no user manual.
  • Embracing the flow.
Some day, perhaps very soon, everyday experience for networked workers may be much broader, deeper and richer than any workplace learning professional could ever design. Perhaps I’m thinking too far ahead of the curve, but I get the sneaking suspicion that things are changing faster than we suspect.

Social systems need diversity

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@ffunch – “What we call “thinking” is mostly an illusion and a pretense. We really don’t. You pay attention to something and relevant thoughts appear.”

@IntrepidTeacher – “Best advice I was ever given. “Let your network filter you. You just worry about sharing the things that you find valuable.”

@GapingVoid – “In my (not uninformed) experience, the idle rich possess few lessons worth passing on to the next generation.”

@psaffo – “Figuring out what will replace the job is the great challenge of the next 30 years.” via @TimOReilly

Seth Roberts: What do students want? (PDF)

Formal education resembles agriculture. Agriculture greatly reduced the diversity of the human diet. Before agriculture, a person might have eaten 80 different foods each week; after agriculture began, far fewer. Agriculture caused a big decline in health because its fundamental assumption – it is okay to eat a small number of foods – is false or at least very hard to reconcile with nutritional requirements. Likewise, formal education (classrooms, lectures, textbooks, etc.) surely reduced the diversity of what was learned, how it was taught, and how learning was measured.

Is it so hard to see that one economy is dying and a new one emerging? by @DaveGray

I see massive layoffs in some sectors while tech companies have such a hard time finding engineers that they have to import them from other parts of the world, and pay them huge signing bonuses and salaries. Is it so hard to see that one economy is dying and a new one emerging? Is it so difficult to see that our education system is badly broken? Why aren’t we teaching kids the skills they will need to be successful in the economy that’s coming into being in front of our eyes?

Social Business is About Learning, Not Marketing or Technology – via @britopian

So what’s my point?  That social business at its core is about learning and evolving.  It’s about paying attention to your online communities, your markets, your people, internally and externally.  It’s about collecting data that tells you more about your business, your customers, your stakeholders, your products, your industry, your environment.  It’s about using technology and improving processes internally and externally so you can LISTEN MORE and LISTEN BETTER.  We all talk about “listening” on social media as a low-level, social media 101 skill – but it’s at the core of everything.  And, of course, the point of listening is to figure out the rest.  To learn and grow and evolve with your market.  Bake listening into the way you work – truly bake it in – and you’ll be well on the path to becoming a social business.

Paul Kearns, Evidence-based HR: “training departments re-badged themselves as learning departments & pretended they could bring about learning”

“capitalism is no longer in bed with democracy” – Day I: Keynote of Charles Handy at the 3rd Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna – [A Must Watch Video]

exception handling is complex work

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How is work different in a networked economy? We know that a lot of traditional work is constantly getting automated, from bank tellers, to lawyers to stock brokers. We also know that any work that can be outsourced will go to the place of cheapest labour, wherever that may be. The main reason behind this is the inter-connectivity of the Internet. I can easily find freelancers or software as a service to take care of my more routine tasks. Organizations do this all the time.

Known Problems

Let’s look at a knowledge worker and how things can get done in such an interconnected environment. Any situation can first be looked at from the perspective of, is this a known problem or not? If it’s known, then the answer can be looked up or the correct person found to deal with it. That answer may have been automated or even outsourced.

Known problems require access to the right information to solve them. This information can be mapped, and frameworks such as knowledge management (KM) help us to map it. We can also create tools, especially electronic performance support systems (EPSS) to do work and not have to learn all the background knowledge in order to accomplish the task. This is how simple and complicated knowledge continuously gets automated.

Exceptions

But if it’s a new problem or an exception, then the knowledge worker has to deal with it in a unique way. This is why we hire knowledge workers, to deal with exceptions. Complex, new problems need tacit knowledge to solve them. Exception-handling is becoming more important in the networked workplace. While the system handles the routine stuff, people, usually working together, deal with the exceptions. Exceptions require collaborative approaches to solve.

Once an exception is dealt with, it is no longer new. It is now known. As exceptions get addressed, some or all of the solution can get automated, and so the process evolves.

The challenge for organizational design is to make it easy to move new problems into the knowable space. This is where three principles of net work come into play:

  1. Transparency
  2. Narration of Work [AKA working out loud]
  3. Distribution of power

We cannot know what is known unless the organization, and the entire business ecosystem are transparent. We need to be able find things fast, which is the main benefit of using social media: increasing speed of access to knowledge. Social media enable us to be transparent in our work but transparency is not enough. Each knowledge worker must also narrate his or her own work. For example, just adding finished reports to a knowledge base does not help others understand how that report was developed. This is where activity streams and micro-blogging have helped organizational learning. We see the flow of sense-making in small bits that over time become a flow and later patterns emerge. We humans are very good at pattern recognition.

Exception handling is complex work, which requires passion, creativity and initiative. These cannot be commoditized. This is where the main value of the networked business is created. It’s a constantly moving sweet spot. Today’s complex work is tomorrow’s merely complicated or even simple work. But with complex work, failure has to be tolerated, as there are no best practices for exceptions (that’s why they’re called exceptions). Narrating work also means taking ownership of mistakes. Transparency helps the organization learn from mistakes.

Finally, power in the organization must be distributed. Distributed power enables faster reaction time so those closest to the situation can take action. In complex situations there is no time to write a detailed assessment. Those best able to address the situation have marinated in it for some time. They couldn’t sufficiently explain it to someone removed from the problem if they wanted to anyway. This shared power is enabled by trust. Power in knowledge-based organizations must be distributed in order to nurture trust. “One of the big challenges for companies is that unlike information or data flows, knowledge does not flow easily – as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships.” —John Hagel

Power-sharing and transparency enable work to move out to the edges and away from the comfortable, complicated work that has been the corporate mainstay for decades.  There’s nothing left in the safe inner rings anyway, as it’s being automated and outsourced.

The high-value work today is in facing complexity, not in addressing problems that have already been solved and for which a formulaic or standardized response has been developed. One challenge for organizations is getting people to realize that what they already know has increasingly diminishing value. How to solve problems together is becoming the real business advantage.
new known

The Hyper-social Organization – Review

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The main premise of The Hyper-social Organization is that social media, connectivity, and always-on technology are enabling what humans do naturally — be very social.

The authors on knowledge management:

Of course, one of the big challenges for companies is that, unlike information or data, knowledge does not flow easily, as it relies on long-term trust-based relationships. Indeed, data and information are facts that describe a situation and can be generated by machines, whereas knowledge consists of truths, beliefs, methods, solutions, ideas and other elements that are created by humans and shared among people who trust one another. So one of the keys to success in this new economic reality is to move from a transactional world to a long-term trust-based world.

I have to like these questions the authors ask organizational leaders:

How good are you at engaging your detractors? How much of a “perpetual beta” culture do you have in your company? Do you consider your customer service department to be a cost center, or something more?

On the value of marketing materials:

McKinsey estimates that two-thirds of all buying decision-focused conversations do not involve anyone from the company. In a separate study, IDC estimated that only 20 percent of all content developed by the typical marketing department is actually used by the sales organization. What we can extrapolate from this information is that the content developed by most marketing departments is used in less than 7 percent of all buying decisions.

The most interesting part of the book is the Hyper-Sociality Index, based on four pillars:

Tribes vs Segments — “In a hyper-social environment you need to reach the tribes whose members influence one another – not the market segments that can be targeted with direct mail and ad campaigns”

Human-centricity vs Company-centricity — “… the shift in attention to the human elements of your business can help to improve product development, marketing, sales, talent management, knowledge management, and customer service.”

Networks vs Channels — “Data and information flow through channels, whereas networks allow knowledge to flow.”

Social Messiness vs Process and Hierarchy — “SEAMS: sensing, engaging, activating, measuring, storytelling” [Note: this does not align with the Cynefin framework that advocates a Probe — Sense — Respond approach to complexity, so I think SEAMS lacks the flexibility necessary in complex environments.]

The authors pose a similar question I have been asking for years as well, “Will traditional hierarchical organizations, with multiple levels of management between the tribes and corporate decision makers, enjoy any sort of advantage in a hyper-social future?”

Finally, here are 8 characteristics of hyper-social leaders:

  1. Behave like humans, not faceless entities
  2. Ditch the rule books and embrace values
  3. Live their values
  4. Trust people and create trusted environments
  5. Embrace transparency
  6. Embrace diversity
  7. Never compromise on quality
  8. Let go of control

If these concepts are new to you, I would recommend this book. I noticed that John Hagel is often quoted in this book, so you may want to pick up his latest book as well, or instead — The Power of Pull

Jobs, work and technology

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Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared on Twitter this past week.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Jobs in the Age of Watson – via @raesmaa [automated & outsourced]

These non-routine cognitive tasks are beyond the scope of computer substitution for the foreseeable future.  However, one can design sophisticated tools to significantly expand what people can accomplish when performing these activities.  For example, CAD systems have enabled engineers to develop far more complex products than they could have done otherwise.  Social networking tools make it easier for people to communicate and collaborate with colleagues over wide distances and thus improve the collective intelligence of the team.   And, systems like Watson will be extensively used to help experts deal with highly complex problems in areas like medicine, finance and national security.

‘The Age of the Superfluous Worker‘ – the challenge of thinking outside the box – via @CharlesJennings

Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing and of services not requiring hands-on human contact. Continuing increases in worker productivity add yet more to the surplus. So does the unwillingness of employers to even consider hiring people who have been unemployed for a long time.

@umairh – Seven problems a recovery won’t fix – via @cburell

Pointlessness. Here’s a statistic that ought to set your hair on fire: somewhere between 50 and 75% of “employees” are “disengaged” (depending on whose numbers you want to buy): they don’t care much, if at all, about the work they do. But can you blame them? Perhaps they don’t care not just because the work they do feels pointless, but because, in human terms, it mostly is. Designing new bottles for deodorants or energy drinks or finding a new loophole in the law isn’t exactly helping design, craft, build, or maintain the Sistine Chapel. Yet it’s what roughly about 75% of us do every weary day of our drab working lives. Forget the numbers and just ask yourself: if you were to walk into any corporation, would you find faces brimming over with deep fulfillment and authentic delight–or stonily asking themselves, “If it wasn’t for the accursed paycheck, would I really let imprison myself in this dungeon of the human soul?”

Seth’s Blog: Without a diverse talent pool, any society [company] will do a poor job of solving the problems that inevitably arise:

Diversity of talents and interests is central to innovation because new things are so often mixtures of old things. By rewarding only one kind of talent, colleges suppress diversity of talent and thereby reduce innovation.

Social media: An Epidemic of Insignificance – by @JayDeragon

Everywhere we turn in every form of media we are surrounded with this thing called social media. Facebook dominates magazine covers, stories, broadcast and our mobile devices “tweet” with content from ” twits”.  The human network is more consumed with reading and watching “the latest and greatest” than they are about improving real relationships. Social technology is creating the effect of “social heads in the sand” by believing popular and influential” are more important than the meaningful and significant.