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Brain Food Week 3: Passion, Vision and Cognitive Surplus

You want your employees to bring their hearts with them to their jobs. - Steve Farber, President of Extreme Leadership from 2¢ Worth by David Warlick

Do you ask your colleagues, managers, and employees to bring their hearts to work? If you don't, why not? How would it change your attitude about where you work if everyone did? What would we need to do differently in your organization to have foster this?

ingshen is the Mandarin word for spirit and vivacity. It is an important word for those who would lead, because above all things, spirit and vivacity set effective organisations apart from those that will decline and die. - James L. Hayes, Memos for Management: Leadership, 1983

Our managers and leaders (leaders can be anyone in an organization) need to see the big sky.

We think too small, like the frog at the bottom of the well. He thinks the sky is only as big as the top of the well. If he surfaced, he would have an entirely different view. Mao Tse-Tung

The uncreative mind can spot wrong answers, but it takes a very creative mind to spot wrong questions. - Antony Jay from If You're Working in a Big Group - Matt, 37 Signals

Where does your time go?

It is not enough to be busy. So are the ants. The question is: What are we busy about?" - Henry David Thoreau from Real People Don't Have Time for Social Media by Sarah Perez - ReadWriteWeb

Shirky basically asserts that we are finally realizing that we can do something with the "cognitive surplus" time that has been spent in non-participatory activities like watching TV. Using a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he shows that:

wikipedia = 100 million hours of thought

2 hundred billion hours watching TV (USA) = 2000 wikipedias per year

Gin, Television, and Social Surplus - Clay Shirky

Just for Fun




Tags: busyness | cognitive surplus | heart | humor | leadership | organization | quotation | quote | passion | vision | work