A nice quote, which makes sense.
"Whenever we're afraid, it's because we don't know enough.
If we understood enough, we would never be afraid."
~ Earl Nightingale, motivational speaker and author, who was often acknowledged as the "Dean of Personal Development";
As Bill Clinton says on a recent bigthink.com interview, "Never Stop Learning!"
Mike Myatt, reportedly one of
America’s Top CEO Coach, has done a marvelous job of hacking the
leadership engine by laying bare the ten challenges, which all good
leaders should often deal with.
Here's the link to his article:
http://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140325184854-6114632-the-essence-of-leadership
I would have thought that Challenge #10: "Challenge Yourself" should have been placed as #1.
Nonetheless, I enjoy reading Challenge #5: "Challenge the
Information"... Don't think BIG DATA, think good data; it's always worth
re-imagining how one process information to yield better decisions!
Overall, it's a good roundup.
Dr David Rock, Executive Director of the Neuroleadership Institute and author of 'Your Brain at Work', together with Dr Daniel Siegel, a Harvard-trained physician and codirector of the Mindful Awareness Research Center at UCLA, has jointly created what they call the Healthy Mind Platter.
This platter offers seven essential mental activities that are
necessary for optimum mental health, and provides the full set of
‘mental nutrition’ that your brain needs to function at its best.
Here
they are:
Focus Time
When we closely focus on tasks in a goal-oriented way, taking on challenges that make deep connections in the brain.
Play Time
When we allow ourselves to be spontaneous or creative, playfully
enjoying novel experiences, which helps make new connections in the
brain.
Connecting Time
When we connect with other people, ideally in person, richly activating the brain’s social circuitry.
Physical Time
When we move our bodies, aerobically if possible, which strengthens the brain in many ways.
Time In
When we quietly reflect internally, focusing on sensations, images,
feelings and thoughts, helping to better integrate the brain.
Down Time
When we are non-focused, without any specific goal, and let our mind wander or simply relax, which helps our brain recharge.
Sleep Time
When we give the brain the rest it needs to consolidate learning and recover from the experiences of the day.
I like what I am reading:
"Innovation is executing something real in a different way than has ever worked before.
I emphasize execution because I believe ideas are all in the ether, and nothing under the sun is completely original.
But how you put things together, for what purpose and how it is used,
amplified and impacts the people it reaches has the potential to be
completely unique.
Real innovation has impact,... "
~ Paul Berry, Founder and CEO of RebelMouse, one of the world's Top 10 Most Innovative Companies in Advertising;
This is Øistein Kristiansen, the bald-headed guy in the centre.
To Dilip and I, he is fast draw artist extraordinaire, extremely comfortable with ambidexterity, especially when it comes to his artistic virtuosity.
He has been to Singapore on numerous occasions to showcase his works in real time, and now he is back in Norway.
More information about this genius can be found at this link: https://oistein.com/en
This fine quote excerpted from the recent
article, 'Every Leader Must be a Change Agent or Face Extinction', by
contributor Glenn Llopis on forbes.com, reminds me of a valuable lesson I
have had the wonderful opportunity to pick up from strategy guru Prof. Henry Mintzberg back in the nineties:
"... Leadership in the 21st century not only requires the ability to
continuously manage crisis and change – but also the circular vision to
see around, beneath and beyond the obvious in order to anticipate the
unexpected before circumstances force your hand... "
Prof.
Mintzberg introduced his beautiful concept of "strategy" or rather
"strategic thinking" as "seeing", as illustrated below:
- Seeing ahead: planning ahead;
- Seeing behind: drawing lessons from the past;
- Seeing above: seeing the big picture;
- Seeing below: finding and understanding the root causes;
- Seeing beside: thinking laterally;
- Seeing beyond: expecting better futures with long range projections;
- Seeing through: following up and following through the vision.
However, according to him, this is not a recipe for strategic thinking
but "seeing" is crucial to the formation of the strategic thinking
process.
Dilip Mukerjea and I spend an inordinate amount of time in cyberspace to brainstorm a broad array of different ideas and multiple perspectives.
Prior to moving to Vietnam from Singapore, he often popped into my residence in Jurong West to have our regular "pow wow", followed by chilling out with "teh c" (milked tea) in the nearby food court.
In fact, the cafe on the ground floor of the National Library Building in Singapore had also been our regular "springboard".
We are full-time dedicated and energetic fellow explorers in the field of life-long and life-wide learning, including creative explorations
As shown above is just one of the recent productive outcomes from our cyberspace "pow wow".
What we have done is what I like to call, a "proactively combinatorial" initiative, whereby McKinsey's original idea of a 'T-Shaped Pro' is pitched against Howard Gardner's 'Five Minds for the Future', just to make the composite idea more future savvy.
The adage, "Two Heads Are Better Than One", is very true. More importantly, "Knowledge Shared is Power Squared."
Here's a nice infographic on 'How to Build a Business Plan' from entrepreneur.com.
Just reminiscing a wonderful video ad on television from Timberland Stores in Singapore about four years ago.
In addition to fancy camera work and fast action, coupled with suspense thrown in and loud energetic music, it has a catchy tagline, "IF YOU'RE NOT FAST, YOU'RE FOOD"!
While brainstorming over Skype with my good buddy Dilip Mukerjea this morning, it suddenly comes to my mind.
Despite the transpiration of time, the larger and broader message is still very relevant today, notwithstanding the fact that its focal point was running away from animals in Timberland mountain athletic shoes.
Is your competitor out for lunch or eating your lunch?
I will explore further on this interesting subject in a separate post, drawing upon intellectual cues from my brainstorming session with Dilip.
This is a snappy pictorial rendition of the ancient classic, 'The Richest Man in Babylon', by George Clason, done in the form of a "splashmap'' by Dilip Mukerjea.
An astute observation, but I like to amplify the quote further:
"Education is the best provision for the journey to old age."
~ Aristotle, Greek philosopher;
It should read self-education, and more precisely, self-directed
life-long and life-wide learning, at least from my perspective.
This fine quote has always been one of my greatest inspirations:
"The only way of discovering the limits of the possible is to venture a little way past them into the impossible."
~ Arthur C Clarke (1917-2008), in 'Profiles of the Future';
he was a British author, inventor and futurist, famous for his short
stories and novels, among them '2001: A Space Odyssey' (1968) which was
made into a classic sci-fi movie; also, a visionary who predicted
artificial intelligence and communications satellites that orbit the
earth in fixed positions;
According to the US National Science Foundation, it's estimated that our mind produces as many as 12,000 to 60,000 thoughts in a day.
Dr Deepak Chopra, well-known holistic health guru and alternative medicine practitioner, thinks that about 95% of these thoughts are the same thoughts as yesterday's.
We should therefore, do our best, to take up a proactively combinatorial role in our lives to ensure that our daily thoughts are productive in creating positive outcomes in our lives, failing which we will only create miseries for ourselves.
As ancient sages have exhorted, we are what we think, and thoughts are the architects of our destiny.
Here are some simple and quick ideas to move forward with a positive outlook in life:
Take full responsibility for your life; Decide what you want in life and work out a strategy/plan; Be grateful for what you already have; Talk to and/or mix around with positive folk; Be happy, don't worry, and always smile; Have time-out, and do relaxation sequences; Read inspiring books or quotes; Render random kindness to others wherever possible;
A truly valid observation!
In fact, this is exactly what is happening in today's
Google-era, especially with our younger generation with their notion
that "googling" is a synonym to research!
Just taking a stand:
Information does not equal to insight,
provided that we can generate useful ideas to look at more incoming
information, and then explore their usefulness and usability in
manifesting a productive outcome.
It's pertinent to point out
that data is raw and neutral to everybody. It becomes information only
when we can make sense of it [i.e. conceptually coherent and personally
relevant] and eventually see a use of it.
It is through our perspective of idea generation that insight is finally drawn from the selected incoming information.
Ideas must come first.That's where our personal creativity - and creative imagination - comes to play.
So, without ideas, information is actually useless.
From the chosen workable idea(s), we can then sculpt our decision to
act, and formulate a plan for action, which upon implementation and
execution, in turn generates real-world experience - knowing what works;
what doesn't work, and what could possibly work better the next time.
This is what we call knowledge.
As Einstein is believed to have said, 'Knowledge is experience; everything else is just information'.
Interestingly, making a decision implies making a choice, which entails
a personal accountability for consequences after the choice is taken,
in either way, good or bad.
This is the harsh lesson of having gained knowledge or experience.
Nonetheless, cumulative knowledge or experience over time becomes expertise, and the discerning use of expertise is wisdom.
From data - with the crucial participating elements of information,
idea, decision, choice, plan, action, consequence, experience,
knowledge, and expertise - to wisdom seems like a linear progression.
In reality, it's not; it's more of an iterative and even recursive process, with feedback as well as feed-forward loops.
In a nut shell, this is how insight becomes ultimately BI (business intelligence), at least from my perspective.
Dilip Mukerjea sharing some of his creative strategies and strategist tools, dovetailed specifically for the real estate market, during a recent return visit to Singapore from Mumbai, India.
A nice infographic - a work-in-progress rendition by my good buddy Dilip
Mukerjea in Mumbai, India - about the power and importance of reading!
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