The Job

Sir Ken Robinson: Do schools kill creativity?

Marketing Headhunter.com | Recruiters for Ecommerce: Happy Jay Abraham Day!

"If you're a marketer and you don't know Jay Abraham, then this is your lucky day. I'm giving you amnesty right now. Using the operator ("Jay Abraham" filetype:pdf) I used Copernic to dredge up some of the best FREE Jay Abraham resources on the deep web.

Happy Jay Abraham Day! And many happy returns ..."

Wired 1.02: Crypto Rebels

"As the Cold War drifts into deep memory, one might think that the American body charged with keeping our secret codes and breaking the codes of our enemies -- the National Security Agency (NSA) -- might finally breathe easy for the first time in its 30-year existence. Instead, it is sweating out its worst nightmare."

That was the week that was...Week ending August 22, 2008 - RecruitingBlogs.com

"A round-up from the recruiting industry’s group blogs, portals and individual archives..."

Permanent Innovation Blog: Theory of Business, Complexity and Getting Work Done

"I've just completed a new white paper about the theory of business, complexity and getting work done. The paper posits that the theory of business in use by anyone involved in business (anyone for that matter) will preclude certain responses to the conditions in the environment and hence will preclude certain ways of organizing to get work done.

Here's a quick summary of the paper..."

Chicken, chicken, chicken

Martin Ryder | Cognitive Science Celebrities

"Writings by and about leading thinkers in cognitive science, and critics and observers of the philosophy of mind."

10 Worst Web glitches of 2008 (so far) | Webware : Cool Web apps for everyone - CNET

"We have been reminded several times lately that Web 2.0 is in no way a synonym for 'reliable.' Major services have crashed. Big product launches have fizzled. Users have raised their collective fists in the air. What's going on? Is the Web crumbling? Well, no, it's not. But users' expectations are rising, and Web companies often get themselves into trouble by promising far more than they can deliver.

Here's the timeline of offline..."

Ray Kurzweil on how technology will transform us | Video on TED.com

"Talks Ray Kurzweil: How technology's accelerating power will transform us"

That was the week that was...Week ending August 15, 2008 - RecruitingBlogs.com

"A round-up from the recruiting industry’s group blogs, portals and individual archives..."

Be an Expert on Anything - Wired How-To Wiki

"Stephen Colbert won’t be taking the advice offered in this guide. He has dedicated his career to passing himself off as an expert on anything. Colbert honed this skill on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, where he served as an analyst on everything from the Middle East to presidential gastronomy before gaining the title Senior Expert News Correspondent. He is a specialist in improv comedy, which he says “is partly about making people believe you know everything.” On Comedy Central’s hit show The Colbert Report, he goes beyond expertise into the arena of what he calls the anti-expert. “My show is an exercise in willfully ignorant, emotionally based, non-intellectual, -incurious passion about things. For instance, what gives Britannica the right to tell me that the Panama Canal was built in 1914? If I want to say 1941, that’s my right.” Don’t even think about arguing with him."

Removing anonymity won't stop the online flame wars | Technology | The Guardian

"Another study into online behaviour found that certain types of individual are attracted to the net precisely because it allows them to behave in a way they are less likely to offline. It is, therefore, somewhat self-selecting before you even hit a key: what you read may not reflect the writer's real-life self.

One of the authors of this study, Dr Chris Fullwood, an internet psychology lecturer at the University of Wolverhampton, says: 'Removing anonymity may have some small effect, but not a massive one. This is because a number of factors contribute towards what psychologists call online disinhibition. Removing one of them - the anonymity - and not removing any of the others means it will probably still occur as people remain invisible and so can disassociate their online from their offline persona.' (See liebertonline.com for more.) Professor John Suler of Rider University also explains the main causes of online flaming besides anonymity at enotalone.com."

That was the week that was...Week ending August 8, 2008 - RecruitingBlogs.com

"A round-up from the recruiting industry’s group blogs, portals and individual archives..."

You can’t eat Whuffie (but it’s getting harder to eat without it) | ::HorsePigCow:: marketing uncommon

"Whuffie has replaced money, providing a motivation for people to do useful and creative things. A person’s Whuffie is a general measurement of his or her overall reputation, and Whuffie is lost and gained according to a person’s favorable or unfavorable actions. The question is, who determines which actions are favorable or unfavorable? In Down and Out, the answer is public opinion. Rudely pushing past someone on the sidewalk will definitely lose you points from them (and possibly bystanders who saw you), while composing a much-loved symphony will earn you Whuffie from everyone who enjoyed it."

Guy Debord: Information and Much More from Answers.com

"'Quotations are useful in periods of ignorance or obscurantist beliefs.'"

Power & Appearances -- Transparency.com

"In the past few decades, we have begun to perfect the art and science of creating what are often referred to as virtual worlds. Most notably, we have enhanced the special effects in movies and television, invented realistic computer games, and created new kinds of immersive media with movie-rides, virtual realities and elaborate theme parks. As a result, we can now take the realm of imagination and make it seem to come to life."

Possessed - Morten Søby, Research Fellow Institute for Educational Research, University of Oslo

"The growth of information and the development of digital media and virtual reality have brought about the fulfilment of the ideal belonging to the age of enlightenment. The information explosion and implosion cause a communicational stoppage - a profusion of pictures and signs. Speech, text, TV, film and digital media can no longer keep up with all the signs which run amok in the simulation stream. Virtual reality is not avant-garde, but rather a delayed and necessary updating of symbol exchange under the electronic mode of information. Finally, with this new medium one can have ambitions to impart the complexity and chaos of the present time. With virtual reality we can all play God."

Everything Web 2.0 - 城市胡同

Everything Web 2.0 - 城市胡同

HP Shane Robison Executive Viewpoint: The Next Wave: Everything as a Service

"As we move from the desktop model to the cloud and a world where everything will be delivered as a service, there are five trends that we at HP believe are worth paying close attention to:

1. Publishing will be democratized. A global Internet population of 1.2 billion people now has the tools to produce everything from books and magazines to music and videos. This represents a massive disruption of old publishing models. People will soon have the ability to print on demand any book ever published. The concept of “out of print” will be a thing of the past. Similarly, warehouses of physical inventory in the publishing world will no longer be necessary.

2. Crowd-sourcing is going mainstream and will change the rules of the game forever. Fortune 50 companies will access top talent on a global basis via the Internet, saving millions of dollars in professional services, from occupations as diverse as accountants, advertising experts, attorneys, and engineers. Reputation systems will lower the risks involved by exposing the poor performers. One example of this shift to crowd sourcing is HP’s Logoworks service, which is transforming the graphics design industry.

3. Enterprises will use radically different tools to make key business decisions, including systems to accurately predict the future. A merger is taking place between the structured data that fuels business intelligence and the unstructured data of the web. This combination represents a kind of Holy Grail that will advance the state of the art in business intelligence. At the same time, market-based systems that enable you to accurately predict the future will become common practice in the enterprise.

4. Crowd-sourcing is going mainstream and will change the rules of the game forever. Fortune 50 companies will access top talent on a global basis via the Internet, saving millions of dollars in professional services, from occupations as diverse as accountants, advertising experts, attorneys, and engineers. Reputation systems will lower the risks involved by exposing the poor performers. One example of this shift to crowd sourcing is HP’s Logoworks service, which is transforming the graphics design industry.

5. Enterprises will use radically different tools to make key business decisions, including systems to accurately predict the future. A merger is taking place between the structured data that fuels business intelligence and the unstructured data of the web. This combination represents a kind of Holy Grail that will advance the state of the art in business intelligence. At the same time, market-based systems that enable you to accurately predict the future will become common practice in the enterprise.

Primal Leadership and the Role of Listening in Emotional Intelligence - BusinessListening.com

With the goal of helping people become more effective leaders, Primal Leadership authors Goleman, Boyatzis and McKee identify six styles of leadership, four domains of Emotional Intelligence, and five steps towards learning leadership skills. Listening skills are essential to effectiveness at virtually every stage.

Goleman, Boyatzis & McKee draw extensively from research into Emotional Intelligence or "EI" (which has no relationship to the better known theoretical construct known as the intelligence quotient, or "IQ") and throughout Primal Leadership they use EI as the unifying principle and yardstick with which to evaluate leadership ability.

The central finding of EI research is that emotions are essentially contagious, and thus a leader's attitude and energy can "infect" a workplace either for better or for worse. With this in mind the authors stress the importance of "resonance", which is the ability of leaders to perceive and influence the flow of emotions (including motivational states) between themselves and others they work with. The fundamental importance of resonance, which essentially rests in part upon a leader's ability to put into practice the skill of empathic listening, is explored throughout the book.

Because of the implications for improving resonance, the authors emphasize throughout Primal Leadership the importance to leaders of self-awareness, which includes the ability to perceive and moderate the effect one is having on others.

Start Creating Authentic Leadership - John Baldoni

"When author and consultant Jim Gilmore talks about authenticity, he’s talking about keeping consumer experiences real. To determine the authenticity of a product, Gilmore applies the “Polonius test,” derived from Shakespeare’s Hamlet. “Is the offering true to itself? Is the offering what it says it is?” Affirmative answers confirm a product’s authenticity.

But Gilmore's test, and his authenticity lessons overall, apply just as well to leadership.A leader must be true to herself in order to lead in a genuine way. Here are three ways to start creating authentic leadership..."

The Mystery of Consciousness -- TIME

"The young women had survived the car crash, after a fashion. In the five months since parts of her brain had been crushed, she could open her eyes but didn't respond to sights, sounds or jabs. In the jargon of neurology, she was judged to be in a persistent vegetative state. In crueler everyday language, she was a vegetable.

So picture the astonishment of British and Belgian scientists as they scanned her brain using a kind of MRI that detects blood flow to active parts of the brain. When they recited sentences, the parts involved in language lit up. When they asked her to imagine visiting the rooms of her house, the parts involved in navigating space and recognizing places ramped up. And when they asked her to imagine playing tennis, the regions that trigger motion joined in. Indeed, her scans were barely different from those of healthy volunteers. The woman, it appears, had glimmerings of consciousness."

Turn Social Networks into Your Recruiter -- Facebook -- LinkedIn -- Plaxo

"If corporate recruiters can mine Facebook and LinkedIn for job candidates, small businesses can too. Social networks can level the playing field, and can be used to try lots of different recruiting initiatives.

Jason Averbook flies around the country advising major corporations how to weave social networks and Web 2.0 tools into recruiting and other human-resources practices. So when Averbook needed to add staff to his 50-person HR industry consulting firm recently, he knew he had to practice what he preached.

Instead of going through traditional channels, Averbook updated the “Status” section of his profiles on three social networking sites, Facebook, LinkedIn and Plaxo, to show he was “desperately” seeking new employees. It worked. He got 19 qualified candidates in two days, compared to the five that his Minneapolis-based firm, Knowledge Infusion, attracted through a job listing on their website over the past three months. “Based on interviews that are already happening I predict we’ll end up hiring some of them,” Averbook says."

That was the week that was...Week ending August 1, 2008 - RecruitingBlogs.com

"A round-up from the recruiting industry’s group blogs, portals and individual archives..."

Smart Mobs » Blog Archive » Six degrees of separation confirmed at nearer seven

"An article in today’s Washington Post describes recent confirmation of the reality of a major underlying smart mobs principle. With a main title hyping the popular Kevin Bacon Game illustration, the article’s subtitle tells us: Microsoft Study Supports Small World Theory. Some excerpts from the WP article..."

Insightory’s Expert Blogs: Ami G’s Blogspot Among the First | AMITAI GIVERTZ

"Avneet Jolly continues to improve Insightory.com. The latest addition, a feed of featured experts’ blogs.

I am very happy that Ami G’s Blogspot is among the first to roll out. The other featured bloggers include..."

2.0 Expo 2008: Clay Shirky

The Power of Counter-Intuitive Thinking

Why did the Swiss lose the watch market to the Japanese and others?

According to Bill Byron Concevitch, chief learning officer for Verint, the Swiss discovered the idea of a transistorized watch over 40 years ago, yet they did nothing about it. In his book, Counter-Intuitive Selling (Kaplan Publishing, 2007), Concevitch points out what happened. The Swiss didn’t pursue the idea of a transistorized watch because it was counter-intuitive to their thinking.

Some Japanese businessmen were visiting Switzerland, heard about the idea, and asked the leaders of the Swiss watchmaking industry if they planned to pursue the idea. Told no, the Japanese recognized the opportunity. As Concevitch explained during a visit to AMA, the Japanese were prompted to pursue the idea because they had no preconceived notions about watches. The story, he shared, points out the importance of giving up old habits and embracing new ways of thinking and acting—counter-intuitive to our current thinking.

Social Tagging to Unlock Collective Intelligence

e-BIM : Ask, Find, Solve: Abandoning the Obsolete and Unproductive: A Difficult But Necessary Task

"A fruit tree grows stronger and fuller when it is pruned periodically. In a long-out-of-print book entitled The Folklore of Management, Clarence B. Randall, a retired president of Inland Steel, expressed this thought most elegantly:

The world around, hearty men who make a living by harvesting the fruits of the soil know when and how to use the pruning knife. They have no more useful working tool...whether it be a French peasant who gives daily, almost hourly, care to his precious two hectares of sun drenched hillside soil in Burgundy, or the cherry grower of Michigan or the owner of an apple orchard in the Virginia, he preserves the quality of his product by his skill in removing deadwood...

... the significant thing about his operation, however, is that he works at it all the time...Never does he rush out in terror to lay about him with an ax, slashing indiscriminately right and left...he is steady and consistent about the whole process and keeps constantly at it…in the spring following a bumper crop, when he sure he has a vintage product, he does the same amount of trimming as after one of those sad years when the hail damage has all but ruined

"

The Internet as a metaphor for God - CHARLES HENDERSON, CrossCurrents

"In her ground-breaking study of human identity in the age of the Internet (Life on the Screen), Sherry Turkle reports that numerous computer users she has interviewed talk of their online experience in spiritual terms. In these narratives people tell her that computer networks "resonate with our most profound sense that life is not predictable. They provoke spiritual, even religious speculations." She cites one interviewee who concludes: "To me, it's God coming together with science, and computers have made it all possible."

Subsequently Turkle goes even further in an interview with a Time magazine correspondent referenced in the cover story, "Jesus Online": "People see the Net as a new metaphor for God." The reason for this, she explains, is that they experience electronic networks, like life itself, evolving by a force they can neither understand, nor control. "The Internet is one of the most dramatic examples of something that is self-organized. That's the point. God is the distributed, decentralized system." Turkle is putting together these sentences, not as a religious person trying to prove a point, but as a scientist trying to understand what is happening in the culture at large.

Sway: The Irresistible Pull of Irrational Behavior

Workshop on Semantic Search 2008

"SemSearch 2008

Proceedings of the Workshop on Semantic Search (SemSearch 2008) at the 5th European Semantic Web Conference (ESWC 2008), Tenerife, Spain, June 2nd, 2008."