Dan Pink is a mas­ter of cre­ative swip­ing, which is MBA-speak for “he steals other peo­ples’ ideas.” Which isn’t to say he’s not a clever chap. And we cer­tainly guys like him, crafty writ­ers who aren’t put off by research, who weave the lat­est ideas into pithy, punchy, com­pelling nar­ra­tives. Cer­tainly, for every artic­u­late Dan […]

The gift is to the giver… it can­not fail. –Walt Whit­man Lewis Hyde’s book The Gift has taught me a lot; for one thing, it explains how gifts are the cur­rency of com­mu­nity. The les­son: if you want to make some­one a part of your com­mu­nity, be gen­er­ous to them. If they accept your kind­ness (and […]

Infor­ma­tion is empow­er­ing, but too much can it can also be debil­i­tat­ing.  Infor­ma­tion Over­load costs the U.S. econ­omy $900 bil­lion per year. In this inter­est­ing video a few of the world’s lead­ing man­agers dis­cuss the prob­lem.  In Defense of Dis­trac­tion dis­cusses how our brains are adapt­ing to make the most of the new information-rich environments […]

Run­ning a coun­try is not easy. As hard as you try, you sim­ply can’t make every­one happy. Or can you? In the late Eigh­teenth cen­tury, Eng­lish­man Jeremy Ben­tham sug­gested a Util­i­tar­ian approach –gov­ern­ments should aim to bring the great­est hap­pi­ness to the great­est num­ber of peo­ple. His con­tem­po­raries in the New World agreed and declared “the […]