There's A Flip Side to Everything - Derek Sivers.

A neat little take on our thinking process and how it is influenced culturally with Derek Sivers

Seeking Common Ground in Conversations Can Stifle Innovation and Reward the Wrong People : Research: Stanford GSB

The best baseball players don't always get elected All-Stars. And the Nobel Prize doesn't always go to the most deserving member of the scientific community. This, according to a pair of recent studies, is because such recognition can depend upon how well known an individual is rather than on merit alone. Moreover, because it's human nature for people to try to find common ground when talking to others, simple everyday conversations could have the unfortunate side effect of blocking many of the best and most innovative ideas from the collective social consciousness. "In our research, we found that people are most likely to talk about things they think they have in common with others, rather than topics or ideas that are more unusual or striking," said Nathanael J. Fast, a PhD student at the Stanford Graduate School of Business. Fast is one of three authors of the paper "Common Ground and Cultural Prominence: How Conversation Reinforces Culture," with Chip Heath of the Stanford Business School, and George Wu of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago. "This has the effect of reinforcing—or even institutionalizing—the prominence of familiar cultural elements over ones that are perhaps more deserving."

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A brief history of (ancient) systems thinking « Framework 21 - Daniel Montano

Systems thinking is not new. I have been thinking about its ancient history and so far this is what I have gathered: * 600 B.C. – philosophers used systems thinking to organize their thoughts (e.g. Lao Tze) * 2,700 B.C. – Egyptians, like Imhotep, showed evidence that he was using systems thinking during his roles as architect, physician and engineer in Egypt. * 4,000 B.C. – Cuneiform, a system of writing appears thanks to the need to keep track of multiple economic transactions. * (date pending) – the beginnings of economic (value exchange systems). My assumption here is that value exchange systems were designed by systems thinkers. * (90,000 B.C.) – the beginnings of organized belief systems. You can find traces of these belief systems going back as far as 90,000 B.C. [1]. Rather than being “designed” the earliest belief systems may have emerged at the individual level. People may have organized, and synthesized them into coherent systems.

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Why Dirt and Risk Are Good

Within a single generation, our attitude towards children has gone from “go out and don’t come back until it’s dark” to gated children’s playgrounds, chauffeur driven play-dates and a list of officially decreed ‘dangers’ facing children. We have shifted from slugs and snails and puppy dogs tails to iPods, mobile phones and playstations in less than fifty years. You think I’m kidding? There is a DVD compilation of the best of Sesame Street (1969-1974) featuring a warning stating that the DVD is “For adult viewing only”. Why? Because it contains scenes now considered inappropriate for children. We are living in what is undoubtedly the safest time for children in recorded history, yet we protect our kids from germs, grazed knees and broken bones like never before. But what about ‘stranger danger’? Warwick Cairns, a researcher in the UK has calculated that one would have to leave a young child on a pavement for 600,000 years before it became statistically probable that the child would be abducted by a stranger.

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A Cultural Fix for Risk Management Failure

How to create a culture that combines healthy risk taking with effective risk management. Want to buy a pile of second mortgages with a loan-to-equity value of 99 to 1, and scant documentation on borrower qualifications? (By the way, those borrowers might not live in the homes they’re mortgaging.) And, sure, it’s possible the borrowers are lying about their income and job status. (But who cares?) Today, even considering such a package seems ridiculous. Yet most of these loans, part of

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