The Business Case for Reading Novels - Anne Kreamer - Harvard Business Review

I've been a devoted, even fanatical reader of fiction my whole life, but sometimes I feel like I'm wasting time if I spend an evening immersed in Lee Child's newest thriller, or re-reading The Great Gatsby. Shouldn't I be plowing through my in-box? Or getting the hang of some new productivity app? Or catching up on my back issues of The Economist? That slight feeling of self-indulgence that haunts me when I'm reading fake stories about fake people is what made me so grateful to stumble on a piece in Scientific American Mind by cognitive psychologist Keith Oatley extolling the practical benefits to be derived particularly from consuming fiction.

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How leaders kill meaning at work - McKinsey Quarterly - Leadership

As a senior executive, you may think you know what Job Number 1 is: developing a killer strategy. In fact, this is only Job 1a. You have a second, equally important task. Call it Job 1b: enabling the ongoing engagement and everyday progress of the people in the trenches of your organization who strive to execute that strategy. A multiyear research project whose results we described in our recent book, The Progress Principle,¹ found that of all the events that can deeply engage people in their jobs, the single most important is making progress in meaningful work.

Even incremental steps forward—small wins—boost what we call “inner work life”.....More and to read the full article click here

Don't let market research myopia distract you from innovation - Jim Clemmer - Innovation Tools

Customer and market research, competitive benchmarking, and focusing on market share could be detrimental to your organization's future performance. These approaches are critical improvement tools. Top performing organizations have turned them into a disciplined and useful science. But they can also lead to "me-too" followership or - even worse - commodity products and services that compete only on price.

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To Inspire Innovation, Get a Muse - Michael Schrage - Harvard Business Review

Yves Saint Laurent and Pablo Picasso — brilliant entrepreneurs as well as celebrated artistes — claimed inspiration from muses.So, apparently, did Steve Jobs. Perhaps the newly-knighted Sir Jonathan Ive has one, too. Creative dynamos have always sought the frisson of the divine revelatory spark. So they look to a muse for energy inspiration. Does your business — should your innovators — have a muse?

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An Aggregation on the Definitions and Concepts of Psychology - Curious: Decisions, Decisions

Here is a great aggregation of videos entitled Psychology Concepts » » Curious: Decisions, Decisions on the definitions and concepts of psychology. It is hard to find out who put the aggregation togther but it is a really worthwhile resource - one well worth bookmarking.