Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@JaneBozarth – “Setting up only private internal social media platforms is like having phones that won’t call outside the building.”

On perpetual Beta & Social Learning: Are You Learning as Fast as the World Is Changing? – via @TimKastelle

Finally, and most personally, successful learners work hard not to be loners. These days, the most powerful insights often come from the most unexpected places — the hidden genius locked inside your company, the collective genius of customers, suppliers, and other smart people who would be eager to teach you what they know if you simply asked for their insights. But tapping this learning resource requires a new leadership mindset — enough ambition to address tough problems, enough humility to be willing to learn from everyone you encounter. Nobody alone learns as quickly as everybody together.

Clueless in Davos – “A very interesting article in the Foreign Policy magazine about the relevance of Davos – via @AdrianCheok”

… the forum’s two major flaws. The first is that the Davos meeting is a gathering of the global establishment. By definition, establishments are slow and even unable to see and understand developments that run contrary to the orthodoxy of the establishment. One should never expect the unexpected from an establishment institution. The second flaw is even more serious. It is that the theory of globalization underlying the Davos concept is false. That theory holds that globalization is a win-win economic movement that will enrich the whole world and thereby lead the nations to democracy and eternal peace.

Going Mainstream by @reubentozman via @quinnovator

The next change required is to stop talking about “performance support” as though it were a job aid or a little something you use to support a training effort. We need to start talking about performance support as though it were the very essence of what we do and look at training as something that may be used when required. We also tend to use performance support to talk about “just-in-time” training. In the world of business process mapping and systems thinking, everything is “just in time.” All of our interventions need to come when required as dictated by the system. The questions we need to continually ask ourselves are how do we strengthen the system? What interventions and when will lead to better performance of the system?

QR Codes: bad idea or terrible idea? – via @KevinMarks

The only place you should use QR codes is if you have a dedicated reader for them, like a classic barcode scanner, and a workflow that is designed for this that actually saves time. If you do empirical research on using QR codes for the public, you’ll likely see 80% worse performance than text, like this museum did. By all means try the experiment and report your results. Put up a QR code and a printed URL and see which gets the most usage.

Photo by Scott Blake

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“If the structure does not permit dialogue the structure must be changed. ~ Paulo Freire” – via @surreallyno

“Learning is the human activity which least needs manipulation by others. ~ Ivan Illich” – via @IvanIllich2

@flowchainsensei – “Any organisation is screwed when it believes only certain privileged individuals can lead and/or manage.”

@melissapierce – “If you were a real rebel, you’d realize that anger is the trendiest emotion of all and you’d buck that trend with lusty immutable joy.”

@doctorjeff – “Next time a child comes at you with question after question – embrace it with a smile, for they chose … you.”

@umairh – “It’s no coincidence that “Davos” rhymes with “McFuture”.”

Yochai Benkler: Seven Lessons from SOPA/PIPA/Megauplaod and Four Proposals on Where We Go From Here – via @hreingold

Lesson 3: As the networked environment resists control, more of the flow of networked economy has to be sucked in to the enforcement vortex.

The Net is proving much harder to control than the industries anticipated when they got the Digital Millennium Copyright Act DMCA passed in 1998. In order to actually control materials on the Net, SOPA and PIPA tried to harness a range of technical, economic, and bureaucratic platforms, aimed to impede the functions of an ever-more-vaguely defined set of targets. Technical platforms included most prominently the DNS service and registrars and the search engines. Business platforms included payment systems and advertising systems. In order to achieve effective enforcement in a global digitally networked environment, Hollywood seems destined to try to draw an ever-larger set of platforms and actors into the risk of potential copyright and near-copyright liability.

When an enterprise moves to an organic, value-creating, diverse network, the training department has to join the fray. – by @jaycross

What did CLOs do with the insight that informal learning matters? Next to nothing. They left informal learning to chance. Even now, with the cost-effectiveness and responsiveness of informal learning pushing it to the top of CLO’s priority lists, most are taking baby steps if any steps at all. This is extremely disappointing. We who understand how people learn need to be at the vanguard of establishing social networks, expertise location, online communities, information streams, agile instructional design, help desks, federated content management, continuing reinforcement, peer development, and so on.

Homework: To Flip or to Toss? we read homework in class, discuss it in class, clarify and debate it in class — then briefly write about it at home – by @cburell

My current experiment involves not so much flipping homework as (almost) ending it. I’m using document-based lessons in which all reading and discussion is done in class, and the only homework is a reflective blog post about the day’s content on a team blog — which student team-members read and comment on with corrections, extensions, challenges, etc. I like this so far, for several reasons …

Sebastian Thrun: you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students, but I’ve taken the red pill (video) – via @downes

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

Quotable Moments:

“The only person who is educated is the one who has learned how to learn and change. ~ Carl Rogers” – via @timbuckteeth

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud. ~ Coco Chanel” – via @transarchitect

@flowchainsensei – “Projects” are no way to run a railway – or any other kind of business, for that matter.”

Audience question about IBM Connect during Lotusphere 2012 “Did you evaluate enterprise LMS [learning management systems] before you built this?” A, “No, we began with how people learn.” – via @marciamarcia

Maps only get you so far:

@upriver_ca - If you were going to be thrown into a fast-moving river, would you rather have a map or a canoe?

Much of the world of management is built around drawing maps. And maps are wonderful things if the things that the map represents are manageable. All too often we confuse the map with the terrain, though, and we imagine that while many leaders would like the map, many of those in the water would prefer the canoe.

Walled Gardens:

@MarkFederman – “re: Apple/iTunes becoming de facto textbook gatekeeper. Given their walled garden/control mentality, this is very concerning.”

Jaron Lanier: The False Ideals of the Web – via @jhagel

The obvious strategy in the fight for a piece of the advertising pie is to close off substantial parts of the Internet so Google doesn’t see it all anymore. That’s how Facebook hopes to make money, by sealing off a huge amount of user-generated information into a separate, non-Google world. Networks lock in their users, whether it is Facebook’s members or Google’s advertisers.

Wired – Dirty Little Secrets: The Trouble With Social Search

Still, this potentially marks a real transformation to the way we have looked for information on the web, one with real winners and losers. It also signals a real danger to the balance of power between users and megacompanies. We are increasingly moving from a bottom-up web, where users vote with their links, keyboards and their clicks to show what’s relevant to them, to a top-down web where that’s doubly or triply mediated by browsers, search engines and social networks.

Oopsie! The Audacious iBooks Author EULA - via @nwinton

Apple, in this EULA [end user license agreement], is claiming a right not just to its software, but to its software’s output. It’s akin to Microsoft trying to restrict what people can do with Word documents, or Adobe declaring that if you use Photoshop to export a JPEG, you can’t freely sell it to Getty. As far as I know, in the consumer software industry, this practice is unprecedented. I’m sure it’s commonplace with enterprise software, but the difference is that those contracts are negotiated by corporate legal departments and signed the old-fashioned way, with pen and ink and penalties and termination clauses. A by-using-you-agree-to license that oh by the way asserts rights over a file format? Unheard of, in my experience.

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@EskoKilpi – “Learning is the main driver for productivity. Productivity of learning determines the speed of productivity improvement.”

Teaching: “The master taught by example to the apprentice, by coaching to the journeyman.” by @snowded

It matters who you teach. The more you know about the subject, the less able you are to [teach] beginners classes. I am sure there are some people who can manage this but i haven’t found one yet. In effect to teach (which again is different from speaking) you have to be separate but close in your knowledge base. Academic audiences are good for my work as they challenge and test in a way that a conference audience rarely does. Not only that, you can use words and reference concepts without explanation which means you move faster to more interesting grounds.

@flowchainsensei – “In a world of complexity and change, is consensus unrealistic, and does (ongoing) diversity of viewpoints offer more?”

No more business as usual: “As all business becomes social business, L&D professionals face a momentous choice.” by @JayCross

Our evolving view is that successful future organizations will become learning networks of individuals creating value. They will become stewards of the living. This is a major break from the past — and an opportunity for L&D professionals to become essential contributors to their organizations.

“… old ideas, no matter how thoroughly discredited, die a slow death as, one by one, their advocates pass away. ~ Stiglitz” – via @DemingSOS

Do we need patents? by @lemire

Granting monopolies, even temporary ones, is expensive. We need to be sure that the gains out-weight the costs. In this case, the rationalization offered by the industry does not stand up to scrutiny:

• The U.S. and the U.K. have always had strong patent laws protecting chemicals and drugs. Meanwhile, continental Europe had much weaker patent protection. Until recently, you could not patent a drug or a chemical in Germany (1967), Switzerland (1977) and Italy (1978). Where did the pharmaceutical industry thrive before the 1960s? In Germany, Switzerland and Italy. Though Italy was the fifth produce of drugs in the 1970s, its industry is now practically disappearing.

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

“1 tip for managing creative people: don’t.” @flowchainsensei

“The amount of failure that can be tolerated is directly proportional to the amount of innovation needed.”~ Tim Campos” - via Kevin Jones

—

“Security is mostly a superstition. Life is either a daring adventure or nothing. ~ Helen Keller” – via @simpletonbill & @johnsonwhitney

“With enough ‘security,’ corporate or national, you can utterly kill freedom, production capacity, and morale.” @PatrickWelsh

—

Being an Outsider - by @euan

In business it is easy to get locked into things being the way they are. To be too much in the flow. To become too mainstream and feel stuck. It is easy to think that things are inevitable and that change is too difficult to even consider.

Blogging inside a business has the potential to alter this.

Forbes: Learning from Brilliant Mistakes – via @CharlesJennings

• Mistakes should be planned
• Mistakes must be mined
• Mistake-making must be promoted

“We need to start thinking about the social context of knowledge development as much as, if not more than, individual competence.” – by @snowded

The same applies for an organisation as for an individual. Its not enough to run experimental programmes, the key word in deliberative practice is deliberative. There are some key additional requirements:

• Experiments need to be constructed to run in parallel
• All experiments must be designed as safe-to-fail
• Amplification and dampening strategies need to be in place before the experiments are run
• Managers need to be targeted on the basis that at least half of their experiments should fail
• Research and monitoring needs to provide real time feedback

Every Friday I review what I’ve noted on Twitter and post a wrap-up of what caught my eye. I do this as a reflective thinking process and also in order to take some of what I’ve learned and put it on a platform I can control, my blog. I call it Friday’s Finds and here are some of the more notable finds during 2011.

Blogging

Blogging for knowledge workers: incubating ideas; by @mathemagenic

Blogging is primarily known as an instrument for personal publishing, reaching a broad and often unknown audience without pushing content on them. While blogging is personal, most of its advantages are the result being part of an ecosystem, where weblogs are connected not only by links, but also by relations between bloggers. Those relations do not appear automatically: it takes time and effort before one can enjoy social effects of blogging. To sustain blogging before those effects appear it is important to find a personally meaningful way to use a weblog.

@euan: Information Fertiliser: untidy information, like blogs, makes better knowledge fertiliser:

Finding the good stuff is one of the functions of bloggers. Information rag and bone men who curate the weak signal and the long tail. Seeing patterns in the small, the marginal, the messy. This is where those with nerdy curiosity and a good eye can find real value in what others have discarded or not noticed …

Learning

Johnnie Moore: Learning is not a parcel - via @DavidGurteen

Learning is not a FedEx package that you sign for at the door. Learning happens on its own schedule. We often realise the significance of events long after their original impact, and may actually continue to revise what we think the lesson is as our lives unfold.

The Power of Conversations by @charlesjennings

We rarely, if ever, work and learn alone. We reach our goals and contribute to our organisations’ objectives in a social context. In the maelstrom of our digital communications age the need to think ‘socially’ is more important than ever.

@marksylvester – ‘”I can explain it to you, I can’t understand it for you” – via an extremely smart woman we met on Friday.’

Failure is only useful if we learn from it - by @TimKastelle

• Failure is only useful if we learn from it: we often talk about the need to fail in innovation, however, there is only value in failure if it helps us learn.
• Try to fail as cheaply as possible: the main problem with the Edsel isn’t that it failed – it’s that it failed so expensively. There is a hierarchy of failure, and we need to figure out how to fail as early in the process as possible. One way of doing this is through prototyping.

Networks

Value Networks and the true nature of collaboration by @vernaallee (Digital Edition)

The true shape and nature of collaboration is not the social network – it is the value network. Value networks are purposeful groups of people who come together to take action. Value network modeling and analytics reflect the true nature of collaboration with a systemic human-network approach to managing business operations. It shows how work really happens through human interactions, and provides powerful new practices and metrics for managing collaborative work. It provides a way to a) better support non-hierarchical organizations such as cross-boundary teams, and task forces, and b) quickly and effectively model emergent work and complex activities that have multiple variables and frequent exceptions.

Antony Mayfield: “We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are ...” – via @JohnnieMoore

We don’t grasp how magnificently, terrifyingly complex networks are. We like to draw pictures of them and then think we’ve captured their meaning, when they are more like the weather – always changing, hyper-complex. Predictable if you are smart and have a huge amount of data and training, but only to a point and only some of the time. (There’s mileage in that weather forecasting analogy – I’d like to come up with it.

Knowledge

Knowledge Management = experience-sharing NOT information-sharing – Knoco Stories

In most of the training courses I run, I ask the question “where does knowledge come from?”
Always, every time, I get the answer “Experience – Knowledge comes from Experience”. Never does anyone answer “Knowledge comes from Information”.
Never
If you don’t believe me, try it yourself. Ask people “where does knowledge come from”? and see what they say.

“knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction we have created – by @downes

My answer, and it’s a perfectly reasonable and well-research answer, is that nothing is transferred. That the whole idea of “knowledge transfer” is a handy fiction that we have created over the years, as simple folk, to function as shorthand for what we know is a much more complex process.

Probably the best intermediate position a person can attempt here is something like “knowledge replication“. That’s what’s actually happening in a lot of people’s theories. We know that the sending of a message from one person to another involves a state change. The signal (another handy fiction; let me have it for now) crosses through several media en route from sender to receiver. Thus questions of signal integrity arise, the problem of distinguishing signal from noise, and all the rest of it.

“Knowledge is constructed, not transferred ~Peter Senge” – via @denniscallahan

Work

@SteveDenning: “The real jobs crisis is that most jobs suck” via @SebPaquet

This is not just a matter of keeping the workers happy. In today’s knowledge economy, the motivation of workers is a key determinant of productivity. The lack of passion in today’s workforce is a fundamental cause of the continuing sharp decline in the performance of the Fortune 500.

“Some psychologists have a theory that many of the world’s ills can be blamed on psychopaths in high places.” via @SebPaquet [reminds me of The Gervais Principle]

“Robert Hare, the eminent Canadian psychologist who invented the psychopath checklist, … recently announced that you’re four times more likely to find a psychopath at the top of the corporate ladder than you are walking around in the janitor’s office,” journalist Jon Ronson tells Guy Raz, host of weekends on All Things Considered.

The Job is dying – by @robpatrob [a comprehensive must-read]

But if all you know is the job, how do you get prepared to do well in the new networked world as a freelancer or as a very small business person?

The challenge is mindset. If you have been looked after in a job, what do you know of making your life on your own? Like riding a bike, no book can help you really.

Our advice is to join a co-working space. There you will have access to both the social aspects of a network and you will have the advice and support that you need to do well as a new immigrant to this New World of the Networked Economy.

Resiliency & the Working Smarter Framework: Building on Strengths ~ by @brentmack

As you can see, the role of Management in this model is to tap into or mine the emergent (next) practices stemming from staff collaborations and transform these practices into new tools and processes.

In this type of workspace, the new tools and processes are put into service much faster. It is accepted that rapid change and the complexity of overlapping issues is the norm. Organizations are positioned more on the outer boundaries where change is happening. Management at the bottom of the pyramid supports a work culture where staff use a variety of social media tools that enables effective social learning activities which fuels collaboration and innovation.

Here are some of the insights and observations that were shared on Twitter this past week.

“The challenge of the coming century is to change the value system of society. ~ Vaclav Havel” via @BillMcKibben

“Intellectual property is an oxymoron. Ideas can’t be owned. Instead, governments grant exclusive licenses to them.” ~ @JohnRobb

“Mechanization best serves mediocrity. ~ Frank Lloyd Wright” via @OurFounder

Working Smarter: Most popular posts of 2011 via @JayCross

Working smarter draws upon ideas from design thinking, network optimization, brain science, user experience design, learning theory, organizational development, social business, technology, collaboration, web 2.0 patterns, social psychology, value network analysis, anthropology, complexity theory, and more. Working smarter embraces the spirit of agile software, action learning, social networks, and parallel developments in many disciplines. Here’s how we choose the crème de la crème for your enjoyment.

The following are the top items from featured sources based on social signals …

Dear Internet: It’s No Longer OK to Not Know How Congress Works (tech can’t shape policy on tech if they don’t show up) @MelissaPierce [same in all democratic nations]

This weekend I read a post titled “Dear Congress: It Is No Longer OK To Not Know How the Internet Works.” The author, Joshua Kopstein, is right: it’s not ok to not know about something before legislating or regulating it. The confessions by members of Congress that they are “not nerds” is frustrating at best because these guys, the guys that are regulating the Internet can’t tell a server from a waiter.

And so a post is born, sympathetically climbing the charts at Reddit and HackerNews, telling Congress to get a clue. But the problem is that that post won’t do any good. Few if any members of Congress will read it, and those that might certainly won’t read it and decide that it’s time for them to brush up on understanding how the Internet works as well as a professional that works on the Internet.

How Germany Builds Twice as Many Cars as the U.S. While Paying Its Workers Twice as Much – Forbes – via @AdamHartung

There are “two overlapping sets of institutions” in Germany that guarantee high wages and good working conditions for autoworkers. The first is IG Metall, the country’s equivalent of the United Automobile Workers. Virtually all Germany’s car workers are members, and though they have the right to strike, they “hardly use it, because there is an elaborate system of conflict resolution that regularly is used to come to some sort of compromise that is acceptable to all parties,” according to Horst Mund, an IG Metall executive. The second institution is the German constitution, which allows for “works councils” in every factory, where management and employees work together on matters like shop floor conditions and work life. Mund says this guarantees cooperation, “where you don’t always wear your management pin or your union pin.”

Here are some of the thoughts and observations that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@johnrobb – “If you aren’t inventing the future and taking your lumps for doing it today, you are going to be steamrolled by it later.”

@webestime – “Simple rules lead to complex behavior. Complicated rules lead to stupid behavior”

@transarchitect: “Emergence: It’s not magic … but it feels like magic.” via @SebPaquet

“History is a race between education and catastrophe. ~ H. G. Wells” via @iain2008

@TeenThings – “Things I learned in school: 1. How to whisper 2. How to text without looking 3. How to look like I’m thinking.”

@CharlesJennings – “in a complex world, continuous learning is the only option available to us” – Globalization, Complexity & Change

Many transactional jobs are being substituted with technology. Machines can replace a checkout clerk at a supermarket and can log deposits and dispense cash, but they can’t replace a marketing manager or an advertising campaign.

The implications of this trend for CLOs are clear. The challenges of jobs that deal with high levels of complexity and tacit interactions are best addressed through the development of core skills and capabilities, not through trying to teach sets of processes or facts.

@StevenBJohnson - How research works in an age of social networks (or at least how it works for me) [highly recommended post #PKM]

Very few of the key links came from the traditional approach of reading a work and then following the citations included in the endnotes. The reading was still critical, of course, but the connective branches turned out to lie in the social layer of commentary outside of the work.

@GSiemens: “Brilliant article on what happened w/ crash of Air France 447:  last paragraph is relevant in all human-tech systems” – Popular Mechanics

But the crash raises the disturbing possibility that aviation may well long be plagued by a subtler menace, one that ironically springs from the never-ending quest to make flying safer. Over the decades, airliners have been built with increasingly automated flight-control functions. These have the potential to remove a great deal of uncertainty and danger from aviation. But they also remove important information from the attention of the flight crew. While the airplane’s avionics track crucial parameters such as location, speed, and heading, the human beings can pay attention to something else. But when trouble suddenly springs up and the computer decides that it can no longer cope—on a dark night, perhaps, in turbulence, far from land—the humans might find themselves with a very incomplete notion of what’s going on. They’ll wonder: What instruments are reliable, and which can’t be trusted? What’s the most pressing threat? What’s going on? Unfortunately, the vast majority of pilots will have little experience in finding the answers.

Evolution of Social Business panel – by @BillIves

Andy said that social media did not change their culture. It exposed it and this is what they needed. They needed to move away from control.  Hearing the complaints is even more helpful that the complements because then you can address them.  Some companies are not ready for this. The CEO recognizes this.

@ourfounder - “If people want a set of processes that will not change in the future, that is a trap” – Evolving Web

 In most human endeavor today, certainly in knowledge work, but increasingly in manufacturing, we do not operate in the complicated domain, we operate in the complex domain. This is a domain where business process or team process can change from moment to moment. The speed at which new products can come to market, the decoupling of the production of an object from its design and sales, and the rate at which the markets and technologies change make any stolid process unsustainable and dangerous.

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared via Twitter this past week.

@ffunch – “What we call “thinking” is mostly an illusion and a pretense. We really don’t. You pay attention to something and relevant thoughts appear.”

@IntrepidTeacher – “Best advice I was ever given. “Let your network filter you. You just worry about sharing the things that you find valuable.”

@GapingVoid – “In my (not uninformed) experience, the idle rich possess few lessons worth passing on to the next generation.”

@psaffo – “Figuring out what will replace the job is the great challenge of the next 30 years.” via @TimOReilly

Seth Roberts: What do students want? (PDF)

Formal education resembles agriculture. Agriculture greatly reduced the diversity of the human diet. Before agriculture, a person might have eaten 80 different foods each week; after agriculture began, far fewer. Agriculture caused a big decline in health because its fundamental assumption – it is okay to eat a small number of foods – is false or at least very hard to reconcile with nutritional requirements. Likewise, formal education (classrooms, lectures, textbooks, etc.) surely reduced the diversity of what was learned, how it was taught, and how learning was measured.

Is it so hard to see that one economy is dying and a new one emerging? by @DaveGray

I see massive layoffs in some sectors while tech companies have such a hard time finding engineers that they have to import them from other parts of the world, and pay them huge signing bonuses and salaries. Is it so hard to see that one economy is dying and a new one emerging? Is it so difficult to see that our education system is badly broken? Why aren’t we teaching kids the skills they will need to be successful in the economy that’s coming into being in front of our eyes?

Social Business is About Learning, Not Marketing or Technology – via @britopian

So what’s my point?  That social business at its core is about learning and evolving.  It’s about paying attention to your online communities, your markets, your people, internally and externally.  It’s about collecting data that tells you more about your business, your customers, your stakeholders, your products, your industry, your environment.  It’s about using technology and improving processes internally and externally so you can LISTEN MORE and LISTEN BETTER.  We all talk about “listening” on social media as a low-level, social media 101 skill – but it’s at the core of everything.  And, of course, the point of listening is to figure out the rest.  To learn and grow and evolve with your market.  Bake listening into the way you work – truly bake it in – and you’ll be well on the path to becoming a social business.

Paul Kearns, Evidence-based HR: “training departments re-badged themselves as learning departments & pretended they could bring about learning”

“capitalism is no longer in bed with democracy” – Day I: Keynote of Charles Handy at the 3rd Global Peter Drucker Forum in Vienna – [A Must Watch Video]

Here are some of the observations and insights that were shared on Twitter this past week.

Irving Wladawsky-Berger: Jobs in the Age of Watson - via @raesmaa [automated & outsourced]

These non-routine cognitive tasks are beyond the scope of computer substitution for the foreseeable future.  However, one can design sophisticated tools to significantly expand what people can accomplish when performing these activities.  For example, CAD systems have enabled engineers to develop far more complex products than they could have done otherwise.  Social networking tools make it easier for people to communicate and collaborate with colleagues over wide distances and thus improve the collective intelligence of the team.   And, systems like Watson will be extensively used to help experts deal with highly complex problems in areas like medicine, finance and national security.

‘The Age of the Superfluous Worker‘ – the challenge of thinking outside the box – via @CharlesJennings

Meanwhile, new ways of increasing surplus labor have appeared. One is the continued outsourcing of jobs to low-wage countries; the other is the continuing computerization and mechanization of manufacturing and of services not requiring hands-on human contact. Continuing increases in worker productivity add yet more to the surplus. So does the unwillingness of employers to even consider hiring people who have been unemployed for a long time.

@umairh – Seven problems a recovery won’t fix - via @cburell

Pointlessness. Here’s a statistic that ought to set your hair on fire: somewhere between 50 and 75% of “employees” are “disengaged” (depending on whose numbers you want to buy): they don’t care much, if at all, about the work they do. But can you blame them? Perhaps they don’t care not just because the work they do feels pointless, but because, in human terms, it mostly is. Designing new bottles for deodorants or energy drinks or finding a new loophole in the law isn’t exactly helping design, craft, build, or maintain the Sistine Chapel. Yet it’s what roughly about 75% of us do every weary day of our drab working lives. Forget the numbers and just ask yourself: if you were to walk into any corporation, would you find faces brimming over with deep fulfillment and authentic delight–or stonily asking themselves, “If it wasn’t for the accursed paycheck, would I really let imprison myself in this dungeon of the human soul?”

Seth’s Blog: Without a diverse talent pool, any society [company] will do a poor job of solving the problems that inevitably arise:

Diversity of talents and interests is central to innovation because new things are so often mixtures of old things. By rewarding only one kind of talent, colleges suppress diversity of talent and thereby reduce innovation.

Social media: An Epidemic of Insignificance – by @JayDeragon

Everywhere we turn in every form of media we are surrounded with this thing called social media. Facebook dominates magazine covers, stories, broadcast and our mobile devices “tweet” with content from ” twits”.  The human network is more consumed with reading and watching “the latest and greatest” than they are about improving real relationships. Social technology is creating the effect of “social heads in the sand” by believing popular and influential” are more important than the meaningful and significant.