This is a great piece on Introversion and Extroversion. We can all get along so long as we pay attention to, and appreciate, our differences.

Heard on All Things Considered

MELISSA BLOCK, HOST:

This is ALL THINGS CONSIDERED, from NPR News. I’m Melissa Block.

AUDIE CORNISH, HOST:

And I’m Audie Cornish. From Gandhi and Joe DiMaggio to Mother Teresa and Bill Gates, introverts have done a lot of great things in the world. But being quiet, introverted or shy was sometimes looked at as a problem to be overcome.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED BROADCAST)

UNIDENTIFIED ANNOUNCER: If you’re what they call a shy guy, you’re standing on the outside looking in. You might have something to contribute to their conversation, but nobody cares whether you do or not. There’s a barrier, and you don’t know how to begin breaking it down.

CORNISH: In the 1940s and ’50s, the message to most Americans was, don’t be shy. And in the era of reality television, Twitter and relentless self-promotion, it seems that cultural mandate is in overdrive.

A new book tells the story of how things came to be this way, and it’s called “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” The author is Susan Cain, and she joins us from the NPR studios in New York to talk more about it.

Welcome, Susan.

SUSAN CAIN: Thank you. It’s such a pleasure to be here, Audie.

CORNISH: Well, we’re happy to have you. And to start out – I think we should get this on the record – do you consider yourself an introvert or an extrovert?

CAIN: Oh, I definitely consider myself an introvert, and that was part of the fuel for me to write the book.

CORNISH: And what’s the difference between being an introvert versus being shy? I mean, what’s your definition?

CAIN: So introversion is really about having a preference for lower-stimulation environments – so just a preference for quiet, for less noise, for less action – whereas extroverts really crave more stimulation in order to feel at their best. And what’s important to understand about this is that many people believe that introversion is about being antisocial. And that’s really a misperception because actually, it’s just that introverts are differently social. So they would prefer to have, you know, a glass of wine with a close friend as opposed to going to a loud party full of strangers.

Now shyness, on the other hand, is about a fear of negative social judgment. So you can be introverted without having that particular fear at all, and you can be shy but also be an extrovert.

CORNISH: And in the book, you say that there’s a spectrum. So if some people are listening and they think, well, I, too, like a glass of wine and a party. It’s like we all have these tendencies.

CAIN: Yeah, yeah. That’s an important thing. And, in fact, Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms all the way back in the 1920s – even he said there’s no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert, and he said such a man would be in a lunatic asylum.

CORNISH: That makes me worry because I took your test in the book and I’m like, 90 percent extroverted, basically.

(SOUNDBITE OF LAUGHTER)

CORNISH: Now, you mentioned going back into the history. And I want to talk more about that because I was really fascinated by how you showed how this extrovert ideal – you call it – came to be. When did being introverted move from being a character trait to being looked at as a problem?

CAIN: Yeah. What I found is, to some extent, we’ve always had an admiration for extroversion in our culture. But the extrovert ideal really came to play at the turn of the 20th century, when we had the rise of big business. And so suddenly, people were flocking to the cities, and they were needing to prove themselves in big corporations – at job interviews and on sales calls.

And so at that moment in time, we moved from what cultural historians call a culture of character to a culture of personality. So during the culture of character, what was important was the good deeds that you performed when nobody was looking. You know, Abraham Lincoln is the embodiment of the culture of character, and people celebrated him back then for being a man who did not offend by superiority.

But at the turn of the century, when we moved into this culture of personality, suddenly, what was admired was to be magnetic and charismatic. And then at the same time, we suddenly had the rise of movies and movie stars. And movie stars, of course, were the embodiment of what it meant to be a charismatic figure. And so part of people’s fascination with these movie stars was for what they could learn from them, and bring with them to their own jobs.

CORNISH: Now, how does this thinking affect the workplace today?

CAIN: Well, you know, I would say it’s quite a problem in the workplace today because we have a workplace that is increasingly set up for maximum group interaction. More and more of our offices are set up as open-plan offices, where there are no walls and there’s very little privacy. And in fact, the average amount of space per employee actually shrunk from 500 square feet in the 1970s, to 200 square feet today.

And also, introverts are much less often groomed for leadership positions, even though there’s really fascinating research out – recently, from Adam Grant at Wharton – finding that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes. When their employees are more proactive, they’re more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extroverted leader might almost unwittingly be more dominant and be putting their own stamp on things, and so those good ideas never come to the fore.

CORNISH: Of course, getting to that theory of like, the loudest ideas aren’t necessarily the best ideas.

CAIN: Right, right.

CORNISH: Except in brainstorming sessions, right? It sounds like some of these team- building things, in a way, don’t stamp out good ideas, but certainly make it hard for those of us who aren’t as loud.

CAIN: Yeah. And none of this is to say that it would be a good thing to get rid of teamwork and to get rid of group work altogether. It’s more just to say that we are at a point in our culture and in our workplace culture, where we’ve gotten too lopsided. And we tend to believe that all creativity and all productivity comes from the group when in fact, there really is a benefit to solitude, and to being able to kind of go off and focus and put your head down.

CORNISH: Susan, I have to admit, as I read the book more and more, I became more and more offended as an extrovert. I felt like, wait a second. I listen to people in meetings. You know, I, like, felt sort of sheepish.

CAIN: Oh, gosh. Well, you know, that’s so not the intention. My criticism in the book is not of extroverts at all, but rather the extrovert ideal. I actually find extroversion to be a really appealing personality style. And this sounds like a funny thing, but many of my best friends truly are extroverts, including my beloved husband.

CORNISH: All my best friends are extroverts. OK. Well, I believe you, and I had a great time talking with you, so thanks so much.

CAIN: Thank you, Audie. I appreciate it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

CORNISH: That’s Susan Cain, author of “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.” And if all this talk has you thinking, who am I? Introvert, extrovert, ambivert – yes, that’s really a thing. Well, you can take Susan Cain’s quiz at NPR.org.

Source:  Copyright ©2012 National Public Radio®. All Rights Reserved.

There is increasingly obvious evidence that slowing down to a quiet stop on a regular basis increases well being and even happiness. Do we really have to live life with such stress? I don’t think so. We just need to prioritize a little quiet into our days to realize this. Try it.

ABOUT a year ago, I flew to Singapore to join the writer Malcolm Gladwell, the fashion designer Marc Ecko and the graphic designer Stefan Sagmeister in addressing a group of advertising people on “Marketing to the Child of Tomorrow.” Soon after I arrived, the chief executive of the agency that had invited us took me aside. What he was most interested in, he began — I braced myself for mention of some next-generation stealth campaign — was stillness.

A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms.

Has it really come to this?

In barely one generation we’ve moved from exulting in the time-saving devices that have so expanded our lives to trying to get away from them — often in order to make more time. The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug. Like teenagers, we appear to have gone from knowing nothing about the world to knowing too much all but overnight.

Internet rescue camps in South Korea and China try to save kids addicted to the screen.

Writer friends of mine pay good money to get the Freedom software that enables them to disable (for up to eight hours) the very Internet connections that seemed so emancipating not long ago. Even Intel (of all companies) experimented in 2007 with conferring four uninterrupted hours of quiet time every Tuesday morning on 300 engineers and managers. (The average office worker today, researchers have found, enjoys no more than three minutes at a time at his or her desk without interruption.) During this period the workers were not allowed to use the phone or send e-mail, but simply had the chance to clear their heads and to hear themselves think. A majority of Intel’s trial group recommended that the policy be extended to others.

THE average American spends at least eight and a half hours a day in front of a screen, Nicholas Carr notes in his eye-opening book “The Shallows,” in part because the number of hours American adults spent online doubled between 2005 and 2009 (and the number of hours spent in front of a TV screen, often simultaneously, is also steadily increasing).

The average American teenager sends or receives 75 text messages a day, though one girl in Sacramento managed to handle an average of 10,000 every 24 hours for a month. Since luxury, as any economist will tell you, is a function of scarcity, the children of tomorrow, I heard myself tell the marketers in Singapore, will crave nothing more than freedom, if only for a short while, from all the blinking machines, streaming videos and scrolling headlines that leave them feeling empty and too full all at once.

The urgency of slowing down — to find the time and space to think — is nothing new, of course, and wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.” He also famously remarked that all of man’s problems come from his inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

When telegraphs and trains brought in the idea that convenience was more important than content — and speedier means could make up for unimproved ends — Henry David Thoreau reminded us that “the man whose horse trots a mile in a minute does not carry the most important messages.” Even half a century ago, Marshall McLuhan, who came closer than most to seeing what was coming, warned, “When things come at you very fast, naturally you lose touch with yourself.” Thomas Merton struck a chord with millions, by not just noting that “Man was made for the highest activity, which is, in fact, his rest,” but by also acting on it, and stepping out of the rat race and into a Cistercian cloister.

Yet few of those voices can be heard these days, precisely because “breaking news” is coming through (perpetually) on CNN and Debbie is just posting images of her summer vacation and the phone is ringing. We barely have enough time to see how little time we have (most Web pages, researchers find, are visited for 10 seconds or less). And the more that floods in on us (the Kardashians, Obamacare, “Dancing with the Stars”), the less of ourselves we have to give to every snippet. All we notice is that the distinctions that used to guide and steady us — between Sunday and Monday, public and private, here and there — are gone.

We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say. Partly because we’re so busy communicating. And — as he might also have said — we’re rushing to meet so many deadlines that we hardly register that what we need most are lifelines.

So what to do? The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.

MAYBE that’s why more and more people I know, even if they have no religious commitment, seem to be turning to yoga, or meditation, or tai chi; these aren’t New Age fads so much as ways to connect with what could be called the wisdom of old age. Two journalist friends of mine observe an “Internet sabbath” every week, turning off their online connections from Friday night to Monday morning, so as to try to revive those ancient customs known as family meals and conversation. Finding myself at breakfast with a group of lawyers in Oxford four months ago, I noticed that all their talk was of sailing — or riding or bridge: anything that would allow them to get out of radio contact for a few hours.

Other friends try to go on long walks every Sunday, or to “forget” their cellphones at home. A series of tests in recent years has shown, Mr. Carr points out, that after spending time in quiet rural settings, subjects “exhibit greater attentiveness, stronger memory and generally improved cognition. Their brains become both calmer and sharper.” More than that, empathy, as well as deep thought, depends (as neuroscientists like Antonio Damasio have found) on neural processes that are “inherently slow.” The very ones our high-speed lives have little time for.

In my own case, I turn to eccentric and often extreme measures to try to keep my sanity and ensure that I have time to do nothing at all (which is the only time when I can see what I should be doing the rest of the time). I’ve yet to use a cellphone and I’ve never Tweeted or entered Facebook. I try not to go online till my day’s writing is finished, and I moved from Manhattan to rural Japan in part so I could more easily survive for long stretches entirely on foot, and every trip to the movies would be an event.

None of this is a matter of principle or asceticism; it’s just pure selfishness. Nothing makes me feel better — calmer, clearer and happier — than being in one place, absorbed in a book, a conversation, a piece of music. It’s actually something deeper than mere happiness: it’s joy, which the monk David Steindl-Rast describes as “that kind of happiness that doesn’t depend on what happens.”

It’s vital, of course, to stay in touch with the world, and to know what’s going on; I took pains this past year to make separate trips to Jerusalem and Hyderabad and Oman and St. Petersburg, to rural Arkansas and Thailand and the stricken nuclear plant in Fukushima and Dubai. But it’s only by having some distance from the world that you can see it whole, and understand what you should be doing with it.

For more than 20 years, therefore, I’ve been going several times a year — often for no longer than three days — to a Benedictine hermitage, 40 minutes down the road, as it happens, from the Post Ranch Inn. I don’t attend services when I’m there, and I’ve never meditated, there or anywhere; I just take walks and read and lose myself in the stillness, recalling that it’s only by stepping briefly away from my wife and bosses and friends that I’ll have anything useful to bring to them. The last time I was in the hermitage, three months ago, I happened to pass, on the monastery road, a youngish-looking man with a 3-year-old around his shoulders.

“You’re Pico, aren’t you?” the man said, and introduced himself as Larry; we’d met, I gathered, 19 years before, when he’d been living in the cloister as an assistant to one of the monks.

“What are you doing now?” I asked.

“I work for MTV. Down in L.A.”

We smiled. No words were necessary.

“I try to bring my kids here as often as I can,” he went on, as he looked out at the great blue expanse of the Pacific on one side of us, the high, brown hills of the Central Coast on the other. “My oldest son” — he pointed at a 7-year-old running along the deserted, radiant mountain road in front of his mother — “this is his third time.”

The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.

By Pico Iyer | Source: The New York Times

While millenials might frustrate some, they bring some beautiful gifts. Here are some wonderful words of wisdom for school and work environments. Let’s practice these.

Author Jean Twenge has reported that:

“…indicators of self-esteem have risen consistently since the 1980s among middle-school, high-school, and college students. But what starts off as healthy self-esteem, at times quickly morphs into an inflated view of oneself-a self-absorption and sense of entitlement that looks a lot like narcissism. In fact, rates of narcissism among college students have increased right along with self esteem. Meanwhile rates of anxiety and depression have also risen in tandems with self-esteem? Why?”

As an educator who has taught for over 14 years, I have lamented this question. Year after year I have had some of the best individuals clamor for success. They have worked industriously to achieve grades indicating a certain level of success attained. I have seen students balance the many demands of a “successful” high school life: work, sports, clubs, theatre, dance, math school, friends, family, health, SAT prep, college prep. In doing so, I have also seen students become unbalanced as individuals.

On the surface, many of my students can be the nation’s future leaders. They are altruistic, they volunteer, they are fun, industrious, empathic, goal-oriented, ambitious, and they excel at athletics, music, mock-trial, debates, chess, math and many club endeavors. Unfortunately, at far too many points in the year, many of the students that I see also happen to be miserable. Over the last three years, graduation speeches contained the theme of “finding happiness” in college because it was certainly not attained during high school. This was a disturbing trend.

As a result, around three years ago, I developed a new curriculum I called the “Love Course.” Its purpose has been to study love in its many forms (the Greeks determined that there were many different types and names for love) by using a variety of sub-disciplines including philosophy, religion, political science, sociology, positive and behavior psychology, anthropology, neuroscience, etc. The task of this course has been to present ancient cultural wisdoms coupled with the latest discoveries in the modern sciences to address issues concerning love in our contemporary lives. It has also, in part, been organized around a set of issues that relate to personal and public life so that we can build environments that bend our lives toward happiness, and to help students become the kinds of people they truly want to be.

The class focuses on personal happiness, good relationships, how to flourish with others, friendship, marriage, the love of the environment, altruism, agapic love, and “random acts of kindness.” Getting clear about these matters and figuring out what’s good and bad, right and wrong, won’t provide the means to attain a financial windfall, but will enrich our lives. Throughout the course we place emphasis on life application of the ideas we explore. The course is not merely about information but it is also about transformation.

The importance of this course is best summed up by Maya Angelou: “I’ve learned that I still have a lot to learn. I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” Spreading love, kindness, happiness and altruism will go a long way to promote the changes we all wish to see in the world. And, as I remind my students, “It is never too late to be what you might have been.” (George Eliot)

Students have reported that in small ways, they have transformed themselves, their friends, and the school around them. They perform random acts of kindness, like greeting their peers in the morning with sincere compliments similar to the “Compliment Guys” at Purdue University, engage in laugh yoga sessions, and promote activities and projects to make the school a more loving place. But more importantly, the course helps students find a healthy balance between the Darwinian struggle for college acceptance and finding enjoyment in living in the present.

I am proud of the work we do together, and continue to hope that students redefine “success” to include happiness, fulfillment, being ethical, decent, productive, independent, resilient and self reliant but also caring, compassionate, confident, curious, creative, being a critical thinker, and a good communicator. The “Love Course” does what a famous song enjoins: “What the world needs now is love, sweet love. It’s the only thing that there’s just too little of. What the world needs now is love, sweet love, No not just for some but for everyone.”

By Stephen Banno, a social studies teacher in a public high school outside of Boston, Massachusetts.

Source: Odewire

He’s got good points here. What do you think? If you’re an entrepreneur, has your education helped you in your endeavors?

Michael Ellsberg is the author of “The Education of Millionaires: It’s Not What You Think and It’s Not Too Late.”

I TYPED these words on a computer designed by Apple, co-founded by the college dropout Steve Jobs. The program I used to write it was created by Microsoft, started by the college dropouts Bill Gates and Paul Allen.

And as soon as it is published, I will share it with my friends via Twitter, co-founded by the college dropouts Jack Dorsey and Evan Williams and Biz Stone, and Facebook — invented, among others, by the college dropouts Mark Zuckerberg and Dustin Moskovitz, and nurtured by the degreeless Sean Parker.

American academia is good at producing writers, literary critics and historians. It is also good at producing professionals with degrees. But we don’t have a shortage of lawyers and professors. America has a shortage of job creators. And the people who create jobs aren’t traditional professionals, but start-up entrepreneurs.

In a recent speech promoting a jobs bill, President Obama told Congress, “Everyone here knows that small businesses are where most new jobs begin.”

Close, but not quite. In a detailed analysis, the National Bureau of Economic Research found that nearly all net job creation in America comes from start-up businesses, not small businesses per se. (Since most start-ups start small, we tend to conflate two variables — the size of a business and its age — and incorrectly assume the former was the relevant one, when in fact the latter is.)

If start-up activity is the true engine of job creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. Simply put, from kindergarten through undergraduate and grad school, you learn very few skills or attitudes that would ever help you start a business. Skills like sales, networking, creativity and comfort with failure.

No business in America — and therefore no job creation — happens without someone buying something. But most students learn nothing about sales in college; they are more likely to take a course on why sales (and capitalism) are evil.

Moreover, very few start-ups get off the ground without a wide, vibrant network of advisers and mentors, potential customers and clients, quality vendors and valuable talent to employ. You don’t learn how to network crouched over a desk studying for multiple-choice exams. You learn it outside the classroom, talking to fellow human beings face-to-face.

Start-ups are a creative endeavor by definition. Yet our current classrooms, geared toward tests on narrowly defined academic subjects, stifle creativity. If a young person happens to retain enough creative spirit to start a business upon graduation, she does so in spite of her schooling, not because of it.

Finally, entrepreneurs must embrace failure. I spent the last two years interviewing college dropouts who went on to become millionaires and billionaires. All spoke passionately about the importance of their business failures in leading them to success. Our education system encourages students to play it safe and retreat at the first sign of failure (assuming that any failure will look bad on their college applications and résumés).

Certainly, if you want to become a doctor, lawyer or engineer, then you must go to college. But, beyond regulated fields like these, the focus on higher education as the only path to stable employment is profoundly misguided, exacerbated by parents who see the classic professions as the best route to job security.

That may have been true 50 years ago, but not now. In our chaotic, unpredictable economy, even young people who have no interest in starting a business, and who want to become professionals, still need to learn the entrepreneurial skills that will allow them to get ahead.

True, people with college degrees tend to earn more. But that could be because most ambitious people tend to go to college; there is little evidence to suggest that the same ambitious people would earn less without college degrees (particularly if they mastered true business and networking grit).

And while most people who end up starting businesses likely have college degrees, those degree-bearers should be well aware (as they learned in their freshman statistics classes) that correlation does not equal causation. Assuming that college was responsible for their success gives higher education more credit than it deserves.

AFTER all, there is not one job market in America, but two. The formal market we always hear about — jobs that get filled through cold résumé submissions in reply to posted ads — accounts for only about 20 percent of jobs.

The other 80 percent get filled in the informal job market. Any employer knows how the informal job market works: you need a position filled, so you ask your friends, colleagues and current employees if they know anyone who would do a good job.

In this informal job market, the academic requirements listed in job ads tend to be highly negotiable, and far less important than real-world results and the enthusiasm of the personal referral.

Classroom skills may put you at an advantage in the formal market, but in the informal market, street-smart skills and real-world networking are infinitely more important.

Yet our children grow up amid an echo chamber of voices telling them to get good grades, do well on their SATs, and spend an average of $45,000 on tuition — after accounting for scholarships — while taking on $23,000 in debt to get a private four-year college education.

It’s time that we as a nation accepted a basic — and seldom-mentioned — fact. You don’t need a degree (and certainly not an M.B.A.) to start a business and create jobs, nor is it even that helpful, compared with cheaper, faster alternatives.

Parents could turn the system on its head if they weren’t so caught up in outmoded mentalities about education forged in the stable economy of the 1950s (but profoundly misguided in today’s chaotic, entrepreneurial economy).

Employers could alter this landscape if they explicitly offered routes to employment for those who didn’t get a degree because they were out building businesses.

And the government could divert some of the money it now spends encouraging college for all, and instead promote the idea that creating a start-up is a worthy, respectable alternative to academics. This would go a long way to helping our unemployment problem.

If I were betting on the engines of future job creation, I wouldn’t put my money on college students cramming for tests and writing papers with properly formatted M.L.A.-style citations in order to bolster their résumés for careers in traditional professions and middle-management jobs in large corporate and government bureaucracies.

I’d put my money on the kids who are dropping out of college to start new businesses. If we want to get out of the jobs mess we’re in, we should hope that more will follow in their footsteps.

Source: The New York Times

I always encourage lifelong learning, but now is absolutely the time to stretch out of our comfort zone to embrace the possibilities that this time of change presents. Stepping into change stems from hope….

When you see spontaneous social protests erupting from Tunisia to Tel Aviv to Wall Street, it’s clear that something is happening globally that needs defining. There are two unified theories out there that intrigue me. One says this is the start of “The Great Disruption.” The other says that this is all part of “The Big Shift.” You decide.

Paul Gilding, the Australian environmentalist and author of the book “The Great Disruption,” argues that these demonstrations are a sign that the current growth-obsessed capitalist system is reaching its financial and ecological limits. “I look at the world as an integrated system, so I don’t see these protests, or the debt crisis, or inequality, or the economy, or the climate going weird, in isolation — I see our system in the painful process of breaking down,” which is what he means by the Great Disruption, said Gilding. “Our system of economic growth, of ineffective democracy, of overloading planet earth — our system — is eating itself alive. Occupy Wall Street is like the kid in the fairy story saying what everyone knows but is afraid to say: the emperor has no clothes. The system is broken. Think about the promise of global market capitalism. If we let the system work, if we let the rich get richer, if we let corporations focus on profit, if we let pollution go unpriced and unchecked, then we will all be better off. It may not be equally distributed, but the poor will get less poor, those who work hard will get jobs, those who study hard will get better jobs and we’ll have enough wealth to fix the environment.

“What we now have — most extremely in the U.S. but pretty much everywhere — is the mother of all broken promises,” Gilding adds. “Yes, the rich are getting richer and the corporations are making profits — with their executives richly rewarded. But, meanwhile, the people are getting worse off — drowning in housing debt and/or tuition debt — many who worked hard are unemployed; many who studied hard are unable to get good work; the environment is getting more and more damaged; and people are realizing their kids will be even worse off than they are. This particular round of protests may build or may not, but what will not go away is the broad coalition of those to whom the system lied and who have now woken up. It’s not just the environmentalists, or the poor, or the unemployed. It’s most people, including the highly educated middle class, who are feeling the results of a system that saw all the growth of the last three decades go to the top 1 percent.”

Not so fast, says John Hagel III, who is the co-chairman of the Center for the Edge at Deloitte, along with John Seely Brown. In their recent book, “The Power of Pull,” they suggest that we’re in the early stages of a “Big Shift,” precipitated by the merging of globalization and the Information Technology Revolution. In the early stages, we experience this Big Shift as mounting pressure, deteriorating performance and growing stress because we continue to operate with institutions and practices that are increasingly dysfunctional — so the eruption of protest movements is no surprise.

Yet, the Big Shift also unleashes a huge global flow of ideas, innovations, new collaborative possibilities and new market opportunities. This flow is constantly getting richer and faster. Today, they argue, tapping the global flow becomes the key to productivity, growth and prosperity. But to tap this flow effectively, every country, company and individual needs to be constantly growing their talents.

“We are living in a world where flow will prevail and topple any obstacles in its way,” says Hagel. “As flow gains momentum, it undermines the precious knowledge stocks that in the past gave us security and wealth. It calls on us to learn faster by working together and to pull out of ourselves more of our true potential, both individually and collectively. It excites us with the possibilities that can only be realized by participating in a broader range of flows. That is the essence of the Big Shift.”

Yes, corporations now have access to more cheap software, robots, automation, labor and genius than ever. So holding a job takes more talent. But the flip side is that individuals — individuals — anywhere can now access the flow to take online courses at Stanford from a village in Africa, to start a new company with customers everywhere or to collaborate with people anywhere. We have more big problems than ever and more problem-solvers than ever.

So there you have it: Two master narratives — one threat-based, one opportunity-based, but both involving seismic changes. Gilding is actually an optimist at heart. He believes that while the Great Disruption is inevitable, humanity is best in a crisis, and, once it all hits, we will rise to the occasion and produce transformational economic and social change (using tools of the Big Shift). Hagel is also an optimist. He knows the Great Disruption may be barreling down on us, but he believes that the Big Shift has also created a world where more people than ever have the tools, talents and potential to head it off. My heart is with Hagel, but my head says that you ignore Gilding at your peril.

You decide.

Source: NY Times

Over the years I’ve heard outrageous stories of disfunction in the workplace. Finding a way to create your own happiness at work is key. So how do you do it?

The Five Drivers of Happiness at Work

I am in a wood-paneled boardroom of a large multinational waiting to make a pitch. My stomach lurches as I anticipate having to use the “H” word to the CEO. It just feels too “new-agey” to associate with the hard-numbered world of business.

“We’re here to talk about happiness. Happiness at work.” The words sound so flaky; “happy clappy” and “happy hippy” ping into my mind even though the numbers tell their own story.

We’ve all had to face and deal with a very different working world, especially since the financial crisis and ensuing recession.

Data which we’ve gathered since 2006, shows that people everywhere feel less confidence, motivation, loyalty, resilience, commitment and engagement.

And whether your local economy is in a state of boom or bust, employees are experiencing similar pressures and bosses can only squeeze until the pips squeak for so long.

But imagine a mindset which enables action to maximize performance and achieve potential in these tough times. At the iOpener Institute for People and Performance, we understand that this is another way of describing happiness at work.

Our empirical research, involving 9,000 people from around the world, reveals some astonishing findings. Employees who report being happiest at work:

• Stay twice as long in their jobs as their least happy colleagues
• Spend double their time at work focused on what they are paid to do
• Take ten times less sick leave
• Believe they are achieving their potential twice as much

And the “science of happiness at work” has big benefits for individuals too. If you’re really happy at work, you’ll solve problems faster, be more creative, adapt fastest to change, receive better feedback, get promoted quicker and earn more over the long-term.

So how can you get to grips with what it’s all about?

Our research shows that there are five important drivers that underpin the science of happiness at work.

1. Contribution.

This is about what you do, so it’s made up of some of the core activities which happen at work. Like having clear goals, moving positively towards them, talking about issues that might prevent you meeting your objectives and feeling heard when you do so.

You’ll do all this best when you feel appreciated and valued by your boss and your colleagues. So it’s not just about delivering: it’s about doing that within collaborative working relationships too.

Here’s what Daniel Walsh, executive vice president at one of the world’s leading transport and logistics organizations, Chep, said about his insight into the value of his colleagues’ contributions:

“I was very task-focused and goal-oriented early in my career and I delivered significant deals. But afterwards it would take a few weeks to mop up the wreckage because I was more gung-ho than I needed to be. I had a meeting with my mentor who said, “look this has got to stop. You’re delivering fantastic results but you’ve got to take people with you.

“Now I try to create an environment where people feel their opinions or views matter and I appreciate what they bring to the table. I can’t do my job on my own.”

2. Conviction.

This is the short-term motivation both in good times and bad. That’s the key point: keeping going even when things get tough, so that you maintain your energy, motivation and resources which pull you through.

Key to doing this is feeling that you’re resilient, efficient and effective. In fact, our data clearly shows that we’re much more resilient than we are aware but we’re much less aware of how variable our motivation is and how to manage it.

Actively deciding to do this can make a huge difference.

As Adam Parr, CEO of Williams F1 said, “a driver who gets out of a car when it’s spun off or he’s been hit and it’s all gone horribly wrong and reminds himself that he’s privileged to do the work and there’s a job to be done—that takes him to another level.”

3. Culture.

Performance and happiness at work are really high when employees feel they fit within their organizational culture. Not fitting in a job is like wearing the wrong clothes to a party—all the time.

It’s hugely draining and de-energizing.

If you’re in the wrong job, you’ll find that the values mean little to you, the ethos feels unfair or political and you don’t have much in common with your colleagues. What’s interesting about our data is that employees like their organizational cultures a lot less than they did in pre-recession times: in particular “generation Y-ers” or “millennial” workers really don’t seem to like what they’re experiencing at work.

So any business which wants to attract and retain top young talent and find the leaders of tomorrow, needs to start addressing this issue today.

4. Commitment.

Commitment matters because it taps into the macro reasons of why you do the work you do. Some of the underlying elements of commitment are perceiving you’re doing something worthwhile, having strong intrinsic interest in your job and feeling that the vision of your organization resonates with your purpose.

We’ve seen commitment decline for the majority of employees post-recession as leaders and organizations think that tuning into this soft stuff is a waste of time.

It isn’t.

It’s how you enable your employees to understand why they should make a greater discretionary effort for you. What is important is to recognize that the five factors work as an ecosystem.

That means if one of the five drivers isn’t functioning well, the others will be affected. For example if you don’t feel high levels of commitment, it’s likely that your contribution will be affected. When contribution goes down, conviction, especially the motivation part of it, tends to go down with it. And that obviously has an effect on your confidence too.

5. Confidence.

Confidence is the gateway to the other four drivers. Too little confidence and nothing happens: too much leads to arrogance and particularly poor decisions. Without greater levels of self-belief, the backbone of confidence, there will be few people who’ll take a risk or try anything new. And you can’t have confident organizations without confident individuals inside them.

Here’s what Dr Rafi Yoeli, founder of Urban Aeronautics, the leading Israeli fancraft aviation entrepreneur said:

“We’ve built a flying machine that’s half way between a Harrier jump jet and a helicopter. We work very differently here, it’s organic engineering. You need a high level of curiosity and of expertise if you’re going to make something extraordinary. And you need an even higher level of confidence to put it together.”

And finally, understanding what makes you happy at work and how that affects your performance offers a whole new way of managing yourself, your career and your opportunities.

And by the way, the CEO at the beginning of the piece told me that, “when you said happiness, it really resonated with me. I’m so unhappy in my job, I hate what I do and I can barely bring myself to come in every day.”

So if you want to know how the science of happiness applies to you at your work, simply complete our quick questionnaire and get your personalized report.

The Source has teamed up with the iOpener Institute iOpener Institute for People and Performance to find out how happy and fullfilled our readers are at work. The Institute has a specially designed survey to help you establish how happy you are at work and along with the article below you can figure out how you can increase your happiness. Complete the questionnaire now.

Jessica Pryce-Jones is the CEO and founder of the iOpener Institute. She is the author of, “Happiness at Work: Maximizing Your Psychological Capital for Success”.

Source: WSJ.com

How Happy Are You at Work? One of the first things I hear from clients, and others, about what they want from work is more meaning and creativity; this article echoes this. How we think about our contribution at work has everything to do with our happiness at work.

I’m Mad As Hell and I’m Not Going to Take It Anymore!

Applying to Any Area of Your Life Recommended.

Thinking Thoughts No One Has Thunk

Charles Darwin did this, slowly and painfully, and so can you.

Every day we walk through the world. We look around. We think we see what’s going on, but it is hard to remember how routinized we are as we look, how we automatically see things from our accustomed angle, never thinking of alternate possibilities.

I mean, who goes to Mount Rushmore and thinks about this?

Courtesy of Scholz & Friends

But some people know how. They can re-see what the rest of us see in totally new ways. Just a few weeks ago, a young Canadian filmmaker in Alberta, Nick Saik, gave his sister Laura a hula hoop. On it, he’d clamped a light-weight, wide-angle camera. All he did was ask her to hula. (Is that the verb? To hula? )

This is the first time I’ve ever seen hooping from the hoop’s point of view. Instead of a ring twirling around a girl, in this version the ring seems stock still. It’s the girl who does all the twirling. It’s so wonderfully weird.

nsaikSource: YouTube

As somebody wrote on YouTube: “that girl isn’t good at Hula Hooping, the Hula Hoop is good at Girling.”

This talent for topsy-turvying, for knowing that how you view the world is just one way among many, that there are always other ways, and sometimes those other ways may overthrow everything you believe — this is a rare and brave thing to do.

Which brings me back — way, way back — to Charles Darwin. The American Museum of Natural History has a Darwin Manuscripts Project. Working with Cambridge University, they’ve been publishing photos of Charles Darwin’s papers. Last week, they released a series of pages from Darwin’s private books covered with personal scribbles, penciled notes, jottings he made as he read. One of those notes caught my eye.

He was 27 years old, he was just beginning to form his theory of evolution, and on this page he’s reading about Jean-Baptiste Lamarck’s very different view of how animals change over time. If Lamarck was right, Darwin was wrong. And Lamarck, at that time, was a very eminent fellow. Did Darwin stab that paragraph with his pencil? Did he write, “No! No! Never!” in the margins?

He did not.

Image courtesy of the Cambridge University Library, Biodiversity Heritage LibraryDarwin’s notes stating, “If this were true adios theory” from page 442 from Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology Vol. 2.

Instead he thought, “If Lamarck is right, I’ll have to kiss my insight goodbye” — or, as he put it, switching to a 19th century Spanglish — “If this were true adios theory.”

I see a brave smile in that phrase. Darwin knew what he wanted to see, but he knew there are many ways to weigh the evidence. And so for the next few decades he would look at his Big Idea from every possible angle, supportive, contrarian — every way possible. Just to make sure he wasn’t missing a point of view. Just to test his guess against all the other guesses.

There’s a stubborn, happy bravery in that.

Source: NPR.org

You don’t have to jump in to your own enterprise without a safety net. Just as the panelists at our June event discussed, taking a risk to live your passion is necessary but you can mitigate that risk, as you’ll read below.

Older Americans Fuel Entrepreneurial Boom

Faced with bruised nest eggs and high unemployment rates, older Americans—ever resourceful—are becoming entrepreneurs.

According to the nonprofit Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation, individuals between the ages of 54 and 64 represented 22.9% of the entrepreneurs who launched businesses in 2010 – up from 14.5% in 1996. Since 2007, the foundation says, this age group has created new businesses at a higher rate than any other. The data, writes Kauffman’s research director Dane Stangler, indicates “the United States might be on the cusp of an entrepreneurship boom—not in spite of an aging population but because of it.”

Still, failure rates for new businesses are high—as high as 90% by some measures.

Accordingly, we sat down with Eric Ries, Entrepreneur in Residence at Harvard Business School, to talk about his forthcoming book, “The Lean Startup,” which Crown Publishing Group is scheduled to publish on September 13. Here are edited excerpts:

Q: The stereotype of an entrepreneur tends to be that of a young technology genius. Yet the statistics tell a different story. What’s going on?

A: The idea that you have to be a young 20-something just out of college to be a successful entrepreneur is just not true. Older entrepreneurs outperform younger ones in terms of their success rates. All you need is insight and a willingness to test your ideas.

Q: How can entrepreneurs reduce the odds of failure?

A: Entrepreneurial vision is very important, but it’s important to test it as quickly as possible with empirical data. One good place to go is the web site kickstarter.com, which helps projects get funding. Before you go to the trouble and expense of producing a product, you can list it for a specific price on kickstarter and see whether people pre-order it. If you never produce the product, the web site gives customers their money back. By looking at pre-orders you can gauge demand for your idea. If you simply ask people whether they think something is a good idea or whether they would pay for a product, most are not going to be able to give you an accurate answer. People are very unpredictable. With kickstarter, they send the money up front, so you can see how they will really behave.

Q: Is it important to write a business plan?

A: I think business plans are obsolete. It’s not that planning isn’t valuable. But the goal should be to use tools such as kickstarter to research demand, rather than to speculate on demand in a business plan. You should do this type of business experimentation as quickly as possible so you don’t waste time or money on product development. The failure rate for startups is astronomical. We can do a lot better.

Q: What if you want to test a service, instead of a product?

A: Instead of building a big, expensive version of your service, build the smallest, simplest version that enables you to get started testing it with potential customers. For example, some entrepreneurs I know in Austin, Texas had an idea for a service to help parents with meal planning that incorporates family members’ food preferences, provides recipes, and keeps track of grocery lists. Rather than spend money developing software, they spent time with customers every week in the grocery store. They helped their customers by doing meal planning by hand. They wrote out menus on paper and as they got better at serving the needs of these customers, they added others. When they had a critical mass, they started to automate the service, by developing software. The rationale is that if no one is willing to pay for the concierge version of the service, no one is going to pay for the software either. The idea is to get just 10 customers to try it out and see how many people will pay for it. These techniques are very simple.

Q: What if you are offering a service, such as carpentry work, and you know there is a market. How can you go about testing whether your business will succeed?

A: I know someone who started a home interior design company. He knew that people would spend money on home refurnishing, but would they want to buy it from him? He spoke to prospective customers, to find out why it was that they wanted to remodel. It turned out that many potential customers in the place where he was based were women. He had the realization that they were not just buying home remodeling, but the sense of control a designer could create for them over their environments. He tried out tag lines for his business until he found a hit—which enabled him to market himself as offering something they could not get elsewhere. The tag line he chose was “unlike your husband, we listen.”

Q: Should you spend money designing a web site for your company?

A: You can create a web site for little to no money. Keep it basic and simple and don’t get distracted with business cards or stationary. It used to be that you had to wear a suit and hand out business cards. Those days are over. There are companies including unbounce.com that allow you to create web pages so that people can sign up for your service or product. [Ries, who is an adviser to unbounce.com, owns an equity stake in the company.] For example, if you are planning to launch a cleaning and organizing service, you can create a page geared to moms and you can create a separate page for businesses. Those web pages will look very different but this enables you to test both versions and see which does better.

Source: Smartmoney.com