Business Insight Zone

I’m a sucker for Big Ideas. Here are a few good ones. I hope you enjoy them — and, better, that you do something wonderful with them.

§§§

TED2008: Days 3 and 4 in Quotes

The quote from Bob Geldof explains the appeal of the TED conference, and why it is a steady supplier of Big Ideas for people in the business world and beyond:

“Human progress depends on unreasonable people. Reasonable people accept the world as they meet it; unreasonable people persist in trying to change it. Well, I’m Bob and I’m an unreasonable person. And if TED is anything, it is the olympics of unreasonable people.”

If you recall the TED videos I’ve linked to before, you won’t be surprised when I encourage you to dig around on the TED site for yourself. Plenty of good stuff there to get the synapses firing.

§§§

The World Question Center at Edge.com

Here’s a good recipe for unlocking Big Ideas:

• Take dozens of the smartest people you can find.
• Pose them the killer question“What have you changed your mind about?”
• Let them talk.
• Stir and enjoy.

§§§

Andrew Revkin at the New York Times Dot Earth blog: Apocalypse Then. Next One, When?

Major asteroid or meteorite impacts on Earth seem like the stuff of science fiction, but in fact the science fiction in tales like “Deep Impact” is based on actual events — such as the Tunguska impact in Siberia 100 years ago. As Revkin explains in this piece, it’s a good thing that the Tunguska object didn’t land on a big city like Moscow, because the loss of life would have been horrific.

Here’s the thing: we could be doing something to avert these sorts of disasters, which astronomers say are much more likely than we’d prefer to believe. But what are we doing? Nothing.

Mr. [Rusty] Schweickart [an Apollo 9 astronaut and activist on this issue] had just given testimony before a a Senate committee, and told a depressing story about his conversations with staff members shortly afterward. To a person, they said the lawmakers they worked for were convinced of the threat and need to invest more in protection. And to a person, he recalled, they apologized that new money was unlikely because making the deflection of asteroids a priority might backfire in reelection campaigns.

Last year in an earlier post on asteroid impacts, Mr. Schweickart mused on an issue at the heart of Dot Earth — how political systems, reflecting human nature, still seem to be having a hard time integrating scientific understanding, uncertainties and all, in ways that result in policies and investments that could blunt risks while fostering prosperity.

Revkin rightly calls for a better understanding of science in the political sphere. Our highly populated, highly globalized planet is facing many challenges that could be addressed with some combination of scientific and public-policy solutions. The Big Idea here is that, somehow, we have to come to grips politically with ways to tackle these challenges before they turn into problems totally beyond our control.

§§§

From Psychology Today: 10 Ways We Get the Odds Wrong

To my mind, this item relates directly to the preceding one. The more I observe the worlds of business, politics, and human nature generally, the more I’m convinced that many of the good solutions to many of our most pressing problems aren’t so arcane — but they do require a new cast of mind to appreciate them.

A good place to start, in my opinion, is to better understand how our brains tend to mislead us. From there, we can figure out how to harness our brainpower, whether by computing mathematical probabilities or by harnessing our common sense, to solve our vexing problems.

It sounds like a small thing, but it’s going to take some Big Ideas to actually make it happen.

~

(Photo by Paul Worthington.)

Category: The business brain