Drop the Deck, 2,000-year-old Roads, GQ, How to Make Friends, Banana Slugs
Brigadoon Weekly
August 12, 2018
Curation and commentary from Marc A. Ross
Reporting from Alexandria, Virginia
Brigadoon Weekly = Enterprise + Culture + Sport + Policy
Brigadoon is Education + Events + Engagement for Doers, Entrepreneurs, and Thought Leaders.
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ROSS RANT
Replacing presentations with conversations
At the core of all Brigadoon events is the belief in the power of conversations.
Brigadoon believes there is power in engaging with subject matter experts from fields different than our own to help with our personal creative skills development.
Sure, as a speaker, when you make the Mad Men presentation with sizzle and flash wrapped up with the big showstopper reveal, it may feel useful to you, but it actually does little to advance understanding or securing solutions.
Standing before a room full of interesting, smart professionals with a slide deck to reveal data on your terms, showing off, and making it all about you is a disservice to your audience.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is the author of the seminal book Flow, and he has spent decades studying happiness and creativity.
Csikszentmihalyi believes creativity is the ability to see and bring a new perspective to a problem with a solution that has meaning. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and total engagement.
The idea of flow is being in the zone, in the groove, in the barrel.
The flow state is an optimal state of natural motivation, where a person is fully immersed in what they are doing.
Advancing slides is not a flow state.
Conversing with an audience is a flow state.
Much of the talk surrounding what is typically thought of as creativity is limited and restricted.
Csikszentmihalyi believes creativity is not the ability to write, draw, poet, or sculpt - these skills as personal creativity.
Csikszentmihalyi believes creativity comes by looking at things differently, hearing things differently, tasting things differently.
Creativity demands immersion with conversations and the ability to think on your feet.
When a subject matter expert can bring a fresh perspective to a problem, they also can go with the flow, engage in conversations, and respond to whatever the audience throws at them.
Brigadoon events curate conversations where the discussion leader starts by sharing their expertise, responding to the audience, having the ability to react, and then moving the audience into flow.
Finding solutions, being creative, expanding learning demands presence.
Man Men was a television show, it ain't real world - at least today's world.
You can't present and be present at the same time.
Drop the deck and have a conversation.
-Marc A. Ross
Brigadoon Founder + TLC
FIVE ARTICLES TO READ
WP: How 2,000-year-old roads predict modern-day prosperityhttps://wapo.st/2MevyT0
"Prosperity begets prosperity: On a global level, economists and historians have shown that places that prospered 100, 500, even 1,000 years ago tend to be more economically developed today."
Starbucks shows that the opportunities for growth are in Guangzhou, not Seattle https://bloom.bg/2M8jPW1
The Atlantic: How to make friends, according to sciencehttp://bit.ly/2M7j935
To begin, don’t dismiss the humble acquaintance.
@AdamMGrant: On average, it takes 50 hours of interaction to go from acquaintance to friend and 200 hours to get to close friend.
Real friendships rarely happen overnight. They build over time through sharing moments of joy and moments of heartache.
Economist: Silicon Valley gets queasy about Chinese moneyhttps://econ.st/2MyPyNd
"China’s ability to invest billions into American startups looks uncertain"
Bloomberg: PepsiCo’s Indra Nooyi in her own words: ‘No one has a lock on ideas’ https://bloom.bg/2KC0Gad
The world has gotten more complex, more volatile. Anyone who wants to be CEO has a healthy dose of four things:
1. IQ = great brains and ability to absorb a lot of material
2. EQ = you have to hold onto people and make them feel they are really part of the company
3. GQ = a global understanding and empathy. You have to be willing to go into every country and be a citizen of that country. If you don’t have the ability to be local in every country, whatever your business, you won’t be able to engage people from that country.
4. It’s a cycle: you’ve got to be a lifelong student. Just because you’re a CEO doesn’t mean you can stop learning.
BRIGADOON SCOTLAND 2018
Brigadoon Scotland 2018 = November 11-13, 2018
More details and ticket information @ thebrigadoon.com/events
TRENDS
PWC: What will work look like in 2030?
Imagining four radically different scenarios for how companies will manage people and how people will manage their work and careers.
Red World - individualism and fragmentation reign, small is powerful. Technology allows tiny businesses to tap into the vast reservoirs of information, skills, and financing that were formerly available only to large organizations, and it gives them power and incredible reach. Innovation and people are inseparable, which will trickle down to how companies find, manage and reward workers.
Blue World - individualized and integrated world, global corporations take center stage, becoming larger, more powerful, and more influential than ever — some even have more sway than nation states. Companies see their size and influence as the best way to protect their prized profit margins against intense competition from their peers and aggressive new market entrants.
Green World — collective and integrated — is driven by the need for a powerful social conscience. Reacting to public opinion, increasingly scarce natural resources, and stringent international regulations, companies push a strong ethical and ecological agenda. Social conscience, environmental responsibility, diversity, human rights and fairness are corporate imperatives.
Yellow World — in which collectivist impulses thrive in a fragmented world — workers and companies seek out greater meaning and relevance. Humanness is highly valued. Workers find flexibility, autonomy, and fulfilment, working for organizations with strong social and ethical records. There’s a strong desire to contribute to the common good.
Read the full report here: PWC: Workforce of the future: The competing forces shaping 2030 https://pwc.to/2MuHCwb
DOCUMENTARY
EAT. RACE. WIN. is a behind-the-scenes, on and off-the-bike adventure into the biggest annual sporting event on the planet: The Tour de France. Known as the Queen of Performance Cooking, Chef Hannah Grant takes you on her race within the race, sourcing fuel-packed food for Australia's pro cycling team, Orica-Scott, as Sports Director Matthew White encourages his nine riders to victory.
Watch a clip here: https://imdb.to/2MHqrr
PODCAST
Knowledge @ Wharton: Amazon's core product = Convenience: Amazon sells more goods than any one person could count – but the e-commerce giant’s true “core product” is convenience, and how quickly it can get an order from customers’ virtual shopping carts to their real-life doorsteps.
Part of what makes it so easy for Amazon to offer two-day or even same-day shipping to customers is its vast network of distribution centers, which are located across the U.S. and store and ship products to their final destinations. New research from Wharton business economics and public policy professor Katja Seim takes a closer look at how significantly expanding that distribution center network over the past decade has been key to Amazon’s growth strategy.
Seim recently spoke to Knowledge@Wharton about her paper, “Economies of Density in E-Commerce: A Study of Amazon’s Fulfillment Center Network,” which was co-authored with Cornell’s Jean-Francois Houde and Penn State’s Peter Newberry.
You can listen to the podcast here: https://whr.tn/2KRkfeC
SONG
The Tragically Hip - Ahead By A Century https://goo.gl/tJBgwL
SPORT
NYT: A dream ended on a mountain road: The cyclists and the ISIS militants https://nyti.ms/2MjuCwu
Make time to read.
LAT: Cheer, cheer for the Banana Slugs? Earwigs? Prune Packers? California teams go nuts on sports nicknameshttps://lat.ms/2MnQd3L
SI: Premier League rankings: Separating the contenders from the relegation fodder https://on.si.com/2OUXby
