When Ideas Have Sex (& Other Fascinations)

I’ve always wanted to know “Why?” (God bless my saintly parents). I reason that if we can understand why things are happening — if we can figure out what’s hiding in the background motivating people or systems or organizations — it’s easier to make sense of things and figure out how to respond.

Today I wanted to share with you a few ideas that I’ve found interesting and valuable. They should also help explain why I think the way I do about the world. These first two are excerpts from the 2009 Deloitte Shift Index (you can get the whole report here if you feel so inclined).

Why does passion matter? Because staying competitive in the newly globalized labor market requires all of us to constantly renew and update our professional skills and capabilities. The effort required to increase our rate of professional development is difficult to muster unless we are passionately engaged with our professional activities. (p. 70)

I’m part of a tremendous tribe of people over at the Management Innovation eXchange — or MIX — who are discussing this idea in depth right now, particularly how to create communities of passion (get a taste here).

Trends set in motion decades ago are fundamentally altering the global landscape… Clearly, there is a fundamental disconnect between the mind-set and practices of companies and the environment in which they compete… These findings suggest a fundamental re-thinking of the way we do business is in order. (p. 81-82)

I drastically shortened this quote; the whole two pages it comes from are a great read if you have time. The marketplace is shifting in completely unprecedented ways. Fortunately, we have better tools than ever before (i.e. collective global brainpower) to help us understand what’s going on.

The next thing I want to share is a video from TED called “When Ideas Have Sex” — turns out it’s much less bawdry than you might hope, but still incredibly brilliant. ;-)

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