Later this morning, I’m looking forward to talking to thousands of young Australians who’ll be meeting at the Melbourne Convention Centre to discuss the subject of LEADERSHIP.

The Halogen Foundation organises these meetings around Australia–National Young Leaders Days. Students attend from government, Catholic and private schools. Many travel from the country and remote areas.

The other speakers will be Olympian Brooke Hanson, AFL Legend Glenn Manton, and Polar Explorer Matt McFayden. We each have 20 minutes.

So, how do you discuss the subject of LEADERSHIP, in a meaningful way, in 20 minutes with an audience of 2000 young people?

I’ll try to leave them with just one idea to focus on and that will be the concept of ESCAPE.

Thinking is the skill of leading yourself, and Leadership is the skill of helping others to lead themselves. And, the most difficult feat in thinking is to ESCAPE from your current point-of-view.

• In science and technology we have to escape from old ways of looking at things and experiment with new ways.

• In business we have to escape from last year’s results and come up with much better results for this year.

• In sport we have to escape from previous ‘personal bests’ and past competition results and produce even better results.

• In education, we can’t teach students to use Green Hat thinking unless we can first teach them how to escape from Black Hat thinking.

It’s all about ESCAPE.

The problem is that at school we are mostly taught–through the traditional RIGHT/WRONG system–not to escape from our opinions but to defend the rightness of our point-of-view, to get the ‘RIGHT’ answers and to avoid ‘MISTAKES’. This has made us fearful of change, innovation, experiments, risk, and of escaping from ‘right’ ways of doing things.

But, at this morning’s big meeting if we are going to be talking about LEADERSHIP then we will be talking about ESCAPE.

For more on ESCAPE click through to the 59 Second Course on Thinking …

In Adelaide recently, I found a quaint old bookstore in the Barrossa Valley. I spent an hour rummaging around and came out with I Will Be Called John, a 1973 biography of Pope John XXIII by Lawrence Elliott.

To my mind, the wonderful Pope John is really the only pope worth bothering about in living memory–but that’s just me. The story of his life only enhances the opinion I had already formed of him.

The current pope’s recent encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, is about ‘Love’ and that’s commendable. But Pope John was universally loved and, not unlike the Dalai Lama, taught us more by example than exhortation.

Anyway, I had heard this quote of his before and was pleased to read it again in his biography. It’s one of my favourites. It is said that wherever he had gone he excercised his authority according to his personal style which was:

The ME-TOO challenger politician in the Australian electoral campaign is a clever thinker and is using–t4t–one of the cleverest strategies in the world.

Much of the media commentary seems to be missing the point.

Kevin Rudd of Kevin07 is using the t4t strategy on a daily basis and it’s already casting its irresistable ’shadow of the future’. His opponent, Prime Minister John Howard, is on the run.

You can see the power of t4t on a daily basis. t4t is tit4tat and also known as ME-TOO. It has already struck fear into the heart of Howard, the incumbent.

Howard is haunted by t4t’s powerful ’shadow of the future’ and is panicking and complaining to anyone who’ll listen, “Rudd’s using me-too, me-too on me”.

Drawing on the vast amount of work dome by Nobel Laureate scientists on Game Theory, t4t/ME-TOO is considered by many world experts to be the ‘best strategy in the world’.

t4t is an ancient strategy which has been in constant use for thousands of years by those in the know. It has been challenged in modern computerized simulator testing environments by information scientists around the world in rigorous competitions, yet it still reigns supreme.

In the political jungle, me-too practitioners of t4t/ME-TOO have a powerful darwinian unfair advantage known as ‘the shadow of the future’.

t4t is also known as ‘tit4tat‘.

Earthlings are from Earth! And, that’s the truth. But what might happen if foreigners ever arrived from another planet?

Many thinkers have speculated about such things over the years from John the Baptist to HG Wells. Recently, Professor Richard Dawkins gives his version in the first paragraph of his famous book in the 30th Anniversary Edition of The Selfish Gene:

Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its existence. If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilisation, is: ‘Have they discovered evolution yet?’.

THOUGHT EXPERIMENT: What do YOU think is the first question a visitor to earth might ask?

You can post your version here in 25 words or less …

When I was living in New York I was often asked what I thought was a difference between Australian and American culture. I often cited, as an example, the First Tuesday in November. In America it is Election Day while in Australia it is Cup Day.

The biggest race in Australia is the Melbourne Cup. It is also a public holiday!

For over a hundred years the race has run on the First Tuesday in November. It started off as ‘cupday’ and became a carnival.

Innovation in fashion is also the name of the game. In 1965 the world media saw ’superfilly Jean Shrimpton’ give birth to the ‘mini-skirt’ at this carnival.

If you’d like to be a part of it click through here …

The Australian Sports Commission (Ausport) last week invited Michael to work with representatives of the 30 top sports in Australia–including all football codes, polo, speed skating, basketball and pool sports–to help them think of better ways to develop their sports.

Introducing them to SOTs School of Sports Thinking program these sports managers received new software for their brain and current techniques from cognitive science.

Michael said, “Since the brain is the biggest sports muscle in the human body, acquiring virtuosity in Sports Thinking is an important part of strategic development in any competitive sporting environment–both on and off the field”.

Ausport’s Tom O’Connor described the workshop on Sports Thinking as “fantastic“. He said, “Feedback from the attendees has been overwhelming. cvs2bvs is being raved about everywhere. We are bound to do some follow up work in this area of sports thinking”. Ausport already promotes four main virtues in Australian Sport: