We have just seen GM go bankrupt. The GM story and that of others in the motor industry have been some of the major shocks of the Global Financial Crisis.
So what is the future of the motor industry? Only time will tell.
Volkswagen is Europe’s biggest car manufacturer. VW’s transparent factory is amazing.
Take a look at this short video. •••Click through here …
World thinking is the thinking of ALL the people in the world.
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There are many different and parallel worlds.
There is the cosmos. The natural universal world.
There is the world on Earth. The 1.8 million species of the animal world. The world of plants. There is the human world. There is the world of your family, your school, your gang, your sports club, your partner, your enemy, your nation and the street where you live.
And most poignant and immediate of all, there is the cognos, the world of thinking inside your head!
One of the world’s most authentic models of world thinking is the Gallup World Poll.
The late Professor George Gallup founded the Gallup Poll at Princeton, New Jersey, which became the world’s first system to objectively and scientifically measure public and customer opinion. He was also the inventor of market research and the ultimate saviour of the customer.
What do think is most interesting about WORLD THINKING?
Post your thinking here:
Advanced Thought Leadership Training
From time to time SOT conducts advanced thought leadership training with a focus on Leadership Thinking and Strategic Thinking. SOT has been conducting advanced thought leadership training since 1981 in New York. We have recently upgraded the leadership training.
Dr Eric Bienstock, was the first graduate of SOT Advanced Thought Leadership Training. He graduated as a Thinking Instructor, and later Chief Instructor SOT. He became the first Managing Director of SOT in New York and Eric is now the Vice Principal SOT.
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INVITATION
You are invited to participate in the next intake of Advanced Thought Leadership Training SOT. There are no fees.
This is a 34-day leadership training program under the personal direction of SOT Principal, Michael Hewitt-Gleeson. On successful completion you may qualify for the Advanced Thought Leadership Certificate SOT. For an insight into how his views on leadership have been informed by his personal experience you can click through here to read Michael’s story.
FEEDBACK FROM GRADUATES:
••• Click here to see what graduates are telling their friends about their SOT leadership training …
APPLY FOR TRAINING:
••• If you would like to be considered for this next intake, please express your interest by writing directly to Michael here.
Teenagers will be awarded the equivalent of a GCSE in “thinking” under new plans.
They will be taught the difference between an argument and a rant and how to separate fact from opinion, it was disclosed.
Topics covered in the new course – drawn up by one of Britain’s biggest exam boards – will include debate over the existence of UFOs, a belief in the after life and arguments for and against euthanasia.
The Awakening …
(Author Unknown)
A time comes in your life when you finally get it… when, in the midst of all your fears and insanity, you stop dead in your tracks and somewhere the voice inside your head cries out – ENOUGH!
Enough fighting and crying or struggling to hold on. And, like a child quieting down after a blind tantrum, your sobs begin to subside, you shudder once or twice, you blink back your tears and begin to look at the world through new eyes. This is your awakening. You realize it’s time to stop hoping and waiting for something to change… or for happiness, safety and security to come galloping over the next horizon. You come to terms with the fact that neither of you is Prince Charming or Cinderella and that in the real world there aren’t always fairy tale endings (or beginnings for that matter) and that any guarantee of “happily ever after” must begin with you… and in the process a sense of serenity is born of acceptance.
You awaken to the fact that you are not perfect and that not everyone will always love, appreciate or approve of who or what you are… and that’s OK. They are entitled to their own views and opinions. And you learn the importance of loving and championing yourself… and in the process a sense of new found confidence is born of self-approval.
You stop complaining and blaming other people for the things they did to you (or didn’t do for you) and you learn that the only thing you can really count on is the unexpected.
You learn that people don’t always say what they mean or mean what they say and that not everyone will always be there for you and that it’s not always about you. So, you learn to stand on your own and to take care of yourself… and in the process a sense of safety and security is born of self-reliance. You stop judging and pointing fingers and you begin to accept people as they are and to overlook their shortcomings and human frailties… and in the process a sense of peace and contentment is born of forgiveness.
You realize that much of the way you view yourself, and the world around you, is as a result of all the messages and opinions that have been ingrained into your psyche. And you begin to sift through all the junk you’ve been fed about how you should behave, how you should look, how much you should weigh, what you should wear, what you should do for a living, how much money you should make, what you should drive, how and where you should live, whom you should marry, the importance of having and raising children, and what you owe your parents, family, and friends.
You learn to open up to new worlds and different points of view. And you begin reassessing and redefining who you are and what you really stand for. You learn the difference between wanting and needing and you begin to discard the doctrines and values you’ve outgrown, or should never have bought into to begin with … and in the process you learn to go with your instincts.
You learn that it is truly in giving that we receive. And that there is power and glory in creating and contributing and you stop maneuvering through life merely as a “consumer” looking for your next fix.
You learn that principles such as honesty and integrity are not the outdated ideals of a by gone era but the mortar that holds together the foundation upon which you must build a life. You learn that you don’t know everything, it’s not your job to save the world and that you can’t teach a pig to sing.
You learn to distinguish between guilt and responsibility and the importance of setting boundaries and learning to say NO. You learn that the only cross to bear is the one you choose to carry and that martyrs get burned at the stake. Then you learn about love. How to love, how much to give in love, when to stop giving and when to walk away.
You learn to look at relationships as they really are and not as you would have them be. You stop trying to control people, situations and outcomes. And you learn that alone does not mean lonely. You also stop working so hard at putting your feelings aside, smoothing things over and ignoring your needs.
You learn that feelings of entitlement are perfectly OK…and that it is your right to want things and to ask for the things you want and that sometimes it is necessary to make demands. You come to the realization that you deserve to be treated with love, kindness, sensitivity and respect and you won’t settle for less. And you learn that your body really is your temple. And you begin to care for it and treat it with respect.
You begin to eat a balanced diet, drink more water, and take more time to exercise. You learn that being tired fuels doubt, fear, and uncertainty and so you take more time to rest. And, just as food fuels the body, laughter fuels our soul. So you take more time to laugh and to play.
You learn that, for the most part, you get in life what you believe you deserve… and that much of life truly is a self-fulfilling prophecy. You learn that anything worth achieving is worth working for and that wishing for something to happen is different than working toward making it happen. More importantly, you learn that in order to achieve success you need direction, discipline and perseverance. You also learn that no one can do it all alone… and that it’s OK to risk asking for help.
You learn the only thing you must truly fear is the greatest robber baron of all: FEAR itself. You learn to step right into and through your fears because you know that whatever happens you can handle it and to give in to fear is to give away the right to live life on your own terms. And you learn to fight for your life and not to squander it living under a cloud of impending doom.
You learn that life isn’t always fair, you don’t always get what you think you deserve and that sometimes bad things happen to unsuspecting, good people. On these occasions you learn not to personalize things. You learn that God/dess isn’t punishing you or failing to answer your prayers. It’s just life happening. And you learn to deal with evil in its most primal state – the ego. You learn that negative feelings such as anger, envy and resentment must be understood and redirected or they will suffocate the life out of you and poison the universe that surrounds you. You learn to admit when you are wrong and to build bridges instead of walls.
You learn to be thankful and to take comfort in many of the simple things we take for granted, things that millions of people upon the earth can only dream about: a full refrigerator, clean running water, a soft warm bed, a long hot shower. Slowly, you begin to take responsibility for yourself by yourself and you make yourself a promise to never betray yourself and to never, ever settle for less than your heart’s desire. And you hang a wind chime outside your window so you can listen to the wind. And you make it a point to keep smiling, to keep trusting, and to stay open to every wonderful possibility.
Finally, with courage in your heart YOU take a stand.
You take a deep breath, and you begin to design the life you want to live as best you can.
“English has become the language of problem-solving“, says Jay Walker.
Check out his TED Talk, only 5 mins.
Jay Walker explains why two billion people around the world are trying to learn English.
He shares photos and spine-tingling audio of Chinese students rehearsing English — “the world’s second language” — by the thousands …
NOTE: 2009 celebrates the 200th Anniversary of the birth of Charles Darwin on February 12 and the 150th of the publication of The Origin of Species. There are many celebrations planned worldwide. For example, there is Evolution – The Experience in Melbourne and Darwin 2009 – The Festival in England. You can google to find where there are celebrations planned in your city.
Oxford Professor, Richard Dawkins, is well known for his witty and elegant explanations of how Darwin’s Theory works in genetic detail. It’s all about replicator power!
Fitness survives!
In Dawkin’s acclaimed book on Darwin’s Theory, The Selfish Gene, he showed how fitness survives not only in biology but wherever we can find replicators at work.
As another example he coined the word meme as a unit of culture which gets passed on from person to person. A meme is a replicator like a gene. Successful genes replicate from DNA to DNA and successful memes replicate from brain to brain via word-of-mouth (WOM).
“Memes can be good ideas, good tunes, good poems, as well as drivelling mantras.” says Richard Dawkins in Unweaving the Rainbow. “Anything that spreads by imitation, as genes spread by bodily reproduction or by viral infection, is a meme … As with genes, we can expect the world to become filled with memes that are good at the art of getting themselves copied from brain to brain … It is enough that memes vary in their infectivity for darwinian selection to get going … We may think this spreading for the sake of spreading rather futile, but nature is not interested in our judgements, of futility or anything else. If a piece of code has what it takes, it spreads and that’s that … In Climbing Mount Improbable I explained that an elephant’s DNA and a virus are both ‘Copy Me’ programmes. The difference is that one of them has an almost fantastically large digression: ‘Copy me by building an elephant first’. But both kinds of programmes spread because, in their different ways, they are good at spreading.
The meme is a very useful tool for understanding how WOM in marketing works because it allows us to harness much of the power of Darwin’s Theory. Today, memetics is one of the fastest growing ideas in science. Memetics allows us to understand not only how people get ideas but, more importantly, how ideas acquire people or how minds become memed.
NOTE: Just a note on repetition. As you’ll see, repetition is a very powerful tool when we’re establishing new brain patterns. For example, you’ll notice repetition in this training course and the main point is that it is deliberately put there for your benefit. It’s to help your brain acquire these ideas more easily, or, to put it another way, to help these ideas acquire your brain more easily. The most important memes are the ones that are invested with the most repetition.
Susan Blackmore in her enlightening book The Meme Machine explains, “We do copy each other all the time and we underestimate what is involved because imitation comes so easily to us. When we copy each other, something, however intangible, is passed on. That something is the meme. And taking a meme’s eye view is the foundation of memetics.”
••• Click through here to Susan’s delightful TED talk
In marketing, nothing is more important than taking the meme’s eye-view because nothing is more important than WOM.
WOM is the meme that gets itself passed on from one customer to another. Or, a meme is the WOM that allows one customer’s brain to become ‘infected’ by another brain. Memes reside in the brain (like genes reside in DNA) and how they get from one brain to another is what memetics is all about. Only the fittest memes survive. Think of the marketplace as the meme pool. There are vastly more memes than there are brains to shelter them. Which ones will survive? Why? Which ones will fail? Why?
02 Feedback Question: After you post your comment below for FQ02 you can click here to proceed to FQ03 entitled “Absolute Truth or evolving fuzzy truths?”:
FQ02 (Feedback Question):
What is a meme?
Give an example of a meme that has been good at getting inside and surviving in your brain …
The northernmost city in Australia is Darwin. Darwin is in the Northern Territory and is the only large city in the world named after one of the cleverest humans who ever lived, Charles Darwin, author of The Origin of Species and most famous for his brilliant idea on how evolution works.
Darwin’s Theory (as it has been fully developed during the last 150 years) has explained more about life in the universe than any other idea ever produced by any other thinker from St Paul to Steven Hawking.
In my personal opinion, he is easily the #1 Thinker of the Second Millennium.
So, why may Darwin’s idea be regarded as the most powerful theory in all of science?
In science, the power of a theory is the number of things it explains divided by the number of things it assumes. The more things that can be explained by a theory that assumes as little as possible is what gives the theory its power. So, a theory that explains 10 things but needs to assume 5 things is not as powerful as a theory that explains 8 things but needs to assume only 3 things.
Darwin’s Theory (meaning the elaboration of his theory as it has evolved in science today) explains the existence of a billion well-adapted species by simply assuming genes exist. Why? Because what follows from the existence of high fidelity replicators like genes is the process of mutation, competition, selection and … evolution.
Before Darwin, in the Western culture, the only explanation for the origin of the diverse array of different species on earth was the JCI Monotheistic Theory of GOD.
In the Judeo-Christian-Islamic (JCI) religious theory, each species was seen as a separate direct line of member creatures originating from the first of its kind which was created personally by GOD. If you see an elephant, it was thought to have descended from a long line of ancestor elephants going all the way back to the first ‘Adam elephant’ which GOD made. The same applied to any dragonfly you could see, or dolphin, or insect, or rattlesnake. Each member of a species was thought to have descended from it’s own Adam prototype which was created by GOD in a momentous and strenuous burst of designer energy.
Darwin provided an alternative explanation for the origin of all species. His theory of evolution was explained by the survival of fitness. His theory showed how over evolutionary time–which is very, very, very, long in the millions of years–random mutations or variations in the copies of each generation allowed for the fittest copy to survive and pass its adaptation on to the next generation.
The same idea can explain much of what happens in the marketplace over time. Only those offers that are good enough at getting themselves copied–the fittest–survive.
01 Feedback Question: After you post your comment below for FQ01 you can click here to proceed to FQ02 entitled “Dawkins on Memes“:
FQ01 (Feedback Question):
Cut and paste below the sentence from this page that you find most interesting and say why.
I’ve created a new online course called Think Darwin!
The purpose of this training is to help raise your darwinian intelligence, your ability to survive and grow in rapidly changing environments.
“Nearly all of business education–even at postgraduate level–may be misguided, even misleading. In my experience, business education is faithfully based on a false premise–that the problem of business is growth. When, in fact, the problem of business is survival.
Most business leaders may be spending their time and energy on solving the wrong problem. Yes, of course, growth is critical in business but the MAIN PROBLEM is that most businesses fail to survive long enough to grow!”
Of the Fortune 500 class of 1974 only 22 of those businesses still survive. These are the big companies. The failure to survive of smaller companies is ten times worse.
Since Darwin explained the reasons 150 years ago, we know that it’s not the strongest or the largest that survive but it’s those best prepared to cope with change.
On this BIG PROBLEM of survival, most business executives are shockingly ignorant and deplete in their formal education. They lack sufficient darwinian intelligence.They know little or nothing useful about the science of strategic darwinian thinking.
They venture forth naked and ill-equipped in their approach to the chaos of the marketplace–the whirling, howling, cacophonous wilderness of the global marketplace with its ferocious fads, toxic wastes, and vicious moods, its callous explosions and cruel extinctions putting capricious end to the blind and righteous rivalry across pointless medieval double-entry boardrooms.
Extravagant expenditures of directors’ time and energy are squandered on the talmudic reading of balance-sheets and P&Ls, like the obsessive pre-scientific study of entrails, when less than one director in a hundred could give an intelligent, educated account of what strategy it would take for their business to survive in the fast-changing environment of the next decade.
Experiment: Ask any director you know to demonstrate their strategic understanding of Darwin’s Theory and to show how s/he uses that knowledge to safeguard the future of the company in the faster-changing environment of the marketplace. If you get a clear, articulate response it will be a surprise.
Is there any business school in Australia that insists their graduates understand the strategic business application of the darwinian imperative? Are there any of the endless ‘case studies’ churned out by business schools devoted to darwinian business strategy?
Do let me know if you find one.
Think Darwin! Raise your darwinian intelligence.
Meanwhile, I’ve created a new online course to help raise your darwinian intelligence, your ability to survive and grow in rapidly changing environments. Think Darwin! consists of ten lessons you can do at your own speed. It’s been designed so that anyone can understand, get their head around and then harness the amazing power of Darwin’s Theory in their daily life, career and business.
For example, have you heard about ‘memes‘?
If you’re in management, marketing, media, or HR/training memes are a must. You’ll become very up-to-date with them on this course.
Darwin’s Theory is widely regarded as the most powerful theory in all of science! Don’t miss out on this unique training program.
There are no fees for Think Darwin!. If your family and friends can benefit then they are most welcome, too.
••Click here for The First Lesson …
These lessons were first published in my book
The X10 Memeplex: Multiply Your Business By Ten!
