My inspiration for the coming decade….

The thing is, we still live in a world that’s filled with opportunity. In fact, we have more than an opportunity — we have an obligation. An obligation to spend our time doing great things. To find ideas that matter and to share them. To push ourselves and the people around us to demonstrate gratitude, insight, and inspiration. To take risks and to make the world better by being amazing.

Are these crazy times? You bet they are. But so were the days when we were doing duck-and-cover air-raid drills in school, or going through the scares of Three Mile Island and Love Canal. There will always be crazy times.

So stop thinking about how crazy the times are, and start thinking about what the crazy times demand. There has never been a worse time for business as usual. Business as usual is sure to fail, sure to disappoint, sure to numb our dreams. That’s why there has never been a better time for the new. Your competitors are too afraid to spend money on new productivity tools. Your bankers have no idea where they can safely invest. Your potential employees are desperately looking for something exciting, something they feel passionate about, something they can genuinely engage in and engage with.

You get to make a choice. You can remake that choice every day, in fact. It’s never too late to choose optimism, to choose action, to choose excellence. The best thing is that it only takes a moment — just one second — to decide.

Before you finish this paragraph, you have the power to change everything that’s to come. And you can do that by asking yourself (and your colleagues) the one question that every organization and every individual needs to ask today: Why not be great?

via Seth’s Blog: Only two years left.

Fryer: Which of these skills do you think is the most important?

Dyer: Weve found that questioning turbo-charges observing, experimenting, and networking, but questioning on its own doesnt have a direct effect without the others. Overall, associating is the key skill because new ideas arent created without connecting problems or ideas in ways that they havent been connected before. The other behaviors are inputs that trigger associating — so they are a means of getting to a creative end.

Gregersen: You might summarize all of the skills weve noted in one word: “inquisitiveness.” I spent 20 years studying great global leaders, and that was the big common denominator. Its the same kind of inquisitiveness you see in small children.

via How Do Innovators Think? – HBR Editors Blog – Harvard Business Review.

Via Rajesh Jain

The Australian has a story today about a study with the headline

“Developing nations outstrip rich on greenhouse gases”

When you go into the details the numbers are different.

Developing countries of the world; where 5.7 billion people live emit 54% of the world emissions; and the developed world where 1 billion people live emit about 46% of the world emissions. From 1990, the developing countries have been growing faster than developed countries. This is true for two reasons – one, more population and two, higher economic growth.

The author of the study has this to say too,

• The study said that the increase in emissions from developing countries was in part due to their manufacture of goods for export to rich countries.
• Professor Le Quere said that emissions per person remained much higher in rich countries
• Professor Le Quere said that the study did not take account of historic responsibility for greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. She said that developing countries were responsible for only 20 per cent of cumulative emissions since 1751.
• “Emissions in rich countries have only stabilised because they have reached a certain stage of development which other countries have yet to attain.”

The last part is the critical. They have stabilised at a very high per capita per person because of a certain stage of development and developing countries with their higher population are responsible for only 20% of the world emissions from 1751.

If carbon emissions need to be cut then the developed nations responsible for 80% of the emissions from 1751 need to do it first. Only if headlines told the real story.

The university of Berkeley has launched a Berkeley blog where more than 150 Berkeley professors will be discussing topics of great interest to me and importance too.

From the Press release:

Berkeley — The University of California, Berkeley’s best and brightest are often asked to share their insights at the White House, on Wall Street and with the media worldwide. Now, they are furthering that conversation in a new format – The Berkeley Blog.

Launched on Oct. 12 by UC Berkeley’s online NewsCenter, the blog (http://blogs.berkeley.edu/) features campus faculty members fielding a wide spectrum of questions about the hottest current events. The blog appears to be the first such enterprise based at a major university in the United States.

So far, about 150 UC Berkeley professors have signed on to share their knowledge, experience and ideas with the academic community and the general public. They are responding to topical questions posed two or three times a week by the staff of UC Berkeley’s Office of Public Affairs, which hosts and moderates the blog. (An alphabetical list of faculty participants is online at: http://blogs.berkeley.edu/all-authors.)

Some of the topics right now,

Economics
How does Nobel economist Oliver Williamson’s work apply to 21st century capitalism, both here and in developing countries?

Energy & Environment
What is at stake if world leaders fail to act when they meet in Copenhagen in December for the World Climate Conference?

Science & Technology
The blockbuster discovery of a 4.4 million-year-old hominid, Ardi, adds another chapter to the history of human origins. What does this discovery tell us, and what more is there to learn about the story of human evolution?