This month's Harvard Business Review is worth reading

If you can grab a copy of this month Harvard Business Review please do, some of the articles on it are worth reading. I found them very useful. Or read the executive summary for free online at http://www.hbr.org/.

The 3 articles/executive summary I read are:
1. Cognitive Fitness
2. Eight ways to build collaborative teams.
3. Are your engineers talking to one another when they should?

The articles on cognitive fitness just confirms why I feel more perceptive with age – it’s called pattern recognition. Below is a quote from the article:

"Pattern recognition is the brain’s ability to scan the environment; discern order and create meaning from huge amounts of data; and thereby quickly assess a situation so that appropriate action can be taken right away and with a high degree of accuracy. It is a complex chain reaction that uses the highest-level capacities for abstraction and reflection that are based on the deepest repositories of stored experience. The power of pattern recognition, a critical competence of the executive brain, can be seen in the capacity to simplify without being simplistic. (…)

There’s a lot that you can do to develop you left-hemispheric capabilities. First and foremost, challenge your existing mind-set, enlarge it, and make it more complex. Listen to different viewpoints, read new kinds of articles and books, and visit places with a focused set of learning objectives. All those experiences (…) will expand your vocabulary, your conceptual storehouse, and your general perspective. Such immersions will call into question your own mindset and improve your abilities in pattern recognition."

Of the Eight Ways to build Collaborative Teams, I find those worth noting:
2. Modelling collaborative behaviour: senior executives must demonstrate highly collaborative behaviour themselves.
3 Mentor and help people to build the networks they need to work across boundaries.
4. Ensure the requisite skills: Teach people how to build relationships, communicate well, and resolve conflicts creatively.
5. Support a strong sense of community: when people feel a sense of community, they are more comfortable reaching out to others and more likely to share knowledge.
6. Assign team leaders that are both task and relationship oriented.

If I could travel back in time

I have always loved to watch historical documentaries and science fictions and fantasy movies, because deep inside I would love to live those adventures. I harbour the wish, if it was at all possible, that I would pass through a vortex into another world, or travel in time and then I would know enough or be experienced enough to solve the problem of that world or time, a bit like in Stargate.

Maybe the idea that I would be able to solve their problem is my own pride, just because I know better and I am from another world or time. If I was to travel back in time, I would be able to tell people I meet of the mistakes there were making. For example, how many lives I could have saved, if I was to travel in time and be able to talk to an Allied commander during the WWI – well I have chosen my side. To me, it's obvious that the commanders during the WWI were guilty of slow learning and repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and the cost was in terms of millions of human lives. Any man with an ounce of common sense would have realised how pointless it was to do frontal attack on a position that is defended by machine guns. But most people do not recognise the mistakes they are making as they are making it. Most people only realise a mistake has been made when they feel the pain of committing the mistakes, or maybe they recognise the pain and not the mistake. What is the problem? It's pride. Pride makes of us slow learners and pride makes it harder for us to learn from our mistakes, and pride can make us blind to our own mistakes.

If I did travel in time, while I was in that time, that would be the 'present' for me then. In the case where we are fighting an enemy, if I have spoken to a commander on how not to fight or how to, I would have advantaged one side to victory if the other side remain slow to learn and do not adjust their tactics and strategies. I would have changed history. But if the enemy changes, reacts, adapts to the new ways of fighting, then I would be of no further help in that time. Either I would need to keep travelling back and forth in time to help, or use my common sense to help, or be of no help at all. I would have travelled in time but act as if I am living in the present. Yes, I would be of no help because I don't have any extra knowledge from the future, I am on equal basis as anybody in the present time. I am as others, a limited person in knowledge and skills.

Back to reality, we can't change the past, but we can change the future by what we do in the present. What we wish we could do in fantasy, we can actually do in our daily life. We can learn from our mistakes and the mistakes of others and help others learn from their mistakes and our mistakes. We can learn to make better decisions. Will we wise up? Well there are proverbs that remains true for all of us:

"The way of a fool seems right to him, but a wise man listens to advice.

There is a way that seems right to a man, but in the end it leads to death."

Some people, not excluding myself from them, when we get warned about the mistakes we are making, we just can't stand those advice, because it hurts us. What gets hurt within us? It's our pride. Telling the truth often hurt the pride, if there is pride, within us. Then suffering from our mistakes is the only way to break the pride within us. Doing things our own way and to have our way is a value of our age and to listen to a wisdom not our own is just out of question. There's no way to become wiser when we think we are already wise.

Well, if you feel within you, "who is Ben to be telling me how to be wiser thinking he could teach me a lesson?" What's making you say so? Could it be the pride within you that's telling you that? If you really feel that way, then you would have learn nothing from me except maybe to recognise that there is pride in you (too, because noone is without pride). Pride is so competitive at its root, it is the pride in us makes it hard to stand what appears to be pride in someone else.