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.