I’ve always wanted to know “Why?” (God bless my saintly parents). I reason that if we can understand why things are happening — if we can figure out what’s hiding in the background motivating people or systems or organizations — it’s easier to make sense of things and figure out how to respond.
Today I wanted to share with you a few ideas that I’ve found interesting and valuable. They should also help explain why I think the way I do about the world. These first two are excerpts from the 2009 Deloitte Shift Index (you can get the whole report here if you feel so inclined).
Why does passion matter? Because staying competitive in the newly globalized labor market requires all of us to constantly renew and update our professional skills and capabilities. The effort required to increase our rate of professional development is difficult to muster unless we are passionately engaged with our professional activities. (p. 70)
I’m part of a tremendous tribe of people over at the Management Innovation eXchange — or MIX — who are discussing this idea in depth right now, particularly how to create communities of passion (get a taste here).
Trends set in motion decades ago are fundamentally altering the global landscape… Clearly, there is a fundamental disconnect between the mind-set and practices of companies and the environment in which they compete… These findings suggest a fundamental re-thinking of the way we do business is in order. (p. 81-82)
I drastically shortened this quote; the whole two pages it comes from are a great read if you have time. The marketplace is shifting in completely unprecedented ways. Fortunately, we have better tools than ever before (i.e. collective global brainpower) to help us understand what’s going on.
The next thing I want to share is a video from TED called “When Ideas Have Sex” — turns out it’s much less bawdry than you might hope, but still incredibly brilliant. 
//
Button Pushers & Broken Education by Josh Allan Dykstra on July 11th, 2011
Where The Hell Is Matt? by Josh Allan Dykstra on October 13th, 2009
The Work Revolution by Josh Allan Dykstra on July 1st, 2011
Copyright © 2005-2012 Josh Allan Dykstra
2 Comments
Megan
My brain is a little overloaded after this post – in a super great way.
I couldn’t agree with you (and Deloitte) more about passion being a requisite to keep up and stand out today. Also, what a stellar TED talk! I absolutely love it. It’s right in line with a post I shared about my office’s Vulcan mind meld moments from last week. I think the ‘meeting and mating of ideas’ is beyond fascinating and really a necessity these days, too. Great post, Josh. As always – love your content!
18 Apr 2011 04:04 pm (@@madamenergy)
Josh Allan Dykstra
Yeah, I did kind of put a bunch of stuff out there, didn't I!? Appreciate you taking the time to check it out.
I'm so incredibly fascinated by this idea of convergence -- some days, when I'm able to look at the world with any kind of clarity, it seems like all the disparate fragments humanity's been creating over the past centuries are all crashing back together... right here, right now. Such a cool time to be alive!
21 Apr 2011 11:04 am
Leave a Comment