Synchronicity is the experience of two or more events that are apparently causally unrelated occurring together in a meaningful manner. To count as synchronicity, the events should be unlikely to occur together by chance. The phenomenon of synchronicity was first described by Carl Gustav Jung in the 1920s. (Wikipedia)

Ever felt that something like a reading material is actually beyond your control and under the guidance of an unseen hand?  Or maybe it's just twitter ...

I was going through my usual daily dose of inspiration when I chanced upon a post in The Atlantic, about Abraham Lincoln and his battle with depression.  There were plenty of  things that immediately suggested to me that it was worth a read - that I knew little about the great man with the huge seated statue and that despite the early stories I've read back then about how cheerful he was with children and regular folks, he clearly was battling depression.  Read on and have a better understanding of just how great he is.

Again, moving on I saw a reference to this new site created by a young Russian geek called, I write like .  What it does is analyze your writing style and compare it with a list of authors in its database and figure a match for you.  Deciding to try, I copy and pasted a few paragraphs taken from my blog posts and voila. 

[Gulp]. It says I write like William Gibson.  (Vague idea of him except for Necromancer which I haven't really read at all.)

Unsatisfied, I am now more interested in challenging the algorithm and off I went to copy-paste a new set of writings.  Result? It now says I write like Cory Doctorow!  FIne. So like most sites that supposedly claim insight, this might just be your usual hocus pocus .  Deciding to give it a go one more time with a new set of paragraphs, the result came back the same. Doctorow.  Hmmm.  

Whatever that meant. 

Seeding the mind.

I work the early hours starting at 4 am and this schedule allows me to still perform school bus driver duties for Zaki past lunchtime.  Usually, I have a two-hour interval between bringing her to school and picking her up.  Yesterday, I got a break since wifey volunteered to do the pick-up.

This means I have time to watch Inception which proved quite difficult to follow.  It didn't help that I was quite sleepy, too which made it more 'dream-like' for me.  

Here it comes.

Quited dazed coming out of the theater, I noticed that it was raining hard outside so I really can't walk back home yet.  Honestly, I felt lucky with the situation as I get to visit Booksale by myself without pestering kid.  This thrift bookshop selling second-hand books is bit like paradise for someone like me who has but few pesos to spare.  Only challenge is that the titles depend more on chance, than anything else.  By chance means spending hours rummaging through shelves and even, on the floor.

And what did I find.  Little Brother - Cory Doctorow and Abraham Lincoln: An illustrated History.

Home.

Coming home, told wifey I saw Inception and told her the movie made minced meat of my brain so either I need to watch it again or read a bit more about it.  Ask Wikipedia, perhaps.  Scrolling down, I came upon this:

"Empire magazine rated it five stars in the August 2010 issue and wrote, "it feels like Stanley Kubrick adapting the work of the great sci-fi author William Gibson"

Like a dream, it means nothing, really.  

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via slideshare.net

No problem acknowledging that a majority of us think of ourselves as creative - full of ideas to improve almost anything; but then we grew up.

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In the past, daydreaming was often considered a failure of mental discipline, or worse. Freud labeled it infantile and neurotic. Psychology textbooks warned it could lead to psychosis. Neuroscientists complained that the rogue bursts of activity on brain scans kept interfering with their studies of more important mental functions.

But now that researchers have been analyzing those stray thoughts, they’ve found daydreaming to be remarkably common — and often quite useful. A wandering mind can protect you from immediate perils and keep you on course toward long-term goals. Sometimes daydreaming is counterproductive, but sometimes it fosters creativity and helps you solve problems.

Consider, for instance, these three words: eye, gown, basket. Can you think of another word that relates to all three? If not, don’t worry for now. By the time we get back to discussing the scientific significance of this puzzle, the answer might occur to you through the “incubation effect” as your mind wanders from the text of this article — and, yes, your mind is probably going to wander, no matter how brilliant the rest of this column is.

Mind wandering, as psychologists define it, is a subcategory of daydreaming, which is the broad term for all stray thoughts and fantasies, including those moments you deliberately set aside to imagine yourself winning the lottery or accepting the Nobel. But when you’re trying to accomplish one thing and lapse into “task-unrelated thoughts,” that’s mind wandering.

And I thought it was just really difficult for people to focus ....

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via online.wsj.com

Recommended read for all parents especially for those obsessed with measuring ROI.

Now, have to remind myself, whatever the kid situation, to always 'enjoy the ride'. (Sad thing is can't biologically add another one, the playmate you unconsciously long for, Zaki! You'll have to make do with a lousy grown-up.)

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Collaboration is a key component to success in today's business world. Workforces are increasingly dispersed, with remote workers, offshore contractors and global partnerships making the job of coordinating your team's work harder than ever.

Fortunately, a wide range of services has emerged that take advantage of the Internet to tie vastly distributed teams together in ways that were unheard of a decade ago. And, of course, people in the same office can benefit from online collaboration too.

Cyberwar Threats: New Security Strategies for Governments: Download now

Even better, you don't need a huge IT budget to collaborate online. While enterprise programs like Microsoft SharePoint Server are still standard at large corporations, much of their functionality can be easily duplicated -- and even surpassed -- with online services that support activities like collective editing of documents in real time, brainstorming and long-term project management.

For small and midsize businesses, or teams with limited budgets, these apps can be deployed cheaply and quickly (some are even free), making them great go-to tools when it just isn't feasible to set up SharePoint or another enterprise app.

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Below is a selection of great online applications to help make your team more productive and maybe even more creative. I'll look at some of the common tasks teams perform and discuss some affordable tools to help your team do them better. These aren't the only affordable options out there, but they are widely used, so you know they'll stand up to real-world use.

Brainstorming and mind mapping

Ideas are the lifeblood of any business, and the brainstorming session has rightfully become a mainstay of the business world. Being able to bounce ideas off other employees and to build on one another's thoughts can unleash incredible creativity, making a team truly more than the sum of its parts.

Traditional brainstorming revolves around the whiteboard, with a facilitator writing down each idea as it emerges. Online whiteboards offer the same kind of free-form discussion and idea capture, usually coupled with chat or voice conferencing.

Mind mapping is also proving to be a popular brainstorming tool. Mind maps employ free association to spin off ideas around a central concept, using a branch-and-leaf structure to clump related ideas together. This reveals relationships and structures as they emerge from the flow of ideas, often leading to new ideas that might not have come up otherwise.

Writeboard

Brought to you by 37signals, the maker of the popular Basecamp project management tool and creator of the open-source Web framework Rails, Writeboard is a free, no-frills, text-only blank space where you can record ideas. Collaboration doesn't come any simpler than this.

Choose a name for your board, select a password, enter an e-mail address, and you're ready to go -- no further registration required. To invite others to view the board or add comments, just enter their e-mail addresses and click the "Send invitation" button.

Writeboard provides few options, but it's great for capturing and fleshing out ideas on the fly. You can type in ideas, move them around and distinguish them with simple text formatting such as headers and numbered lists. Automatic revision-tracking lets you go back and recover anything that might have gotten lost in the shuffle.

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via networkworld.com

Unless you are already using some, there's no reason not to try any of these. Oh, and don't lose sight of your objectives because these things aren't just to make you cool. Productivity is the word.

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via slideshare.net

11 key things to help you start Blogging - which remains the foundation to help you get started with social media.

(Thanks to the THE HOMER FOUNDATION - Magsaysay Group of Companies for allowing me to share to the youth campers things about what I do at Morphlabs plus a bits and pieces of myself)

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What Chief Executives Really Want

A survey from IBM's Institute for Business Value shows that CEOs value one leadership competency above all others. Can you guess what it is?

By Frank Kern

Innovation

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What do chief executive officers really want? The answer bears important consequences for management as well as companies' customers and shareholders. The qualities that a CEO values most in the company team set a standard that affects everything from product development and sales to the long-term success of an enterprise.

There is compelling new evidence that CEOs' priorities in this area are changing in important ways. According to a new survey of 1,500 chief executives conducted by IBM's Institute for Business Value (IBM), CEOs identify "creativity" as the most important leadership competency for the successful enterprise of the future.

That's creativity—not operational effectiveness, influence, or even dedication. Coming out of the worst economic downturn in their professional lifetimes, when managerial discipline and rigor ruled the day, this indicates a remarkable shift in attitude. It is consistent with the study's other major finding: Global complexity is the foremost issue confronting these CEOs and their enterprises. The chief executives see a large gap between the level of complexity coming at them and their confidence that their enterprises are equipped to deal with it.

Until now creativity has generally been viewed as fuel for the engines of research or product development, not the essential leadership asset that must permeate an enterprise.

Needed: Creative disruption

Much has happened in the past two years to shake the historical assumptions held by the women and men who are in charge. In addition to global recession, the century's first decade heightened awareness of the issues surrounding global climate change and the interplay between natural events and our supply chains for materials, food, and even talent. In short, CEOs have experienced the realities of global integration. The world is massively interconnected—economically, socially, and politically—and operating as a system of systems. So what does this look like at the level of customer relationships? For too many enterprises, the answer is that their customers are increasingly connected, but not to them.

Against that backdrop of interconnection, interdependency, and complexity, business leaders around the world are declaring that success requires fresh thinking and continuous innovation at all levels of the organization. As they step back and reassess, CEOs have seized upon creativity as the necessary element for enterprises that must reinvent their customer relationships and achieve greater operational dexterity. In face-to-face interviews with our consultants, they said creative leaders do the following:

• Disrupt the status quo. Every company has legacy products that are both cash—and sacred—cows. Often the need to perpetuate the success of these products restricts innovation within the enterprise, creating a window for competitors to advance competing innovations. As CEOs tell us that fully one-fifth of revenues will have to come from new sources, they are recognizing the requirement to break with existing assumptions, methods, and best practices.

• Disrupt existing business models. CEOs who select creativity as a leading competency are far more likely to pursue innovation through business model change. In keeping with their view of accelerating complexity, they are breaking with traditional strategy-planning cycles in favor of continuous, rapid-fire shifts and adjustments to their business models.

• Disrupt organizational paralysis. Creative leaders fight the institutional urge to wait for completeness, clarity, and stability before making decisions. To do this takes a combination of deeply held values, vision, and conviction—combined with the application of such tools as analytics to the historic explosion of information. These drive decisionmaking that is faster, more precise, and even more predictable.

Taken together, these recommendations describe a shift toward corporate cultures that are far more transparent and entrepreneurial. They are cultures imbued with the belief that complexity poses an opportunity, rather than a threat. They hold that risk is to be managed, not avoided, and that leaders will be rewarded for their ability to build creative enterprises with fluid business models, not absolute ones.

Something significant is afoot in the corporate world. In response to powerful external pressures and the opportunities that accompany them, CEOs are signaling a new direction. They are telling us that a world of increasing complexity will give rise to a new generation of leaders that make creativity the path forward for successful enterprises.

Frank Kern is senior vice-president of IBM Global Business Services.

via businessweek.com

You will have to read the article to find out what is the surprising answer. Hint: It has something to do with the right-brain competency. I'm just wondering if I am doing enough to nurture it in others particularly with Zaki and within myself, too.

[Throwing in a link on the beauty of visualizing data http://bit.ly/bF9AaW]

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