Barnabas File

Once upon a time, I worked for an organization that wanted to provide a creative environment where employees were encouraged to work together to design innovative ways to improve what they provided to the constituency.  Some would call this a learning organization.  Perhaps I should say, I worked for an organization whose leader wanted to provide that type of culture.  When he left, everything changed. What does it take to be the leader of an organization that empowers everyone to be innovative while pursuing the mission of the organization?  Let me suggest several things. First, the leader must understand the mission of the organization and clearly articulate it.  When the leader is uncertain about the reason the organization exists, she or he can only send an uncertain message about what is important and why.  The leader embraces the mission of the organization or finds a way to keep it before employees. Second, the leader must care about...

In an article on the exponential growth of knowledge, David Russell Schilling wrote: Buckminster Fuller created the “Knowledge Doubling Curve”; he noticed that until 1900 human knowledge doubled approximately every century. By the end of World War II knowledge was doubling every 25 years. Today things are not as simple as different types of knowledge have different rates of growth. For example, nanotechnology knowledge is doubling every two years and clinical knowledge every 18 months. But on average human knowledge is doubling every 13 months.  According to    IBM, the build out of the “internet of things” will lead to the doubling of knowledge every 12 hours. Of course, all knowledge is not of equal value.   There are some things that we can live without knowing but there is other information that can be invaluable to us.   How do we do about acquiring it? As you begin a new year, how will you go about acquiring the knowledge that will...