The Motivation Behind the Love of Money and Power

We human beings and very socially aware of our environment and swim in that environment like fish and water. We are born into a social environment and die in a social environment. Our lives revolve around a social activities whether we like it or not. Because we are in constant contact with others we judge our value by others and money and power become brokers toward greater personal influence.

Some see the accumulation of money and power as a negative thing. Money and power are not moral or immoral in and of themselves. Money and power put toward a good act can be helpful to society while money and power used to manipulate others is a destructive force on society.

 The way in which we use our money and power is based deeply in your personality and our lives. At the lower income levels of society money has great meaning and is needed as access to resources and opportunities. This is completely understandable. At the higher income levels of society money is no longer needed for survival but is used for thriving, generational support, and social class distinction.

 The fish bowl becomes smaller but the players are much bigger. All of us seek to influence our environment in some way or another. The common street thug and the sophisticated politician all have as what Nietzsche described the "Will to Power". They are seeking to raise their status in society and gain more access to the resources around them.

At our deepest levels we strive to be more and accomplish more. It is rooted in our psychology and biology and helps us to survive as a species. Those who are the strongest further support their survival. Ensuring access to growth, opportunity, and resources based on the actual skill of the person is beneficial for society.

Mission Trails Regional Park-Easy to Difficult

Hiking is one of the best ways to get in shape and improve your cardio health. With hiking you can do it while enjoying nature. Sometimes you might even have the fortune of having a group of people to go with and get some great conversation in. Mission Trails Regional Park offers local hiking with easy to difficult options.

The main trail is paved and works well for those with a bike, strollers, and beginning hikers. There are other trails that spider off of the main road that require more effort. There are 5 peaks with trails that lead to each one of them. By the time you finish them all you will have experienced different challenges.

The thing I like about these trails is that there is a river that runs through it as well as a historical dam. Lots of trails have nothing special but this one seems to have a lot of unique things. It is a fun trail to take family members and go for a walk, run, or climb challenging hillsides. So it is versatile. It might be one of the reasons why it is so popular.

Developing Learning Organizations

Learning organizations continually learn and adapt to environment in a way that keeps them market relevant and producing meaningful products. Peter Senge, a systems scientist at MIT, came up with the concept that learning organizations are successfully adapting to their environment but have special characteristics that make them different than other organizations.

Systems Thinking: The ability to see objects and activities as bounded and part of something bigger.

Personal Mastery: The desire of employees to become masters of their work.

Mental Models: The desire to change current ways of thinking and create new models.

Shared Vision: Getting employees to perceive the same shared visions.

Team Learning: Helping team members to learn from each other and reinforce each other.

Such organizations have an open system that takes in new information, integrates into their knowledge and skill base, and adapt. Once they have moved through the stages of adaptation they move onto new learning. The key difference is that they are never complacent and continue to adapt and develop.

This requires the right type of leadership that has the capability to allow certain levels of freedom to experiment on ideas. The mindset of leadership should be focused on guiding people to greater performance rather then controlling actual occupations and outcomes. The leaders will need to be view their position more as an informed mentor that creates masterpieces;not products.

Avoid Fried Food When Living a Busy Life

Your hungry, busy, time has run out, and your working on a big project. The more you avoid the hungry growl coming from your stomach the more you are pushed to find something to stuff in your mouth. Nothing in the fridge, nothing in the cupboards, and you feel like you must trek out into the world to fulfill your primal urges. The closest and most convenient place is your neighborhood greasy spoon that has a waxy smell in the air.

Fried food is everywhere and offered in most restaurants that cater to the on the go crowd. Convenient and cheap will cost you plenty later on in terms of obesity, weight, heart disease and strokes. According to a study at the Harvard School of Public Health that looked at 100,000 men and women over 25 years it was found that people who ate fried food at least once a week were at higher risk for type 2 diabetes and heart disease.

Much of the problem lays within the type of oil being used. The corn and canola oil that is common is full of bad fats and calories. The more it is used the worse the oil gets and the more it soaks into the food. As the oil makes its way into the batter it also becomes a saturated part of your meal making its way throughout your entire body.

Alternatives to fried food is to find fresh food, salads, lean meats, and other choices. Stay away from French fries, fried fish, and popular appetizers. You would be better off avoiding all fried food together and option for something without greater nutritional value. As you make small steps with your food you will find that it will begin to shave off your calorie intake and body fat leaving not only feeling healthier but also looking healthier.

Impressionist Art as a Gateway to Creative Capital

Our global economy requires a higher level of creative capital to create new products and services. New ideas don't come from the redundancy of thinking and relies heavily on solving complex problems in unique and creative ways. Impressionist art helps people make a fundamental shift from seeing to feeling that can be applied to a corporate environment.

It is probably one of the last things you think about when you visit an art gallery. People look at these odd, perhaps seen as bad, paintings and think, "what is that all about?". Maybe some will feel something while others might completely discard their value. Behind each painting is a deep thought process that connects experiences, feelings, and ideas in a creative way.

Preparing a highly technical and specialized workforce was once great for an industrial society. That has nearly changed now. Specialization is still beneficial but isn't the primary need of the country at this time. We need creative people who can solve problems and come up to new solutions to old problems.

Traditional learning teaches us to do things the way they have always been done. We get better and faster when we become higher trained and more knowledgeable. It doesn't necessarily shift the foundations of our thought but only improves upon existing processes. New thought requires  level of creativity that is difficult to find in our current educational programs.

When experience, creativity and knowledge/education come together and rolled up in some motivation like a healthy sandwich great things can happen. Our experience lets us know what works and doesn't work in the real world, our creativity makes new connections, and knowledge/education provides us useful frameworks.

The missing component for many executives and workers is creativity. This can be learned but is also an innate trait that is enhanced through practices. Impressionism isn't about what you see but what you feel. Therefore. learning to connect the bigger impression together without having worry about perfect pictures takes a unique skill set.

Sitting in the boardroom rehashing old ideas may work  sometimes but won't put a company on the next level of development. That requires a paradigm shift that comes from thinking about things in a new way. This is difficult to do if you haven't developed, or hired, the right creative capital to get things done.

2016 International Conference on Business, Internet, and Social Media

The 2016 International Conference on Business, Internet, and Social Media (BISM 2016) will take place on December 14-16, 2016The scholars are encouraged to submit papers or abstracts on any aspect of Business, Internet, and Social Media. All submissions to the conference will go through blindly review processes by at least two independent peers. Quality and interesting papers will be recommended to be possible consideration for publication of special issue of sponsoring journals. Please go to the conference website to see more detail information. Prospective attendees are also welcome to contact us at htsm@tw-knowledge.org

Enquiries: bism@tw-knowledge.org
Web address: http://tw-knowledge.org/bism
Sponsored by: Knowledge Association of Taiwan

Military Leadership in an Information Rich World

Leadership requirements are different in a globally diverse, data rich world, where higher mental processing powers are needed to understand emerging situations. As our environment changes, it will have a natural impact on our ability to generate leaders who can manage complex systems to achieve meaningful results. Skills that would make a leader successful in managing a sophisticated modern system in the military can also be applied to the civilian world, and visa versa, making it a worthy topic of exploration.

The Army defines leadership as, "the process of influencing people by providing purpose, direction, and motivation while operating to accomplish the mission and improving the organization” (Department of the Army, 2006). It is thus a way of encouraging others to follow a path based on a higher level of understanding of the environment. Today, that understanding should include abstract ideas formed from our physical and virtual environment.

Leadership and Cognitive Capacity

We have defined leadership by our historical understanding of psychological and physical attributes. The strong willed and muscular male figure prevails our understanding based on a world of physical requirements but do doesn't give full weight to the new needs of leadership. While many of those attributes are still important, like personality and physical capabilities, the new world requires higher level of abstract mental faculties to understand larger and more complex systems that continue to adjust to each new factor.

One of the things that have made humans successful is their ability to think abstractly and understand ideas without having to physically experience them. They can think through contingencies that allow them to predict the moves of their opponents and understand the details of the survival game. This is purely a "brain skill"developed through the learning and adaptations of our minds to challenging situations. Today's military requires many of these same skills but projected into the need to move beyond the protection of self and into the protection of units and society.

Therefore, these large, fast changing systems, that dominate modern military life require a different level of abstract thinking ability. The person must be able to see a larger system in a political environment and know how it will influence and change the world around it. The person will need to develop a solid grasp of the details and how they fit within the larger system and influence each other. A highly developed intellectual skill.

Complexity of Organizations

Consider the complexity of an modern military organization whose fabric is woven with science and technology in a way that would be impossible for even for some of our most successful historical figures to understand. According to an article investigating leadership in the Journal of Military Psychology leadership exists within a dynamic environment and is influenced by historical factors that create contextual influence (Halpin, 2011).

A battle is not just a battle but a thriving series of transactions based on different types of people, environments, and influences that make up the scene and create outcomes. Data streams back from the battlefield in real time and the organization synthesizes this information for leadership to use for instant decision making. The modern leader must be able to understand this information quickly, how it is gathered, siphoned and displayed to make better decisions in "real time".

Information Influences Social Systems

According to the book Wired for Culture by Mark Pagel human beings belong to complex social systems and their thinking is influenced by such systems. Each part of the  organizational machine will interpret information and their responsibilities differently leading to a variety of outcomes based on how they perceive the world through their cognitive models. In essence, they are blinded by their social groups and limited by organizational environment in which they exist.

Data isn't hard cold pieces of information but a moving entity that interacts with individuals and our social systems to create new understandings. It can change human understanding and perception even though you can't touch "data". Highly developed leaders understand this data-human dance and can manage these influences is a way that lead to complex organizational achievement. They are capable of taking in feedback and adjusting components on the field to help achieve goals.

Organizations contain values, beliefs, motivators, and activities that interact with available resources in a way that produce a meaningful result. New leaders will need to pull together these large social, economic, and physical systems to create the best of all possible outcomes. They get a larger grasp of how all of these influences create winning organization through years of additive experience.

Effective command decisions will hedge new technology and information to influence people to achieve important results. It will be understandable to the social structure in which the information is is used. The type of cognitive abilities will rest upon the capacity to understand the many details associated with this information and its influence on existing structures. Doing this well will help needs to overcome the constraints of organizational structure.

An Example of Logistics

Lets consider an example that applies to both civilian and military worlds. A product must be shipped  from one to another part of the world. Speed will be based on the complexity of the system, motivations of people within the system, available resources, inspection points, financial transactions, information exchanges, skills of employees, technology, treaties, local customs, and customs.

Data can help the leader understand the speed at which and where the product is moving. It may also tell when a product gets stuck. or where damage to products occur. Improving the speed of the system requires using this data but then investigating "hang ups" to create greater efficiency. Sometimes a little research of data can lead to an adjustment of an entire leg of a system thereby saving precious hours in future deliveries.

An Example of USS Cole

In October 2000 the USS Cole was attacked by two suicide bombers catching the crew unaware and in need of quick reaction. Within this dangerous situation information streamed into senior leadership at a rapid rate. Ambiguity mixed with data, human interaction, and still unknown threats creates a highly complex situation where there are few perfect answers.

Thanks to the training and decision making of the crew, and their commander Kirk Lippold, they were able to secure the ship, minimize causalities, and coordinate with foreign entities. The cognitive processing skills need to be high to ensure the  incoming data, human element, and contingency plans are understood and deciphered quickly to make the best possible outcomes under the circumstances..

The leader didn't ignore the human element within that system when responding to the attack. He integrated them into his decision making. The way in which people interact with these machines, how they interpret the information, and the understandings by which they live have a big impact on their performance. Each position and part in response to the attack was understood leaving quality decisions to be made by well-trained staff at their appropriate level...and they successfully improvised.

Higher Cognitive Skills

Leadership will require cognitive skills beyond that which was experienced in the past. New technologies and interrelation of cultures within organizations will make many organizations short on leadership talent until new selection and grooming methods are developed. The field of leadership is starting to explore these phenomenon and how the environment influences effective outcomes. We do know that the conception of leadership will change over time and the high speed of modern information will make no exception.

Leaders are able to hedge the skills and abilities of those around them while still being able to make decisions in situations that don't have all of the information available. A higher level of complex systems thinking is needed to bridge the interaction gap between people and the information that creates new realities and understandings. Future generation of leaders will have highly developed cognitive processing abilities to deal with a greater amount of information and choices that apply to the business and military worlds.

Halpin, S. (2011). Historical Influences on the Changing Nature of Leadership Within the MilitaryEnvironment. Military Psychology, 23 (5).