Simply could not resist posting this online after I received it by email!
Let’s see how many of these characters you can recognize??
Month: October 2005
Learnt a few things about leadership from a very a knowledgeable colleague today.
It seems that as early as the Ancient Greek days, Plato had laid down a recipe for team/community motivation:
- Ethos: Make people feel that they belong to the team – in fact there is some recent psychological studies which indicate that IQ can be affected by this sense of belonging.
- Pathos: ‘Create’ (or, most of the time, just point one out) a common enemy – take for example all the war propaganda both in the past and the present.
- Logos: Use logic to round out the corners – by now, you have done all the hard selling.
Secondly, as a result of Larry Leifer’s work at Stanford University, it seems that the number of unique noun-phrases interspersed in our daily written or oral communications can be a good gauge to the quantity of creative ideas.
This has a rather Zen feel to it.
What we should do is not ‘future’ ourselves so much. We should ‘now’ ourselves more. ‘Now thyself’ is more important than ‘Know thyself.’ Reason is what tells us to ignore the present and live in the future. So all we do is make plans. We think that somewhere there are going to be greener pastures. It’s crazy. Heaven is nothing but a grand, monumental instance of the future. Listen, now is good. Now is wonderful.
Mel Brooks