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:

  1. 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.
  2. 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.
  3. 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.