Wel­come to the Sep­tem­ber 17th edi­tion of the Car­ni­val of Human Resources, the vir­tual gath­er­ing, every other week, of blog­gers focused on Human Resources and Lead­er­ship topics.

Let’s imag­ine all par­tic­i­pants in a con­fer­ence room, con­duct­ing a lively Q&A brown-bag lunch discussion.

Q: Can you teach Lead­er­ship in a class­room?
- Wally: Not really. Nei­ther the per­son who aspires to become a leader nor HR depart­ments should see lead­er­ship devel­op­ment as an activ­ity to be out­sourced to a class­room set­ting. Lead­er­ship is a life­long appren­tice trade, led by the learner himself/ her­self. The most HR depart­ments can do is to archi­tect the right set of expe­ri­ences to enable/ accel­er­ate that development.

Q: Can you teach Social Intel­li­gence in a class­room?
- Jon: Accord­ing to a recent Har­vard Busi­ness Review arti­cle, not really. Daniel Gole­man and Richard Boy­atzis say that “our brains engage in an emo­tional tango, a dance of feel­ings”. And you learn Tango by, well, danc­ing Tango. Gole­man and Boy­atzis add that “Lead­ing effec­tively is about devel­op­ing a gen­uine inter­est in and tal­ent for fos­ter­ing pos­i­tive feel­ings in the peo­ple whose coop­er­a­tion and sup­port you need.”

Q: Can you pro­vide an exam­ple of apply­ing social intel­li­gence in the work­place, and train­ing on-the-job?
- Suzanne: Sure. Learn to appre­ci­ate your front line employ­ees. They are the ones who inter­act with cus­tomers every day — which some com­pa­nies seem to ignore at their peril.
- Denise: another one — What can you do when your team falls apart while you’re gone?.

Q: How can you gen­er­ate pos­i­tive feel­ings, when some­times we get stuck in bad news and con­stant quarter-by-quarter pres­sures?
- Anna: Adding much needed per­spec­tive. Please note: Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have the twice-a-month newslet­ter with our most pop­u­lar blog posts. Please remem­ber that you can sub­scribe to receive this Newslet­ter by email, sim­ply by sub­mit­ting your email at the top of this page.

There is one type of “brain fit­ness pro­gram” which is not only free but also pays you back. You guessed it, that pro­gram is your “job”. Our occu­pa­tions can pro­vide ben­e­fi­cial men­tal exer­cise if they incor­po­rate the key ingre­di­ents of nov­elty, vari­ety, and chal­lenge, and are not a source of chronic stress.

We start today’s newslet­ter with two arti­cles related to the brain value of hav­ing men­tally stim­u­lat­ing jobs.

Your Brain At Work

ABC Reporter Bob Woodruff’s Recov­ery from Trau­matic Brain Injury: For­mer US pres­i­den­tial con­tender and Sen­a­tor John Edwards recently granted an inter­view to reporter Bob Woodruff. The most remark­able aspect of the inter­view? Bob Woodruff’s spec­tac­u­lar recov­ery from the trau­matic brain injury he suf­fered in Iraq 2 years ago. You can’t miss this inter­view with his wife Lee, where we dis­cuss Bob’s recov­ery process (includ­ing mak­ing a doc­u­men­tary, co-writing a book and other projects at ABC), the Bob Woodruff Foun­da­tion, and the over­all chal­lenge of cog­ni­tive reha­bil­i­ta­tion fol­low­ing trau­matic brain injuries.

Research

San­ti­ago Ramon y Cajal’s “Rec­ol­lec­tions of My Life”: Remark­able and can­did views on neu­ro­plas­tic­ity, learn­ing, aging and life, straight from the auto­bi­og­ra­phy of one of the founders of mod­ern neu­ro­science, who once said “Every man can, if he so desires, become the sculp­tor of his own brain.”

Can food improve brain health?: Dr. Pas­cale Mich­e­lon pro­vides an overview of the effects of food on the brain, build­ing on Fer­nando Gomez-Pinilla’s recent study in Nature Reviews Neu­ro­science. Can­di­dates for “brainy” foods con­tain: Omega-3 fatty acid, folic acid, flavonoids, anti-oxidant foods. Please note her warn­ing, though: most of the stud­ies show­ing pos­i­tive effects have been con­ducted in mice.

The biol­ogy of aging: A monthly vir­tual gath­er­ing of blog­gers to dis­cuss Biol­ogy of Aging top­ics includ­ing research, pol­icy, lifestyle guid­ance, and open ques­tions. We are aware that “aging” may not be the sex­i­est  of words in our vocab­u­lary… unless you con­sider the most com­mon alter­na­tive.

Tech­nol­ogy

The Future of Computer-assisted Cog­ni­tive Ther­apy: Cog­ni­tive ther­apy is one of the most researched types of brain train­ing, espe­cially in deal­ing with depres­sion and anx­i­ety. Why don’t more peo­ple ben­e­fit today from it? The lack of a scal­able dis­tri­b­u­tion model may per­haps explain that. We pre­dict that tech­nol­ogy will help com­ple­ment the role of ther­a­pists, help­ing more peo­ple bet­ter cope with change, life, anx­i­ety, and a range of cog­ni­tive and emo­tional chal­lenges. With­out any stigma. Just as nat­u­rally as one trains abdom­i­nal mus­cles today.

We are host­ing here the next edi­tion of the Car­ni­val of Human Resources, on Sep­tem­ber 17th. To par­tic­i­pate, you can sub­mit your blog post using this Con­tact Form or email your sub­mis­sion to: infor­ma­tion at sharp­brains dot com. Thank you!

We are host­ing here at Sharp­Brains the next edi­tions of sev­eral great blog car­ni­vals. If you blog about these top­ics, please sub­mit your best recent posts using our Con­tact Us form:

- August 27th: Car­ni­val of Education.

- Sep­tem­ber 9th: Car­ni­val of Biogerontology.

- Sep­tem­ber 17th: Car­ni­val of HR.

Enjoy the  weekend!

Some great new edi­tions of our favorite blog carnivals:

- Encephalon, Forthy-Third Edi­tion: the best of recent neu­ro­science and psy­chol­ogy blog posts.

- Grand Rounds Vol­ume 4, Num­ber 30: superb overview of the health & med­i­cine blogosphere.

- Car­ni­val of HR #31: great resources for Human Resources professionals.

The move­ment to have US pres­i­den­tial candidates dis­cuss Sci­ence and Tech­nol­ogy in a devoted debate has been pick­ing up steam. Date and place are sched­uled: April 18th at the Franklin Insti­tute in Philadelphia.

- cospon­sored by the AAAS, the Coun­cil on Com­pet­i­tive­ness, the National Acad­emy of Sci­ences, the National Acad­emy of Engi­neer­ing, and the Insti­tute of Med­i­cine, and signed by over 100 lead­ing Amer­i­can uni­ver­si­ties and other organizations

- Fri­day Busi­ness Week ran this story.

–  Intel Chair­man Craig Bar­rett and for­mer HHS Sec­re­tary Donna Sha­lala have Read the rest of this entry »

Here you have a few recent great blog car­ni­vals (col­lec­tions of selected blog posts focused on spe­cific topics):

- Grand Rounds: health and medicine

- Encephalon: neu­ro­science and psychology

- COTC: busi­ness and entrepreneurship

- Human Resources: arti­cles for HR professionals

- Edu­ca­tion: arti­cles for K12 teach­ers and staff

- Tan­gled Bank: gen­eral science 

- Books: good book reviews

 

We also just found a great overview of the brain fit­ness mar­ket in French, sum­ma­riz­ing many of the top­ics we have writ­ten about:

Des logi­ciels qui boos­t­ent le cerveau… et son marché

Some weeks ago we explained how use­ful Con­cept Maps can be to quickly visu­al­ize the key ideas in a field, and their relationships.

Let me show you this fan­tas­tic exam­ple. A few weeks ago I was inter­viewed by David Pescovitz of the Insti­tute for the Future (blog) to dis­cuss The Future of Work and Cog­ni­tive Fit­ness trends. They had an artist who drew the graph below IN REAL TIME, AS WE SPOKE. Very impressive.

Please open the full image by click­ing on it, and spend a few min­utes read­ing around, top-down, left-to right.

You will learn much about what the future may bring (will Human Resources staff become “Cog­ni­tive Resources Man­agers”?), and also how to dis­play com­plex infor­ma­tion in beau­ti­ful visual form.

 

”

 

Kudos to the Insti­tute for the Future, an inde­pen­dent non­profit research group,  for a fas­ci­nat­ing event on The Future of Work.

Credit for the Map: Anthony Weeks, from Grove Con­sul­tants.

(Dear RSS read­ers: I’d really appre­ci­ate if you could Digg this post. You can find the Digg but­ton if you visit this post in our blog. Thanks!)

What an event yes­ter­day night. My wife and I were for­tu­nate to visit the Google Cam­pus and attend the Sixth Annual North Amer­i­can Fel­low­ship Induc­tion Pro­gram of Ashoka: Inno­va­tors for the Pub­lic, a social ven­ture fund where we have been involved for a num­ber of years, and thanks to which (thanks Michele!) my wife and I met in the first place.

18 new Ashoka Fellows/ social entre­pre­neurs were elected, and after a fun cock­tail recep­tion the cer­e­mony began. Sergei Brin (Google Co-founder), Sheryl Sand­berg (who helped launch Google Foun­da­tion and google.org), Salar Kaman­gar (the mind behind AdWords) gave intro­duc­tory remarks. Salar explained how he first heard of Ashoka (through the book How to Change the World, by David Born­stein) and how he saw tremen­dous sim­i­lar­i­ties between Ashoka and Google: both Read the rest of this entry »