The world's top thinkers

After more than 10,000 votes from over 100 countries, the results of Prospect’s world thinkers 2013 poll are in. Online polls often throw up curious results, but this top 10 offers a snapshot of the intellectual trends that dominate our age.

THE WINNERS

1. Richard Dawkins
When Richard Dawkins, the Oxford evolutionary biologist, coined the term “meme” in The Selfish Gene 37 years ago, he can’t have anticipated its current popularity as a word to describe internet fads. But this is only one of the ways in which he thrives as an intellectual in the internet age. He is also prolific on Twitter, with more than half a million followers—and his success in this poll attests to his popularity online. He uses this platform to attack his old foe, religion, and to promote science and rationalism. Uncompromising as his message may be, he’s not averse to poking fun at himself: in March he made a guest appearance on The Simpsons, lending his voice to a demon version of himself.

2. Ashraf Ghani
Few academics get the chance to put their ideas into practice. But after decades of research into building states at Columbia, Berkeley and Johns Hopkins, followed by a stint at the World Bank, Ashraf Ghani returned to his native Afghanistan to do just that. He served as the country’s finance minister and advised the UN on the transfer of power to the Afghans. He is now in charge of the Afghan Transition Coordination Commission and the Institute for State Effectiveness, applying his experience in Afghanistan elsewhere. He is already looking beyond the current crisis in Syria, raising important questions about what kind of state it will eventually become.

3. Steven Pinker
Long admired for his work on language and cognition, the latest book by the Harvard professor Steven Pinker, The Better Angels of Our Nature, was a panoramic sweep through history. Marshalling a huge range of evidence, Pinker argued that humanity has become less violent over time. As with Pinker’s previous books, it sparked fierce debate. Whether writing about evolutionary psychology, linguistics or history, what unites Pinker’s work is a fascination with human nature and an enthusiasm for sharing new discoveries in accessible, elegant prose.

4. Ali Allawi
Ali Allawi began his career in 1971 at the World Bank before moving into academia and finally politics, as Iraq’s minister of trade, finance and defence after the fall of Saddam Hussein. Since then he has written a pair of acclaimed books, most recently The Crisis of Islamic Civilisation, and he is currently a senior visiting fellow at Princeton. “His scholarly work on post-Saddam Iraq went further than anyone else has yet done in helping us understand the complex reality of that country,” says Clare Lockhart, co-author (with Ashraf Ghani) of Fixing Failed States. “His continuing work on the Iraqi economy—and that of the broader region—is meanwhile helping to illuminate its potential, as well as pathways to a more stable and productive future.”

5. Paul Krugman
As a fierce critic of the economic policies of the right, Paul Krugman has become something like the global opposition to fiscal austerity. A tireless advocate of Keynesian economics, he has been repeatedly attacked for his insistence that government spending is critical to ending the recession. But as he told Prospect last year, “we’ve just conducted what amounts to a massive experiment on pretty much the entire OECD [the industrialised world]. It’s been as slam-dunk a victory for a more or less Keynesian view as one can possibly imagine.” His New York Times columns are so widely discussed that it is easy to overlook his academic work, which has won him a Nobel prize and made him one of the world’s most cited economists.

6. Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek’s critics seem unsure whether to dismiss him as a buffoon or a villain. The New Republic has called him “the most despicable philosopher in the west,” but the Slovenian’s legion of fans continues to grow. He has been giving them plenty to chew on—in the past year alone he has produced a 1,200-page study of Hegel, a book, The Year of Dreaming Dangerously, analysing the Arab Spring and other recent events, and a documentary called The Pervert’s Guide to Ideology. And he has done all this while occupying academic posts at universities in Slovenia, Switzerland and London. His trademark pop culture references (“If you ask me for really dangerous ideological films, I’d say Kung Fu Panda,” he told one interviewer in 2008) may have lost their novelty, but they remain a gentle entry point to his studies of Lacanian psychoanalysis and left-wing ideology.

7. Amartya Sen
Amartya Sen will turn 80 in November—making him the fourth oldest thinker on our list—but he remains one of the world’s most active public intellectuals. He rose to prominence in the early 1980s with his studies of famine. Since then he has gone on to make major contributions to developmental economics, social choice theory and political philosophy. Receiving the Nobel prize for economics in 1998, he was praised for having “restored an ethical dimension to the discussion of vital economic problems.” The author of Prospect’s first cover story in 1995, Sen continues to write influential essays and columns, in the past year arguing against European austerity. And he shows no sign of slowing down or narrowing his focus—his latest book (with Jean Drèze), An Uncertain Glory: India and its Contradictions, will be published in July.

8. Peter Higgs
The English physicist Peter Higgs lent his name to the Higgs boson, the subatomic particle discovered last year at Cern that gives mass to other elementary particles. Although Higgs is always quick to point out that others were involved in early work on the existence of the particle, he was central to the first descriptions of the boson in 1964. “Of the various people who contributed to that piece of theory,” Higgs told Prospect in 2011, “I was the only one who pointed to this particle as something that would be… of interest for experimentalists.” Higgs is expected to receive a Nobel prize this year for his achievements.

9. Mohamed ElBaradei
The former director general of the UN’s international atomic energy agency and winner of the 2005 Nobel peace prize, Mohamed ElBaradei has become one of the most prominent advocates of democracy in Egyptian politics over the past two years. Since December, ElBaradei has been the coordinator of the National Salvation Front, a coalition of political parties dedicated to opposing what they see as President Mohamed Morsi’s attempts to secure power for himself and impose a new constitution favouring Islamist parties. Reflecting widespread concern about Morsi’s actions, ElBaradei has accused the president of appointing himself “Egypt’s new pharaoh.”

10. Daniel Kahneman
Since the publication of Thinking, Fast and Slow in 2011, Daniel Kahneman has become an unlikely resident at the top of the bestseller lists. His face has even appeared on posters on the London Underground, with only two words of explanation: “Thinking Kahneman.” Although he is a psychologist by training, his work on our capacity for making irrational decisions helped create the field of behavioural economics, and he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics in 2002. His book has now brought these insights to a wider audience, making them more influential than ever.

The empty nesters

What I wonder about is why we love our children so asymmetrically, so entirely, knowing that the very best we can hope for is that they will feel about us as we feel about our own parents: that slightly aggrieved mixture of affection, pity, tolerance and forgiveness, with a final soupcon - if we live long enough - of sorrow for our falling away, stumbling and shattered, from the vigour that once was ours.

One theory, popular among the cold-blooded, is that we feel this way only because it's a peculiar feature of our new, smothering middle-class culture. Back in the day, they insist, parents yawned over their kids.

The poor had 10 or 11 children and used them, the myth runs, more or less as the Norwegians used their sled dogs on the way to the South Pole, while the rich hardly saw their children from one year to the next, bumping into them occasionally at a Christmas party. Only the growth of middle-class manners made child love so obsessive.

Perhaps that's so. But then I think of that passage in the first of all Western classics, the Iliad, where Priam of Troy goes to Achilles for the body of his son, Hector:

"Honour the gods, Achilles; pity him.

"Think of your father; I'm more pitiful

"I've suffered what no other mortal has

"I've kissed the hand of one who killed my children."

He spoke, and stirred Achilles' grief to tears

He gently pushed the old man's hand away.

They both remembered; Priam wept for Hector,

Sitting crouched before Achilles' feet.

Achilles mourned his father.

Homer's point, which moved the Greeks and still moves us, was that even in heroic society, the love of parents for their children as children was the strongest bonding emotion of all that humans knew, the one common emotion that could reconcile enemies in grief. Hector, the prince and hero of his people, was also - indeed primarily - Priam's son.

The new and more scientific explanation for the asymmetry is that it is all in our inheritance. Our genes are just using us to make more of them. (That Dawkinsian idea of selfish genes always gives me an image of the galley slaves on a Roman ship, peering and panting out of their little window and then, with a silent nod to each other, deciding where to steer the ship while the captain frets helplessly above.)

Our genes, we're told, force us to sacrifice for our children because they - the genes - want to make more of themselves, and our unequal love for our children is the only way to keep the children healthy enough for long enough to reproduce so that the selfish little buggers - the genes, I mean - can flourish.

The trouble with that explanation is that - as with all genetic explanations of anything involving human love - it restates truths we know already, only in slightly more robotic terms.

An obvious truth - for instance, "women just love guys like Daniel Craig" - becomes "our genes compel women to be attracted to men with a full head of hair, broad shoulders and narrow waists, who are perceived as having high social status." Oh. This does not illuminate our lust, it merely annotates it. It explains the origins but not the intensity of the effect.

Our love for anything cannot be explained by our possession of genes, any more than our love for football can be explained by our possession of feet. It is true that football would be impossible without feet, but the feeling it inspires long ago left feet behind - even Frank Lampard's.

It is not that the big emotions we feel - love or lust or loyalty - are more mystical than their biological origins but exactly that they are far more material, more over-loaded with precise dates and data, associations and allegiances, experiences and memories, days and times.The mechanism of life may be set in motion by our genes, as the mechanism of football is set in motion by our feet, but the feelings we acquire are unique to our own weird walk through time.

My own best guess about the asymmetry of parental love lies in a metaphor borrowed from the sciences. Merely a metaphor, maybe, but one that - as metaphors can - touches the edge of actuality.

One of the rules of mathematics and physics, as I - a complete non-mathematician - read often in science books, is that when infinity is introduced into a scientific equation it no longer makes sense. All the numbers go blooey when you have one in the equation that doesn't have a beginning or an end.

Parental love, I think, is infinite. I mean this in the most prosaic possible way. Not infinitely good, or infinitely ennobling, or infinitely beautiful. Just infinite. Often, infinitely boring. Occasionally, infinitely exasperating. To other people, always infinitely dull - unless, of course, it involves their own children, when it becomes infinitely necessary.

That's why parents talking about their children can be so tedious - other parents, I mean, not me or you - not because we doubt their love, or the child's charms, but because itemizing infinities is obviously the most boring thing imaginable.

We see this, with heartbreaking clarity, in those people we know, or read about, who continue to love, say, a meth-addicted child. And we think: "Why don't you just give up?" And they look at us blankly and we say: "Oh, yeah. Right."

The joke our genes and our years play on us is to leave us, as parents, forever with this weird column of figures scribbled on our souls, ones that make no sense, no matter how long you squint at them or how hard you try to make them work.

The parental emotion is as simple as a learning to count and as strange as discovering that the series of numbers, the counting, never ends. Our children seem, at least, to travel for light years. We think their suitcases contain the cosmos. Though our story is ending, their story, we choose to think - we can't think otherwise - will go on forever.

When we have children, we introduce infinities into all of our emotional equations. Nothing ever adds up quite the same again.

Values to emulate

Narayana Murthy on values to emulate for Indians.

"When I got the invitation to speak here, I decided to speak on an
important topic on which I have pondered for years - the role of
Western values in contemporary Indian society. Coming from a company
that is built on strong values, the topic is close to my heart.
Moreover, an organization is representative of society, and some of
the lessons that I have learnt are applicable in the national context.
In fact, values drive progress and define quality of life in society.

The word community joins two Latin words com ("together" or "with")
and onus ("one"). A community, then, is both one and many. It is a
unified multitude and not a mere group of people. As it is said in the
Vedas: Man can live individually, but can survive only collectively.
Hence, the challenge is to form a progressive community by balancing
the interests of the individual and that of the society. To meet this,
we need to develop a value system where people accept modest
sacrifices for the common good.

What is a value system? It is the protocol for behavior that enhances
the trust, confidence and commitment of members of the community. It
goes beyond the domain of legality - it is about decent and desirable
behavior. Further, it includes putting the community interests ahead
of your own. Thus, our collective survival and progress is predicated
on sound values.

There are two pillars of the cultural value system - loyalty to family
and loyalty to community. One should not be in isolation to the other,
because, successful societies are those which combine both
harmoniously. It is in this context that I will discuss the role of
Western values in contemporary Indian society.

Some of you here might say that most of what I am going to discuss are
actually Indian values in old ages, and not Western values. I live in
the present, not in the bygone era. Therefore, I have seen these
values practiced primarily in the West and not in India. Hence, the
title of the topic.

I am happy as long as we practice these values - whether we call it
Western or old Indian values. As an Indian, I am proud to be part of a
culture, which has deep-rooted family values. We have tremendous
loyalty to the family. For instance, parents make enormous sacrifices
for their children. They support them until they can stand on their
own feet. On the other side, children consider it their duty to take
care of aged parents.

We believe: Mathru devo bhava - mother is God, and pithru devo bhava -
father is God. Further, brothers and sisters sacrifice for each other.
In fact, the eldest brother or sister is respected by all the other
siblings. As for marriage, it is held to be a sacred union - husband
and wife are bonded, most often, for life. In joint families, the
entire family works towards the welfare of the family. There is so
much love and affection in our family life.

This is the essence of Indian values and one of our key strengths. Our
families act as a critical support mechanism for us. In fact, the
credit to the success of Infosys goes, as much to the founders as to
their families, for supporting them through the tough times.
Unfortunately, our attitude towards family life is not reflected in
our attitude towards community behavior. From littering the streets to
corruption to breaking of contractual obligations, we are apathetic to
the common good. In the West - the US, Canada, Europe, Australia, New
Zealand - individuals understand that they have to be responsible
towards their community.

The primary difference between the West and us is that, there, people
have a much better societal orientation. They care more for the
society than we do. Further, they generally sacrifice more for the
society than us. Quality of life is enhanced because of this. This is
where we need to learn from the West.

I will talk about some of the lessons that we, Indians, can learn from the West.

In the West, there is respect for the public good. For instance, parks
free of litter, clean streets, public toilets free of graffiti - all
these are instances of care for the public good. On the contrary, in
India, we keep our houses clean and water our gardens everyday - but,
when we go to a park, we do not think twice before littering the
place.

Corruption, as we see in India, is another example of putting the
interest of oneself, and at best that of one's family, above that of
the society. Society is relatively corruption free in the West. For
instance, it is very difficult to bribe a police officer into avoiding
a speeding ticket.

This is because of the individual's responsible behavior towards the
community as a whole On the contrary, in India, corruption, tax
evasion, cheating and bribery have eaten into our vitals. For
instance, contractors bribe officials, and construct low-quality roads
and bridges. The result is that society loses in the form of
substandard defense equipment and infrastructure, and low-quality
recruitment, just to name a few impediments. Unfortunately, this
behavior is condoned by almost everyone.

Apathy in solving community matters has held us back from making
progress, which is otherwise within our reach. We see serious problems
around us but do not try to solve them. We behave as if the problems
do not exist or is somebody else's. On the other hand, in the West,
people solve societal problems proactively. There are several examples
of our apathetic attitude. For instance, all of us are aware of the
problem of drought in India.

More than 40 years ago, Dr. K. L. Rao - an irrigation expert,
suggested creation of a water grid connecting all the rivers in North
and South India, to solve this problem. Unfortunately, nothing has
been done about this. The story of power shortage in Bangalore is
another instance. In 1983, it was decided to build a thermal power
plant to meet Bangalore's power requirements. Unfortunately, we have
still not started it. Further, the Milan subway in Bombay is in a
deplorable state for the last 40 years, and no action has been taken.

To quote another example, considering the constant travel required in
the software industry; five years ago, I had suggested a 240-page
passport. This would eliminate frequent visits to the passport office.
In fact, we are ready to pay for it. However, I am yet to hear from
the Ministry of External Affairs on this.

We, Indians, would do well to remember Thomas Hunter's words: Idleness
travels very slowly, and poverty soon overtakes it. What could be the
reason for all this? We were ruled by foreigners for over thousand
years. Thus, we have always believed that public issues belonged to
some foreign ruler and that we have no role in solving them.

Moreover, we have lost the will to proactively solve our own problems.
Thus, we have got used to just executing someone else's orders.
Borrowing Aristotle's words: We are what we repeatedly do. Thus,
having done this over the years, the decision-makers in our society
are not trained for solving problems. Our decision-makers look to
somebody else to take decisions. Unfortunately, there is nobody to
look up to, and this is the tragedy.

Our intellectual arrogance has also not helped our society. I have
traveled extensively, and in my experience, have not come across
another society where people are as contemptuous of better societies
as we are, with as little progress as we have achieved. Remember that
arrogance breeds hypocrisy. No other society gloats so much about the
past as we do, with as little current accomplishment.

Friends, this is not a new phenomenon, but at least a thousand years
old. For instance, Al Barouni, the famous Arabic logician and traveler
of the 10th century, who spent about 30 years in India from 997 AD to
around 1027 AD, referred to this trait of Indians. According to him,
during his visit, most Indian pundits considered it below their
dignity even to hold arguments with him. In fact, on a few occasions
when a pundit was willing to listen to him, and found his arguments to
be very sound, he invariably asked Barouni: which Indian pundit taught
these smart things!

The most important attribute of a progressive society is respect for
others who have accomplished more than they themselves have, and learn
from them. Contrary to this, our leaders make us believe that other
societies do not know anything! At the same time, everyday, in the
newspapers, you will find numerous claims from our leaders that ours
is the greatest nation. These people would do well to remember Thomas
Carlyle's words: The greatest of faults is to be conscious of none.

If we have to progress, we have to change this attitude, listen to
people who have performed better than us, learn from them and perform
better than them. Infosys is a good example of such an attitude. We
continue to rationalize our failures. No other society has mastered
this part as well as we have. Obviously, this is an excuse to justify
our incompetence, corruption, and apathy. This attitude has to change.
As Sir Josiah Stamp has said: It is easy to dodge our
responsibilities, but we cannot dodge the consequences of dodging our
responsibilities.

Another interesting attribute, which we Indians can learn from the
West, is their accountability. Irrespective of your position, in the
West, you are held accountable for what you do. However, in India, the
more 'important' you are, the less answerable you are. For instance, a
senior politician once declared that he 'forgot' to file his tax
returns for 10 consecutive years - and he got away with it. To quote
another instance, there are over 100 loss making public sector units
(central) in India. Nevertheless, I have not seen action taken for bad
performance against top managers in these organizations.

Dignity of labor is an integral part of the Western value system. In
the West, each person is proud about his or her labor that raises
honest sweat. On the other hand, in India, we tend to overlook the
significance of those who are not in professional jobs. We have a mind
set that reveres only supposedly intellectual work.

For instance, I have seen many engineers, fresh from college, who only
want to do cutting-edge work and not work that is of relevance to
business and the country. However, be it an organization or society,
there are different people performing different roles. For success,
all these people are required to discharge their duties. This includes
everyone from the CEO to the person who serves tea - every role is
important. Hence, we need a mind set that reveres everyone who puts in
honest work.

Indians become intimate even without being friendly. They ask favors
of strangers without any hesitation. For instance, the other day,
while I was traveling from Bangalore to Mantralaya, I met a fellow
traveler on the train. Hardly 5 minutes into the conversation, he
requested me to speak to his MD about removing him from the bottom 10%
list in his company, earmarked for disciplinary action. I was reminded
of what Rudyard Kipling once said: A westerner can be friendly without
being intimate while an easterner tends to be intimate without being
friendly.

Yet another lesson to be learnt from the West, is about their
professionalism in dealings. The common good being more important than
personal equations, people do not let personal relations interfere
with their professional dealings. For instance, they don't hesitate to
chastise a colleague, even if he is a personal friend, for incompetent
work.

In India, I have seen that we tend to view even work interactions from
a personal perspective. Further, we are the most 'thin-skinned'
society in the world - we see insults where none is meant. This may be
because we were not free for most of the last thousand years. Further,
we seem to extend this lack of professionalism to our sense of
punctuality. We do not seem to respect the other person's time.

The Indian Standard Time somehow seems to be always running late.
Moreover, deadlines are typically not met. How many public projects
are completed on time? The disheartening aspect is that we have
accepted this as the norm rather than the exception. In the West, they
show professionalism by embracing meritocracy. Meritocracy by
definition means that we cannot let personal prejudices affect our
evaluation of an individual's performance. As we increasingly start to
benchmark ourselves with global standards, we have to embrace
meritocracy.

In the West, right from a very young age, parents teach their children
to be independent in thinking. Thus, they grow up to be strong,
confident individuals. In India, we still suffer from feudal thinking.
I have seen people, who are otherwise bright, refusing to show
independence and preferring to be told what to do by their boss. We
need to overcome this attitude if we have to succeed globally.

The Western value system teaches respect to contractual obligation. In
the West, contractual obligations are seldom dishonored. This is
important - enforceability of legal rights and contracts is the most
important factor in the enhancement of credibility of our people and
nation.

In India, we consider our marriage vows as sacred. We are willing to
sacrifice in order to respect our marriage vows. However, we do not
extend this to the public domain. For instance, India had an
unfavorable contract with Enron. Instead of punishing the people
responsible for negotiating this, we reneged on the contract - this
was much before we came to know about the illegal activities at Enron.

To quote another instance, I had given recommendations to several
students for the national scholarship for higher studies in US
universities. Most of them did not return to India even though
contractually they were obliged to spend five years after their degree
in India.

In fact, according to a professor at a reputed US university, the
maximum default rate for student loans is among Indians - all of these
students pass out in flying colors and land lucrative jobs, yet they
refuse to pay back their loans. Thus, their action has made it
difficult for the students after them, from India, to obtain loans. We
have to change this attitude.

Further, we Indians do not display intellectual honesty. For example,
our political leaders use mobile phones to tell journalists on the
other side that they do not believe in technology! If we want our
youngsters to progress, such hypocrisy must be stopped. We are all
aware of our rights as citizens. Nevertheless, we often fail to
acknowledge the duty that accompanies every right. To borrow Dwight
Eisenhower's words: People that values its privileges above its
principles soon loses both. Our duty is towards the community as a
whole, as much as it is towards our families.

We have to remember that fundamental social problems grow out of a
lack of commitment to the common good. To quote Henry Beecher: Culture
is that which helps us to work for the betterment of all. Hence,
friends, I do believe that we can make our society even better by
assimilating these Western values into our own culture - we will be
stronger for it.

Most of our behavior comes from greed, lack of self-confidence, lack
of confidence in the nation, and lack of respect for the society. To
borrow Gandhi's words: There is enough in this world for everyone's
need, but not enough for everyone's greed. Let us work towards a
society where we would do unto others what we would have others do
unto us. Let us all be responsible citizens who make our country a
great place to live. 

In the words of Churchill: Responsibility is the price of greatness.
We have to extend our family values beyond the boundaries of our home.

Finally, let us work towards maximum welfare of the maximum people -
Samasta janaanaam sukhino bhavantu. Thus, let us - people of this
generation, conduct ourselves as great citizens rather than just good
people so that we can serve as good examples for our younger
generation."
 

The Happiest People Pursue the Most Difficult Problems

An inspiring piece by Rosabeth Moss Kanter.

"Lurking behind the question of jobs — whether there are enough of them, how hard we should work at them, and what kind the future will bring — is a major problem of job engagement"  she writes. "Too many people are tuned out, turned off, or ready to leave. But there's one striking exception."

The fact is that the happiest people are those dedicated to dealing with the most difficult problems. Turning around inner city schools. Finding solutions to homelessness or unsafe drinking water. Supporting children with terminal illnesses. They face the seemingly worst of the world with a conviction that they can do something about it and serve others.

Ellen Goodman, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist turned grief to social purpose. She was distraught over the treatment of her dying mother. After leaving her job as a syndicated columnist, she founded The Conversation Project, a campaign to get every family to face the difficult task of talking about death and end-of-life care.

Gilberto Dimenstein, another writer-turned-activist in Brazil, spreads happiness through social entrepreneurship. 

When famous Brazilian pianist Joao Carlos Martins lost the use of most of his fingers and almost gave into deepest despair, Dimenstein urged him to teach music to disadvantaged young people. A few years later, Martins, now a conductor, exudes happiness. He has nurtured musical talent throughout Brazil, brought his youth orchestras to play at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center in New York, and has even regained some use of his fingers.

For many social entrepreneurs, happiness comes from the feeling they are making a difference.

There is the same spirit in business teams creating new initiatives that they believe in. Gillette's Himalayan project team took on the challenge of changing the way men shave in India, where the common practice of barbers using rusty blades broken in two caused bloody infections. A team member who initially didn't want to leave Boston for India found it his most inspiring assignment. 

Similarly, Procter & Gamble's Pampers team in Nigeria find happiness facing the problem of infant mortality and devising solutions, such as mobile clinics that sent a physician and two nurses to areas lacking access to health care.

Rosebeth identifies three primary sources of motivation in high-innovation companies: mastery, membership, and meaning. Another M, money, turned out to be a distant fourth. Money acted as a scorecard, but it did not get people up-and-at 'em for the daily work, nor did it help people go home every day with a feeling of fulfillment.

People can be inspired to meet stretch goals and tackle impossible challenges if they care about the outcome. The inspiring story of how a new general manager of the Daimler Benz operations in South Africa raised productivity and quality at the end of the apartheid era by giving the workers something to do that they valued: make a car for Nelson Mandela, just released from prison. A plant plagued by lost days, sluggish workers, and high rates of defects produced the car in record time with close to zero defects. The pride in giving Mandela the Mercedes, plus the feeling of achievement, helped the workers maintain a new level of performance. People stuck in boring, rote jobs will spring into action for causes they care about.

Heart-wrenching emotion also helps cultivate a human connection. It is hard to feel alone, or to whine about small things, when faced with really big matters of deprivation, poverty, and life or death. Social bonds and a feeling of membership augment the meaning that comes from values-based work.

Of course, daunting challenges can be demoralizing at times. City Year corps members working with at-risk middle school students with failing grades from dysfunctional homes see improvement one day, only to have new problems arise the next. Progress isn't linear; it might not be apparent until after many long days of hard work have accumulated. It may show up in small victories, like a D student suddenly raising his hand in class because he understands the math principle.

It's now common to say that purpose is at the heart of leadership, and people should find their purpose and passion. I'd like to go a step further and urge that everyone regardless of their work situation, have a sense of responsibility for at least one aspect of changing the world. It's as though we all have two jobs: our immediate tasks and the chance to make a difference.

Leaders everywhere should remember the M's of motivation: mastery, membership, and meaning. Tapping these non-monetary rewards (while paying fairly) are central to engagement and happiness. And they are also likely to produce innovative solutions to difficult problems.Leaders deliver confidence by espousing high standards in their messages, exemplifying these standards in the conduct they model, and establishing formal mechanisms to provide a structure for acting on those standards.

Espouse: the power of message. Leaders articulate standards, values, and visions.  They give pep talks. Their messages can incite to action when that is appropriate, or they can calm and soothe people to prevent them from panicking.  In the strong cultures that develop in winning streaks, leaders’ messages are internalized and echo throughout the system.  Players on the North Carolina women’s soccer team seemed to have Anson Dorrance’s voice in their heads.  At Continental Airlines, numerous people in a variety of jobs quoted Gordon Bethune’s favorite sayings.  From the Go Forward Plan to Bethune’s weekly voicemails, people learned from what Continental leaders espoused.  The messages provided practical information, inspiration, and a feeling of inclusion, as everyone knew everyone else heard the same message.

Exemplify: the power of models.  Leaders serve as role models, leading through the power of personal example. “I don’t believe as a leader you can ever expect anybody to do things you are not willing to do yourself,” said Mike Babcock of the Mighty Ducks.  The leaders with winning streaks and turnarounds sought to exemplify the kinds of accountable, collaborative behavior they sought in others.  Certainly the personal example of truth and reconciliation, inclusion, and empowerment set by Nelson Mandela reflected one of the most remarkable and admirable personal journeys of the twentieth century.  In a different country and different way, Akin Ongor of Garanti Bank was an inspiring business role model with courage, and compassion – offering to resign when he discovered that the bank had lost $14 million due to a junior manager’s mistake that control systems had not caught because he said he “shared the mistake,” or mobilizing the bank’s employees to help in the aftermath of an earthquake in Turkey.

Establish: the power of formal mechanisms.  Leaders develop processes, routines, and structures.  They embed winners’ behavior in the culture not just through person-to-person and generation-to-generation transfers of norms, but also through the formal mechanisms that embed positive behavior in team and organizational routines.  North Carolina women’s soccer coach Anson Dorrance or Connecticut women’s basketball coach Geno Auriemma had many systematic ways to forge their players into a victory machine that just kept winning – a yearly calendar of activities including off-season events, routines for practices, assessment tools, leadership seminars, a schedule of meetings.  The teams changed composition, as players turned over, but the structures and processes remained. The winning teams that resulted were not a force of nature, they were a product of professional disciplines and structures.  Nelson Mandela’s leadership in South Africa was manifested not just through his inspiring message and model but through the structure of a new government, legislation, formal events such as town meetings on a new constitution and hearings by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission.

Leaders must deliver confidence at every level: self-confidence, confidence in each other, confidence in the system, and the confidence of external investors and the public that their support is warranted.

by   |   9:00 AM April 10, 2013

Boredom

Samuel Johnson once wrote, “It is by studying little things that we attain the great art of having as little misery and as much happiness as possible.”

One “little thing” that can be a source of unhappiness is boredom. Waiting in traffic. Waiting for the subway. Doing the dishes. Waiting in a doctor’s office. Listening to your thirteen year old talk through her different clothing options for the day. Boredom is an emotional state experienced when an individual is left without anything in particular to do, and not interested in their surroundings. (The first recorded use of the word boredom is in the novel Bleak House by Charles Dickens, written in 1852, in which it appears six times, although the expression to be a bore had been used in the sense of "to be tiresome or dull" since 1768. The French term for boredom, ennui, is sometimes used in English as well. I just thought you would like to know).

Mental state in terms of challenge level and skill level, according to Csikszentmihalyi's flow model.

Boredom has been defined as “an unpleasant, transient affective state in which the individual feels a pervasive lack of interest in and difficulty concentrating on the current activity.” Normally boredom is a response to a moderate challenge for which the subject has more than enough skill.

It seems there are three types of boredom, all of which involve problems of engagement of attention. These include times when we are prevented from engaging in some wanted activity, when we are forced to engage in some unwanted activity, or when we are simply unable, for no apparent reason, to maintain engagement in any activity or spectacle. Boredom proneness is a tendency to experience boredom of all types. This is typically assessed by the Boredom Proneness Scale- yes there is such a scale. Although boredom is often viewed as a trivial and mild irritant, proneness to boredom has been linked to a very diverse range of possible psychological, physical, educational, and social problems.

Boredom is a condition characterized by perception of one's environment as dull, tedious, and lacking in stimulation. So how does one overcome boredom? Gretchen Rubin outlines her strategies to overcome boredom:

1. Put the word “meditation” after the activity that’s boring you. If you’re impatient while waiting for the bus, tell yourself you’re doing “bus waiting meditation.” If you’re standing in a slow line at the drugstore, you’re doing “waiting in line meditation.” Just saying these words can make you feel very spiritual and high-minded and wise.

2. Dig in. As they say, if you can’t get out of it, get into it. Diane Arbus wrote, “The Chinese have a theory that you pass through boredom into fascination, and I think it’s true.” If something is boring for two minutes, do it for four minutes. If it’s still boring, do it for eight minutes, then sixteen, and so on. Eventually, you discover that it’s not boring at all. If part of your research isn’t interesting —like the Dardanelles campaign for Forty Ways to Look at Winston Churchill—read a whole book about it, and then it becomes absorbing. The same principle holds when doing boring or irritating tasks, like laundry.

3. Take the perspective of a journalist or scientist. Really study what’s around you. What are people wearing, what do the interiors of buildings look like, what noises do you hear, what do the ads show? If you bring your analytical powers to bear, you can make almost anything interesting. Paradoxically, you will find that understanding the theory of why waiting in line makes you crazy will make  much more tolerant of waiting in line.

4. Find an area of refuge. Have a mental escape route planned. Think about something delightful or uplifting (not your to-do list!). Review photos of your kids on your phone (studies show that looking at photos of loved ones provides a big mood boost). Listen to an audiobook.

5. Look for a way to feel grateful. It’s a lot better to be bored while waiting in a doctor’s office than to be in agony of suspense about your test results. It’s more fun to sit around the breakfast table talking about clothes than to be away from home on a business trip. Maybe the other line at the drugstore is moving even more slowly. 

6. Consider people in glass houses ?:  La Rochefoucauld observed, “We always get bored with those whom we bore.” Remind yourself of this when having a boring conversation with someone!

7. And of course, always bring a book (in physical or virtual form).

Why we clap

Ever wondered why we clap? 

Scholars aren't quite sure about the origins of applause. What they do know is that clapping is very old, and very common, and very tenacious -- "a remarkably stable facet of human culture." Babies do it, seemingly instinctually. The Bible makes many mentions of applause - as acclamation, and as celebration.

Clapping is one of the earliest and most universal system people have used to interact with each other. Applause, in the ancient world, was acclamation. But it was also communication. It was, in its way, power. It was a way for frail little humans to recreate, through hands made "thunderous," the rumbles and smashes of nature. 

Applause, today, is much the same. In the studio, in the theater, in places where people become publics, we still smack our palms together to show our appreciation -- to create, in cavernous spaces, connection. ("When we applaud a performer," argues the sociobiologist Desmond Morris, "we are, in effect, patting him on the back from a distance.") We applaud dutifully. We applaud politely. We applaud, in the best of circumstances, enthusiastically. We applaud, in the worst, ironically. We find ways, in short, to represent ourselves as crowds -- through the very medium of our crowd-iness. 

Clapping was formalized -- in Western culture, at least -- in the theater. "Plaudits" were the common way of ending a play. At the close of the performance, the chief actor would yell, "Valete et plaudite!" ("Goodbye and applause!") -- thus signaling to the audience, in the subtle manner preferred by centuries of thespians, that it was time to give praise. And thus turning himself into, ostensibly, one of the world's first human applause signs.

As theater and politics merged -- particularly as the Roman Republic gave way to the Roman Empire -- applause became a way for leaders to interact directly with their citizens. One of the chief methods politicians used to evaluate their standing with the people was by gauging the greetings they got when they entered the arena. Leaders became astute human applause-o-meters, reading the volume -- and the speed, and the rhythm, and the length -- of the crowd's claps for clues about their political fortunes. "You can almost think of this as an ancient poll," says Greg Aldrete, a professor of history and humanistic studies at the University of Wisconsin "This is how you gauge the people. This is how you poll their feelings." 

Before telephones allowed for Gallup-style surveys, before SMS allowed for real-time voting, before the Web allowed for "buy" buttons and cookies, Roman leaders were gathering data about people by listening to their applause. And they were, being humans and politicians at the same time, comparing their results to other people's polls -- to the applause inspired by their fellow performers. After an actor received more favorable plaudits than he did, the emperor Caligula remarked, "I wish that the Roman people had one neck."

So savvy politicians of the ancient world relied on the same thing savvy politicians of the less-ancient often do: oppo research. Cicero, the ur-politico, would send friends of his to loiter around the theater, taking notes to see what kind of greeting each politician got when he entered the arena -- the better to see who was beloved by the people, and who was not. And his human clap-o-meters had a lot of information to assess. "Ancient crowds tended to be more interactive than they are today," Aldrete points out. "There was a lot of back and forth between speakers and crowds. And particularly in the Greco-Roman world, crowds -- especially in cities -- were really good at communicating messages through rhythmic clapping, sometimes coupled with shouts." The coding was, he says, "a pretty sophisticated thing."

By the late days of the Republic and the early days of the Empire -- from around the first centuries BC to the first centuries AD -- those systems of applause became more and more elaborate. As power consolidated under one person, passing from Caesar to Caesar to Caesar, plaudits became both more systematized and more nuanced. Applause no longer meant, simply, "claps." While Greco-Roman audiences certainly smacked their palms together the same way we do today their overall strategies of applause were much more varied than clapping alone. Plaudits thundered, but they also buzzed. They also trilled. Crowds developed ways to express degrees of approval of the person or persons before them, ranging from claps, to snaps (of the finger and thumb), to waves (of the edge of the toga). The last gesture of which the emperor Aurelian decided would be replaced by the wave of a special handkerchief (orarium) -- a prop which he then helpfully distributed to all Roman citizens, so they would never be without a way to praise him.

The applause rituals were influenced by Rome's expansion, as well. Nero, for his part, amended Rome's clapping style after a trip to Alexandria, where he found himself impressed by the Egyptian method of noise-making. The emperor summoned more men from Alexandria. Not content with that, he selected some young men of the order of equites and more than five thousand sturdy young plebeians, to be divided into groups and learn the Alexandrian styles of applause ... and to ply them vigorously whenever he sang. These men were noticeable for their thick hair and fine apparel; their left hands were bare and without rings, and the leaders were paid four hundred thousand sesterces each.

What Nero wanted to replicate was the Alexandrians' varied style of noise-making, which texts of the time break down into three categories: "the bricks," "the roof tiles," and "the bees." The first two varieties seem to refer to clapping as we know it today -- "bricks" describing flat-palmed clapping, and "roof tiles" describing the cup-palmed version. The third type seems to refer to vocal rather than mechanical applause -- to the humming or trilling that would make an assembled crowd sound like an enormous swarm of bees.  So the arenas were Rome's early answer to the radio and the TV, the ancient incarnation of today's Twitter Q&A and YouTube hangout and Reddit AMA: they allowed the powerful to interact with their constituents, en masse. They offered the illusion, if not the reality, of political freedom. And applause -- medium and message at the same time -- became the vehicle for the performance. Using it, people answered back to their leaders, with buzzes that mimicked bees and claps that mimicked thunder.

It's no surprise, then, that the powerful began making a business of manipulating the crowds. Which are, for all their wisdom, notoriously manipulable. Rome and its theaters saw the rise of a professional class of public instigators -- laudiceni, or "people who clapped for their dinner" -- hired to infiltrate crowds and manipulate their reaction to performances. The practice seems to have started with actors, who would hire a dozen or so shills to disperse among their audiences and prolong the applause they received -- or, if they were feeling either especially bold or especially indignant, to start "spontaneous" chants of praise among the crowd. (Actors might also hire laudiceni to instigate boos and hisses following the performances of competitors.). The practice spread to courts, where lawyers might hire professional rabble-rousers to react to arguments and thus sway juries. And it bled, as so many elements of theater eventually do, into politics. Nero, the legend goes, enlisted 5,000 of his soldiers to praise his performances when he acted. 

So did, centuries later, French performers, who institutionalized shillery even further with the practice known as "the claque." The 16th-century French poetJean Daurat is generally credited with (or: blamed for) the resurrection. He bought a bunch of tickets to his own plays, handing them out to people who promised to applaud at the end of the performances. By the early 1820s, claques had become institutionalized, with an agency in Paris specializing in the distribution of the shills' services. The historian William B. Cohen describes the intricate price lists these faux flatterers would hand out to would-be patrons: polite clapping would cost this many francs, enthusiastic applause would cost this many, heckles directed at a competitor would cost this many. 

The claque also became categorized: There were the rieurs ("laughers"), who would laugh loudly at the jokes; the pleureurs ("criers"), who'd feign tears in reaction to performances; the  commissaires ("officers"), who would learn a play or a piece of music by heart and then call attention to its best parts; thechatouilleurs ("ticklers"), who'd keep the audience in a good mood, in the manner of later drink minimums; and the bisseurs ("encore-ers"), who'd request encore performances -- the first one having been, obviously, so delightful.

And clapping itself evolved, too. Symphonies and operas became more serious, aligning themselves with the reverence and spirituality associated with religious ceremonies. With the advent of sound recording -- of performances subject, as it were, to mechanical reproduction -- they further quieted down. Knowing when to stay silent, as well as when to clap, became a mark of sophistication -- a new kind of code for audiences to learn. Applause became a matter of "do" or "don't," "all" or "nothing," "silence" or "elation" -- losing many of its old shades and nuances. 

Those changes changed performers, too. Applause began to seem less a dialoge with an audience, and more a brute transaction with them. It promised and teased. "The point," Gustav Mahler explained, "is not to take the world's opinion as a guiding star but to go one's way in life and working unerringly, neither depressed by failure nor seduced by applause." The word "claptrap" (literally, "nonsense," but more commonly, "showy language") comes from the stage of the mid-18th century. And it refers to a "trick to 'catch' applause."

So the subtleties of the Roman arena -- the claps and the snaps and the shades of meaning -- gave way, in later centuries, to applause that was standardized and institutionalized and, as a result, a little bit promiscuous. Laugh tracks guffawed with mechanized abandon. Applause became an expectation rather than a reward. And artists saw it for what it was becoming: ritual, rote. As Barbra Streisand, no stranger to public adoration, once complained: "What does it mean when people applaud? Should I give 'em money? Say thank you? Lift my dress?" The lack of applause, on the other hand -- the unexpected thing, the relatively communicative thing -- "that I can respond to."

But, now, we're putting the nuances back. We're finding new ways to reinvent applause, to make it what it used to be: a coded, collective form of communication. We've invented, of course, the slow clap  dutifully and delightfully describes as "a heavy monotonous, thoroughly controlled repetition of the clapping gesture." We have delivered unto the world The Clapper, the device that lets human hands talk to electric light, and is therefore deserving of wonder and awe. We have created new ways to outsource our applause.

Mostly, though, we've used the affordances of the digital world to remake public praise. We link and like and share, our thumbs-ups and props washing like waves through our networks. Within the great arena of the Internet, we become part of the performance simply by participating in it, demonstrating our appreciation -- and our approval -- by amplifying, and extending, the show. And we are aware of ourselves, of the new role a new world gives us. We're audience and actors at once. Our applause is, in a very real sense, part of the spectacle. We are all, in our way, claqueurs. 

But our claps matter more now, in many ways, because they are no longer ephemeral. They are performances in themselves, their praises preserved, their rhythms tracked, their patterns analyzed and exploited. They send messages far beyond the fact of the applause itself. Our applause, when it's given, is silent. And also thunderous.