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Thor Muller certainly thinks that you can plan serendipity!

Thor Muller, CTO and co-founder of the firm Get Satisfaction recently gave a talk, The Practice Planned Serendipity as part of the Unfinished Business series at Ontario College of Art and Design University (OCADU). Before we dive into what Muller said during his talk, first let’s look at what serendipity means.

The Meaning of Serendipity

Horace Walpole, English art historian and politician born in the early 18^th century coined the word serendipity. Walpole who loved to write letters was also known as man of letters. In a letter to Thomas Mann he said that he coined the word serendipity from the Persian fairy tale, The Three Princes of Serendip. In the tale, the heroes “were always making discoveries, by accidents and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”

Image via Wikipedia

As with many things, words often lose part of their meaning, or the meaning is completely changed over a period of time. The way that Walpole used serendipity, sagacity was an important aspect of the definition, which is the “ability to link together apparently innocuous facts to come to a valuable conclusion.” According to Wikipedia, “Serendipity is a propensity for making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated.”

In Muller’s talk, he indicated that serendipity occurs when chance interacts with creativity. Therefore it’s possible to plan the conditions for serendipity to take place.

Getting to Serendipity

There are eight ways that anyone can experience serendipity in a planned way.

Collision: Serendipity requires motion. You cannot have serendipity without collision. Get out there – run into more people and participate in more events.

Preparation: Prepare your mind for serendipity and there are three ways to do so.

1. Obsessive Curiosity
2. Arrest an Exception: Have dogged determination. Hang on until you figure “it” out.
3. Forget What you Know to be True: Nothing is sacred

Divergence: Be ready to divert from the original plan. Take another direction. There are two ways to divert.

1. Branch-out: Take a different fork in the road. Branch-out from another branch, explore the possibilities.
2. Spread Seeds: Spin off new components.

Commitment: You achieve serendipity when you stick to it, you are unwilling to divert from your cause. You know what your mission is and you adhere to it.

Connection: You run into the right people because of your network of connections – because you know the right people.

Porosity: You move the centre of gravity from within your company out to the customers and magic can happen.

Activation: We create the space for serendipity to occur. For instance, there is a certain individual that you’d like to meet, plan on how you can meet her. You could have a party and invite people who know her and encourage them to bring her along. So you create the space for serendipity to take place by having the party.

Additional Information on Serendipity

The Three Princes of Serendip, Part One

Making Science by Serendipity. A review of Robert K. Merton and Elinor Barber’s The Travels and Adventures of Serendipity

The Three Princes of Serendip and the Merchant 

Now that I have attended Thor Muller’s lecture on The Practice Planned Serendipity, I am ready to test the waters.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

At a recent event hosted by the Canadian Women in Communications for senior level women, the guest speaker Linda Jojo, new Executive Vice President, ITS and Chief Information Officer of Rogers Communications shared three lessons she has learned with the women in attendance, but I’d like to focus on only one because it incorporates the other two. And that is the importance of branding yourself.

Quite recently, I have been reading a lot about creating a personal brand for yourself. You have to be known something. Each of us has a unique set of skills and we need to let others know about them, so that when your skill set is needed, your name is synonymous with those skills. It’s interesting that so many people are now talking about personal branding because Tom Peters, the management guru, wrote a seminar article, The Brand Called You in Fast Company in August 1997 – that’s 14 years ago.

How do you brand yourself?

Get yourself SEEN and HEARD. Jojo suggests that you take on tasks that others may not want such as running the United Way Campaign. Why? Because you’ll get visibility doing it, and you’ll also get the opportunity to make presentations about the campaign – this puts you in front of senior managers, the decision makers. She also recommends that you should take on jobs that others do not want. When no one wants a particular job, you can bet that it’s for a reason, and it’s probably because it’s plagued with many problems. But you should not be deterred because if you master that difficult job that no one wants to touch, you will be known as the person to call to solve difficult problems.

Jojo took on the job of running GE’s payroll system, one that didn’t run very smoothly. She made many mistakes along the way because it was a very complex job, but it was the best job she ever had because it taught her how to prioritize and how to communicate during a crisis. Over the years she has built a reputation for herself and that’s one of the reasons why she has moved up the ladder in her career. Sponsors also played a seminal role in opening doors for her. Jojo created a personal brand for herself, and she was SEEN and HEARD.

Unlike mentors, sponsors usually choose their protégés. To be chosen though, they have to know about you, so to have to be SEEN and HEARD. I have been building my personal rand as The Invisible Mentor and Expert Interviewer, how about you?

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Recently the head of Facebook Canada, Jordan Banks, talked to a packed room at a Toronto Board of Trade event about “How Businesses are Organizing Around People.” According to Banks, the essence of Facebook is that it’s a social graph, meaning you have a digital imprint of your connections. To know where we are going requires that we know where we are coming from.

Interesting Tidbits

• Facebook is the number one referral site for traffic.
• 1/3 of Facebook users access the website through a mobile device.
• Commerce is organizing around people. For instance, Ticketmaster tells people which concerts their friends are attending. Vitamin Water created flavours based on input from their fans on Facebook.
• Companies are closing the loop – offline (real world) to online to offline, or online to offline to online – with their customer interactions.

Art of Possibility

• Create content by what your friends like.
• Address problems by putting people in the middle.

What’s on the Horizon? What’s next for Social Media?

Jordan Banks suggests that we look at technologies such as RFID (Radio Frequency Identification Tag), QR Codes (Quick Response Code), AI (Artificial Intelligence) and so on, and figure out how they apply to our lives. Banks did not really explain what he meant, but to further explore his idea requires an understanding of each of the technology. I have included diverse articles on the mentioned technologies to get you started on understanding how they work, and determine if there are ways for you to incorporate them into your life. It’s intended to get your creative juices flowing. Perhaps the future is closer than you think!

Whenever you want to get an understanding of something, good places to begin your research include:

makeuseof.com

howstuffworks.com

Wikipedia.org

Further Reading

How Does RFID Technology Work? [Technology Explained]

How RFID Works

How RFID Works (YouTube Video)

How RFID Works: RFID Tags Past and Present

How 2-D Bar Codes Work

How Robots Work: Robots and Artificial Intelligence

10 Questions for Ray Kurzweil (Time Magazine article on AI)

Top 5 Ways Nature Has Inspired Technology: 5: Developing Artificial Intelligence

Are we 10 years away from artificial life?: Artificial Life Concerns and Challenges

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Image via Wikipedia

The world mourns Steve Jobs, and what I liked about him best was his mind. Jobs knew that magic happened where technology intersected with the liberal arts and I think the key there is liberal arts. And I also think that the most successful leaders know that. The books that these leaders consume are not generally business books, they are books that make them think and business books seldom make anyone really think. They read books that have the ability to change lives.

In the New York Times article, “C.E.O. Libraries Reveal Keys to Success,” Harriet Rubin researched the topic and interviewed some of the most successful CEOs. Rubin writes,

“Serious leaders who are serious readers build personal libraries dedicated to how to think, not how to compete… Forget finding the business best-seller list in these libraries… Students of power should take note that C.E.O.’s are starting to collect books on climate change and global warming, not Al Gore’s tomes but books from the 15th century… Personal libraries have always been a biopsy of power. The empire-loving Elizabeth I surrounded herself with the Roman historians…”

Phil Knight the founder of Nike had an interest in Asian history, art and poetry. It’s reported that Steve Jobs had an interest in the work and poetry of William Blake. Dee Hock the founder of Visa, discovered what he needed in Omar Khayyam’s “Rubáiyát,” the Persian poem. And the article goes on and on and is worth the read.

When a successful leader steeps himself into the liberal arts, he does so because he has an insatiable curiosity. He wants to further his knowledge, and often finds answers to questions that he didn’t know he was looking for. The best leaders read because they want to, not because they think they have to, so the experience is enjoyable.

So what’s the point of all of this?

Sometimes you have to fill an information gap that you didn’t know that you had. And sometimes the payoff is in the future when you are able to connect what others deem to be “unconnectable”. But to be able to do that you have to invest the time in reading first. What liberal arts subject matter are you interested in? Start your reading there.

In How to Fill the Information Gap Part Two:

“Suzanne Collins who wrote The Hunger Games trilogy was first influenced by Greek myth. According to Wikipedia, “Collins says that the idea for The Hunger Games came from channel surfing on television. On one channel she observed people competing on a reality show and on another she saw footage of the Iraq War. The two blended together and the idea for the book was formed. The Greek myth of Theseus also served as inspiration for the book, with Collins describing Katniss as a futuristic Theseus.””

So you ask yourself, who is Theseus, and how would I recognize the Greek story in today’s The Hunger Games?

Theseus was the mythical founder-king of Athens, son of Aethra and King Aegeus of Athens. For his safety, while he was growing up, Aethra pretended that Poseidon and not Aegeus was Theseus’ father, so that the boy would not be killed before he could ascend to his father’s throne.

There was an Olympic game, and every ninth year, King Aegeus had to send seven boys and seven girls from Athens to be devoured by the Cretan Minotaur – a monster that was half bull, half man – which Mino’s kept in a labyrinth. One year, Theseus was chosen (because the people of Athens were upset with Aegeus) as one of the seven boys to be eaten by the Cretan Minotaur. Theseus was very strong, but he prayed to Goddess Aphrodite for assistance. Aphrodite answered, and asked her son Eros to make Ariadne, Minos’ daughter fall in love with Theseus.

Ariadne fell in love with Theseus and agreed to help him if he would marry her. He agreed and she told him that if a golden ball of thread, which she possessed, is tied to the labyrinth door, it would roll itself to the middle of the labyrinth, which is where the Minotaur lived. Ariadne told Theseus that for every 24 hours, the Minotaur slept for only one hour and did so starting at midnight. She tied the thread to the labyrinth door, and Theseus ran his hand along the magic thread and when he got to the centre of the labyrinth he killed the monster shortly after midnight.

For those who have read The Hunger Games you can see the parallels between the book and the Greek myth. Collins would not have been able to blend the news stories with the story of Theseus to create The Hunger Games had she not known the story of Theseus.

We all have gaps in information, and many times we are not even aware of the information gaps. There is no real way around information gaps because we CANNOT read all of the information that is available. But we can create a dent, even if it’s a small one, by taking an interest in the liberal arts and start there. Amazing things CAN and DO happen at the intersection of the LIBERAL ARTS and BLANK. For Steve Jobs, his BLANK was technology, what’s your?

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related Articles

The Precursor to How to Master a Subject
How to Master a Subject
How to Fill the Information Gap
How to Fill the Information Gap Part Two

Liberal Arts Changing Business Management

Book link is an affiliate link.

Last week we wrote about How to Fill the Information Gap and this post is a follow up to that one. Let’s say that you have to master a subject, or perhaps for your own pleasure, you’d like to learn more about a topic because you are seeking inspiration. And let’s also say that you are not sure of how to approach the task. In How to Read a Book by Mortimer J. Adler and Charles Van Doren, the authors discuss three reasons for reading a book and four levels of reading.

Three Reasons for Reading

1. Information
2. To further knowledge
3. Entertainment

Four Levels of Reading

1. Elementary
2. Inspectional
3. Analytical
4. Syntopical

How to Master a Topic of Interest

To master a topic of interest requires reading to further knowledge, and if you are interested in the topic for your personal interest, you would be reading for information. But to learn as much as possible about a subject, whether it be for information or to further your knowledge, Adler and Van Doren recommend that you read syntopically, which is reading several books at the same time about a specific topic, and looking at them in relationship to each other.

Many of us have learned about the Greek myths in school, but perhaps we have forgotten about many of them. It is important to refresh our memory because in last week’s review of A Brief History of the World by J. Milnor Dorey, we learned that Alexander the Great spread Greek culture across the ancient world. That suggests that Greek culture, which is an ancient one, including its literature has had great impact and influence, even on the modern world.

We are not looking to obtain a Masters in Fine Arts with a major in Greek mythology, but we want to sound knowledgeable in conversations. And we want to recognize those stories when they are disguised in other stories. As Thomas C. Foster wrote in his excellent book How to Read Literature Like a Professor, we want to be able to say, “Where have I seen that before?”

Suzanne Collins who wrote The Hunger Games trilogy was first influenced by Greek myth. According to Wikipedia, “Collins says that the idea for The Hunger Games came from channel surfing on television. On one channel she observed people competing on a reality show and on another she saw footage of the Iraq War. The two blended together and the idea for the book was formed. The Greek myth of Theseus also served as inspiration for the book, with Collins describing Katniss as a futuristic Theseus.”

Image via Wikipedia

What if by virtue of reading the Greek stories again, a burst of inspiration wraps its loving arms around you and seeps deep into your soul? What if that’s where your big break comes from?

I decided that I would read the Greek myths again. For whatever subject that you want to learn, I recommend that you take baby steps. I started off the process by reading a short book, Greek Gods and Heroes by Robert Grave that I picked up in a yard sale. I have been doing that a lot lately. A small and short book, Greek Gods and Heroes was a great primer on learning the basics about Greek mythology, and it covered the most important stories.

Next I read A Wonder Book by Nathaniel Hawthorne (author of the literary classic The Scarlett Letter), which takes the most important Greek myth and retell them in an engaging way to captivate children. Well written children’s books are both informative and written in a clear manner, which makes it easy for anyone to learn even the dullest and most difficult topic.

I followed up with Stories from Greek Drama by Winifred Mulley and Selections from Greek and Roman Historians. I am expanding my knowledge and doing it in an interesting way to keep me interested in the topic. I will finish off my topic of interest, Greek mythology, by reading Euripides: Alcestes, Hippolytus, Iphigenia in Taurus, which are three great Greek plays. The interesting thing about Euripides is that he was an innovative and free thinker who broke the status quo even in the fifth century. Even though I haven’t read the plays yet, I learned about Euripides from one of the books I read and I already know the basic Greek stories about Alcestes, Hippolytus, and Iphigenia. Reading Euripides: Alcestes, Hippolytus, Iphigenia, will both expand as well as round out my knowledge on the three characters.

To master your topic of interest, invest the time to discover which books will give you most of the knowledge that you need. As you learn more about the topic, the faster you’ll read because the information is now familiar to you. This is one of the ways to fill the information gap, or the “perceived” information gap.

How can you use this information? What do you have to add to the conversation? Let’s keep the conversation flowing, please let me know your thoughts in the comments section below. Many readers read this blog from other sites, so why don’t you pop over to The Invisible Mentor and subscribe (top on the right hand side) by email or RSS Feed.

Related Articles

The Precursor to How to Master a Subject
How to Master a Subject
How to Fill the Information Gap
How to Fill the Information Gap (when you don’t know there is a gap) Part Three

Book links are affiliate links.