Many of us make resolutions at the beginning of the year. Some of them are very specific. But it might be worth taking a “strategic pause” and do something business does so well – come up with a mission statement – a personal mission statement that defines why you want to do the things you’ll promise yourself you’ll do. It just might be the key that unlocks a brighter future.

Said another way, forget the New Year’s resolution. This year, try creating a personal mission statement instead.

”To get started on your personal mission statement, ask yourself the following questions used by the Corporate Athlete program:

• How do you want to be remembered?
• How do you want people to describe you?
• Who do you want to be?
• Who or what matters most to you?
• What are your deepest values?
• How would you define success in your life?
• What makes your life really worth living?

Use your answers to craft a personal mission statement that reveals your ultimate purpose in life. Rather than listing a behavioral change, focus on a set of guiding principles that capture how you want to live your life. Some examples of mission statements from the Corporate Athlete program include:

“I plan to spend more time doing things that I like to do.”
“I want to become more physically active and try new hobbies.”
“My mission is to incorporate a healthy balance of work and personal time.”
“I aspire to transform negative work-related situations and put energy into relationships with family and friends.”

Read more here.

Does technology change the world? And is it the “lone genius” who gives us these gifts? These are huge questions for all of us. Here is what Jon Gertner shares in “Unforeseeable Consequences:”

At various points in “How We Got to Now,” Steven Johnson helps us see how innovation is almost never the result of a lone genius experiencing a sudden voilà! moment; it’s a complex process involving a dizzying number of inputs, individuals, setbacks and (sometimes) accidents. Also, it’s hardly the exclusive domain of private-sector entrepreneurs. Important ideas are often driven by academics, governments and philanthropists.

Above all, though, technological histories like this help us reckon with how much we miss by focusing too exclusively on economic, cultural and political history. Not that any one domain is superior to another — only that Johnson proves you can’t explain one without the others. He does seem to suggest that technological history may have an advantage in one regard: It not only helps readers better see where we’ve been, but urges us to think harder about where we’re going.
Read the entire article here

Want to write something fabulous in 2015? Most of us do…but we run into so many barriers. It makes what should be a fun and enervating task seem daunting and even overwhelming.

In his new book, The Sense of Style, Steve Pinker helps us get past some of those speed bumps. Read it…it just might inspire you to do your best work. Here is part of what a review says:

The cause of most bad writing, Pinker thinks, is not laziness or sloppiness or overexposure to the Internet and video games, but what he calls the curse of knowledge: the writer’s inability to put himself in the reader’s shoes or to imagine that the reader might not know all that the writer knows — the jargon, the shorthand, the slang, the received wisdom. He may underestimate a little how much deliberately bad writing there is, writing meant to confuse and obfuscate. Just look at the fine print at the bottom of your next credit card bill or listen to a politician in Washington reading a speech about the tax code.

Read more here

One of the most powerful companies is vigilant about keeping its secrets. But you can look behind the scenes thanks to Brad Stone’s thoughts on “How Google Works.” He provides a revealing look at who these people are. It also gives you an impressive leg up if you want to work for a company like Google – or start the next Google:

At the center of their new management framework are “smart creatives”: those unusually intelligent, self-motivated employees who are responsible for coming up with the next big thing. Companies need to hire and keep them, but smart creatives aren’t necessarily dazzled by perks like high salaries and corner offices. They seek meaning in their work and approach their careers with an inflated sense of missionary zeal that would send the writers of HBO’s “Silicon Valley” scurrying for their notebooks. Successful companies must start thinking about their culture early on, the authors write, and fashion direct, inspiring mission statements (“Don’t be evil”) that might sound disingenuous to outsiders but that actually motivate employees.

Most of these lessons have hardened into conventional wisdom and will not surprise anyone already steeped in Silicon Valley’s infectious dogma. Trust your engineers and say yes to them as often as possible. Stay flexible in planning. Power should derive from merit and insight, not tenure or salary. Launch quickly, iterate and don’t be afraid to fail.

Read more here

In the United States, our overarching desire is for security and prosperity. And while there are a number of threats we tend to worry about, there is only one existential threat to the United States. That is ballistic missiles armed with weapons of mass destruction! I’ve written a series of articles on this threat and want to share them with you.

North Korea is armed with nuclear missiles. Iran developing nuclear weapons they can put on a variety of missiles. Troubles with Russia over the Ukraine and fears Russia might flex its muscles with missiles armed with nuclear warheads. The question many are – and should be – asking is this: What capability does the United States have to deal with this kind of existential threat.

While all the U.S. military services have a stake in ballistic missile defense the U.S. Navy is now in the lead in this important warfare area. This journey is a remarkable success story – and one not yet told. Over a period of sixty years, the U.S. Navy has evolved the most versatile, and most successful, naval air and missile defense system in the world.  However, it is a journey that has been fraught with difficulty, advancing not in linear fashion, but in fits and starts, always pushing the edge of the technological envelope until it arrived where it is today.

Read more here

Read anything that made you think lately? I mean really think? For me, it was Arthur Brooks’ thoughtful piece called Abundance Without Attachment. I wanted to share it with you. Here is part of what he shared:

On a recent trip to India, I found an opportunity to help sort out this contradiction. I sought guidance from a penniless Hindu swami named Gnanmunidas at the Swaminarayan Akshardham Hindu temple in New Delhi. We had never met before, but he came highly recommended by friends. If Yelp reviewed monks, he would have had five stars.

To my astonishment, Gnanmunidas greeted me with an avuncular, “How ya doin’?” He referred to me as “dude.” And what was that accent — Texas? Sure enough, he had grown up in Houston, the son of Indian petroleum engineers, and had graduated from the University of Texas. Later, he got an M.B.A., and quickly made a lot of money.

But then Gnanmunidas had his awakening. At 26, he asked himself, “Is this all there is?” His grappling with that question led him to India, where he renounced everything and entered a Hindu seminary. Six years later, he emerged a monk. From that moment on, the sum total of his worldly possessions has been two robes, prayer beads and a wooden bowl. He is prohibited from even touching money — a discipline that would obviously be impossible for those of us enmeshed in ordinary economic life.

As an economist, I was more than a little afraid to hear what this capitalist-turned-renunciant had to teach me. But I posed a query nonetheless: “Swami, is economic prosperity a good or bad thing?” I held my breath and waited for his answer.

“It’s good,” he replied. “It has saved millions of people in my country from starvation.”

This was not what I expected. “But you own almost nothing,” I pressed. “I was sure you’d say that money is corrupting.” He laughed at my naïveté. “There is nothing wrong with money, dude. The problem in life is attachment to money.” The formula for a good life, he explained, is simple: abundance without attachment.

Read the entire article here. It will really make you think. I welcome your feedback.

What part does writing a good narrative play in your life? What if you don’t want to publish a book or even a story or a blog post? Should you be able to tell a good story? Yes!

Harvard Business Review called it a strategic tool with “irresistible power.” What exciting new 21st-century technology is this?

The age-old art of storytelling — something humans have done since they could first communicate. So why has it become this year’s buzzword? And what is its new value?

In these days of tougher-than-ever job searches, competition for crowd-funding and start-ups looking to be the next Google or Facebook, it’s not enough just to offer up the facts about you or your company to prospective employers or investors. Or even to your own workers.

You need to be compelling, unforgettable, funny and smart. Magnetic, even. You need to be able to answer the question that might be lingering in the minds of the people you’re trying to persuade: What makes you so special?

You need to have a good story.

Read more here

One of the most innovative technologies used anywhere – and especially in our military – is unmanned or autonomous systems, sometimes called “drones.” These military drones have been talked about a great deal in all media, especially armed drones which are often operated by the U.S. intelligence agencies or our military to take out suspected terrorists.

Few security issues are more controversial. In an effort to shed some light in an area where there is mostly heat, I published an article with Faircount Media entitled “The Other Side of Autonomy.”

A few salient quotes from this article capture the controversy surrounding “drone wars.”

In an article entitled, “Morals and the Machine,” The Economist addressed the issue of autonomy and humans-in-the-loop this way:

As they become smarter and more widespread, autonomous machines are bound to end up making life-or-death decisions in unpredictable situations, thus assuming—or at least appearing to assume—moral agency. Weapons systems currently have human operators “in the loop”, but as they grow more sophisticated, it will be possible to shift to “on the loop” operation, with machines carrying out orders autonomously. As that happens, they will be presented with ethical dilemmas…More collaboration is required between engineers, ethicists, lawyers and policymakers, all of whom would draw up very different types of rules if they were left to their own devices.

Bill Keller put the issue of autonomy for unmanned systems this way in his Op-ed, “Smart Drones,” in the New York Times in March 2013:

If you find the use of remotely piloted warrior drones troubling, imagine that the decision to kill a suspected enemy is not made by an operator in a distant control room, but by the machine itself. Imagine that an aerial robot studies the landscape below, recognizes hostile activity, calculates that there is minimal risk of collateral damage, and then, with no human in the loop, pulls the trigger. Welcome to the future of warfare. While Americans are debating the president’s power to order assassination by drone, powerful momentum – scientific, military and commercial – is propelling us toward the day when we cede the same lethal authority to software.

Looking ahead to this year and beyond, it is clear that “drone warfare” will continue to be extremely controversial. Stay tuned!

Click here to read the entire article (PDF)

Did you make a New Year’s resolution to read more? I suspect many of us have. While many of us value reading as something we enjoy doing and an activity that delivers some sort of hard-to-define intrinsic value, it’s often hard to pin down precisely what that value is. Keith Oatley and Maja Djikic have taken a good stab at it. They suggest writing transforms us. Here’s part of what they have to say:

A great deal has been written about art, but only recently has research begun in earnest about what goes on in the mind and brain when reading literature. Outside the domain of love relationships and some forms of psychotherapy, the idea of communication that has effects of a non-persuasive yet transformative kind has rarely been considered in psychology.

Read more here

You don’t need to work in Silicon Valley or be an MIT grad to know that innovation is the primary source of competitive advantage for individuals, for companies and even for countries. For those of us in the United States, innovation seems to have been part of our DNA for a long time – a fact recognized even by those who don’t admire us.

Many people write about innovation – some well and some not-so-well. One of my favorites is Walter Isaacson. Three years ago he penned the best-seller Steve Jobs, which gave us a never-seen-before window into the life and work of man who many consider the most innovative genius of the last half-century – and perhaps longer.

Now, Isaacson has delivered another gem, simply titled The Innovators. I enjoyed it immensely and it has also achieved best-seller status. Here is some of what the New York Times review of The Innovators had to say:

As the book gallops forward, Mr. Isaacson must combine the good, the great and the ugly. They all figure in the story of the transistor, which featured William Shockley, the scientist who first saw the potential in silicon and became a Silicon Valley pioneer — but is now remembered for the racist theories that clouded his legacy. His work on the semiconductor, with two powerful collaborators, would never have led to such household popularity had there not been a Steve Jobs-like figure (Pat Haggerty at Texas Instruments, who shared Jobs’ ability to sell products people had no idea they wanted) to put these brand-new devices, now called transistors, into radios, and truly rock the American teenager’s world.

Read the entire review here…and read the book…it may inspire you to be your most innovative self!