We live in a time of information abundance, which far too many of us see as information overload. With the sum total of human knowledge, past and present, at our fingertips, we’re faced with a crisis of attention: which ideas should we engage with, and why? Big Think is an evolving roadmap to the best thinking on the planet — the ideas that can help you think flexibly and act decisively in a multivariate world.
A word about Big Ideas and Themes — The architecture of Big Think
Big ideas are lenses for envisioning the future. Every article and video on bigthink.com and on our learning platforms is based on an emerging “big idea” that is significant, widely relevant, and actionable. We’re sifting the noise for the questions and insights that have the power to change all of our lives, for decades to come. For example, reverse-engineering is a big idea in that the concept is increasingly useful across multiple disciplines, from education to nanotechnology.
Themes are the seven broad umbrellas under which we organize the hundreds of big ideas that populate Big Think. They include New World Order, Earth and Beyond, 21st Century Living, Going Mental, Extreme Biology, Power and Influence, and Inventing the Future.
Browse videos featuring experts across a wide range of disciplines, from personal health to business leadership to neuroscience.
Big Think’s contributors offer expert analysis of the big ideas behind the news.
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Management strategies for the evolving 21st century workspace
What's the Big Idea? Imagine if you could live your life the way you watch a movie on a DVR. You could fast-forward through all the tedious moments and skip right to the good stuff. That was the premise of the 2006 sci-fi comedy Click, starring Adam Sandler. However, as Sandler's character ...
What’s the Big Idea? At a time when the legal status of the corporate corpus is the subject of intense political debate, organizational entrepreneur Brian Robertson maintains that businesses aren’t acting human enough. Instead of allowing the corporate organism to sense and respond to changing ...
In the climactic final act of Verdi's opera La traviata, the heroine Violetta is on her deathbed, stricken with tuberculosis. Suddenly her estranged lover Alfredo returns to her side and the newly reunited lovers imagine a future together. Violetta experiences a great resurgence of strength only to ...
President Obama has been chided – and even derided – for his lack of leadership over the past year. Indeed, the man who was elected on fervent hope and sweeping change in the midst of the worst financial collapse since the Great Depression, was being compared to hapless Jimmy Carter, rather than ...
I’m not happy at work. That is what more and more workers around the world are saying today. In fact, according to a new survey, between 28% and 56% of workers in 17 key countries around the world are seriously considering leaving their jobs at the present time, with younger workers even more ...