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.
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What is the Big Idea? Pension funds have gone from a state of surplus to a state of deficit in the last decade and no matter what measures are taken to mitigate the risks, struggling companies can't seem to catch a break. Stock market crashes, a heavy reliance on equity investment, inflation ...
What is the Big Idea? Ford and General Motors might be setting the new standard for U.S. companies when it comes to managing pension obligations. G.M. reduced its pension liabilities by $26 billion earlier this month by offering lump-sum payments to thousands of retired white collar employees to ...
What's the Big Idea? 2012 has been officially declared the year of cooperatives by the United Nations. The cooperative model is an alternative way of doing business that aims to share the wealth equitably among members rather than shareholders, and it's gaining traction thanks to the exemplary ...
What's the best single piece of advice for grads in a fragile job market? Take the poll, then find out what other Big Think readers are saying. Disagree with all of these options? Want to share a completely different bit of career wisdom? Have at it in the comments thread below...
What's the Big Idea? While over 70 percent of women in the United States work outside of the home, compared with 36 percent in Brazil, and while US women marry, on average, a decade older than women in Latin America, the United States has never had a female president. Latin American countries ...
What's the Big Idea? At 29, Edie Weiner was the youngest woman to ever be elected to a corporate board. "I really do respect the women who run for public office because it is so personally assaulting on them," she told Big Think in a recent interview. "How they don’t go home every night and want ...
What's the Big Idea? This year, more women than men will graduate from institutions of higher education, yet women hold just 15.7% of seats on the boards of U.S.-based Fortune 500 companies, according to Forbes. What gives? In a recent interview with Big Think, Jane Diplock -- former chair of ...
What is the Big Idea? While Congress dukes it out over the federal interest rates on student loans, venture capitalist Peter Thiel has a solution for college students who don't want to be saddled with huge amounts of debts in an unstable economy. The solution, he says, is to drop out of college ...
Class of 2012, you’ve heard it before: you will graduate into a world transformed by the global financial crisis. Unemployment among young people is at its highest rate since WWII, and the average 22-year-old now enters adulthood with $23,000 in debt. The total amount owed by students in the U.S ...
What’s the Big Idea? The average consumer associates 3M with tape – a product so integral to our daily lives that we barely notice it anymore. But in 1925, as an alternative to the unwieldy, glue-covered sheets of paper it made obsolete, the product was a stroke of genius. In fact, 3M is ...
Over 200 powerful women gathered in New York City last week to discuss the idea of adding more women to corporate boards, an idea that seems to be gaining traction. Big Think had the opportunity to speak with Susan Stautberg, who co-founded the group WomenCorporateDirectors, an organization that ...
Clothes make the man. And in the case of Mark Zuckerberg, it is the hoodie, which is part of a look that has endeared him to some as the founder and very public face of Facebook. To his admirers, the hoodie is a display of authenticity. He is about to become one of the richest men in the world, but ...
What's the Big Idea? If more women were on corporate boards four years ago would we have seen the kind of catastrophic financial and economic meltdown that occurred in 2008? Would the presence of female corporate directors have mitigated the damage? Recent studies have suggested that it's ...
Good intentions can lead to bad outcomes in business. This is especially true in organizations that have toxic cultures in which leaders tout worthy values--and then put up roadblocks that prevent employees from living those values. The GSA scandal provides an apt example. With all the rampant ...
What's the Big Idea? Sometimes you have to be bad in the service of being good, say coauthors and cofounders Frances Frei (a professor at Harvard Business School) and Anne Morriss. To research their book, Uncommon Service: How to Win By Putting Customers at the Core of Your Business , they ...