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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How business is done in the 21st century
When you look at the United States at the moment and you think about our future one of the things that you might ask is what are we good at? We used to be good at creating jobs, but we’re not so good at creating jobs. We used to be good at building bridges or highways or infrastructure. We’re ...
"Look out Facebook!" tweeted Rupert Murdoch on the occasion of Facebook's one-year anniversary of its botched IPO. "Hours spent participating per member dropping seriously," he continued. "First really bad sign as seen by crappy MySpace years ago." What do you think? Is so-called "Facebook ...
I think a lot of people stereotype generous and helpful people as pushovers, as weak, as not tough and driven enough to be successful. And I think that is a myth that we really need to break down. There is a wonderful executive, Sherryann Plesse, who really stands out as one of these people ...
In this ongoing series, I talk with thought leaders about ideas in my book Nature’s Fortune and trends in the environmental movement. Next in the series is my conversation with Helene Gayle, president and CEO of CARE, a leading humanitarian organization fighting global poverty. Under Helene’s ...
In a world created by hackers those who can't hack are the underclass. No matter what you do today, success amounts to a form of hacking, whether you're running a hedge fund or if you're just clipping coupons to get by at the bottom of the economic spectrum. The problem with suggesting that ...
You should be willing to do something that will take 5 minutes or less for anybody. This simple notion is not only important for the purpose of being altruistic. It turns out that givers get good karma. One of the masters of the five-minute favor is Adam Rifkin, who was listed by Fortune as the ...
What the public sees of what a conductor does is a tiny, tiny part of the work. The majority of what a conductor does is in isolation. It’s thought of as the most public job there is, but in fact, it’s a tremendously private job that is primarily involves studying. That’s primarily what a ...
We’ve had a lot of fun over the years in connecting the theater to the political world of Washington. A few years ago, maybe more than 10, 12 years ago, we started something called the Mock Trial in which the issue from a play is argued by two opposing lawyers, two different sides, and heard by a ...
In his book, What You're Really Meant to Do: A Roadmap for Reaching Your Unique Potential, Robert Kaplan offers a practical guide to help people filter out conventional wisdom and peer pressure to get to know who they really are. But that will only get you so far, Kaplan says. The next important ...
Alec Baldwin is no fan of The New York Times theater critic Ben Brantley, who the actor lambasted in a recent Huffington Post outburst: "No one I know of in the theatre reads Brantley," Baldwin wrote, "except in the way that a doctor reads an x-ray to determine if you have cancer." In the ...
Since joining The Nature Conservancy, and over the course of writing Nature’s Fortune: How Business and Society Thrive by Investing in Nature, I’ve been fortunate to benefit from the perspectives and advice of many leaders of the environmental community. To continue the conversation on the ideas in ...
I think having a background as a physicist is kind of fortuitously good for people who work on Wall Street because there are a lot of fields that use mathematics, but physics is sort of the field par excellence. It has made the best use of mathematics. And I think physicists understand what’s a ...
We know that diversity on corporate boards is good for business and good for the world, so what steps can we take to boost women’s representation on boards worldwide? A roadmap was unveiled at the third annual WomenCorporateDirectors (WCD) Global Institute that is being held this week in New ...
"This is not a "touchy-feely book," says Robert Kaplan, referring to his latest work, What You're Really Meant to Do: A Roadmap for Reaching Your Unique Potential. Think of it instead as a workout. "I'm trying to get you in shape and dust off some of the muscles you haven't used for reaching your ...
Who gets to define success? Harvard Business School’s Robert Steven Kaplan argues in his new book, What You're Really Meant to Do: A Roadmap for Reaching Your Unique Potential , that success is not about meeting someone else's definition, but reaching your potential by defining it on your own ...