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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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Transcript

Silvia Hewlett: What we found in this research, and we did all kinds of strategy sessions, focus groups and interviews with talent managers, there were eight things you could do to pump up morale and massively improve motivation and actually figure out how to retain and fully utilize the talent you have. They range from involving them in recreating pride and purpose, in terms of the mission of your company.

In some of the our more broken sectors, just think of financial services for instance, there's a tremendous sense that the entire business model is broken, and where do you go next for robust profits? But if you're also been frozen out and not talked and not involved in the process, you yourself don't feel any ownership in terms of where the company may or not may be going. Involving your top talent in the restructuring, refocusing, recreation of purpose and mission are very important.

So it ranges from that to figuring out how to help people, your top people and also yourself, with the body blows. There's tremendous impact on health and well being that's gone on in this recession. We measured a lot of this, whether it's depression or compromised immune systems. There are really egregious impacts on the body that has gone on in this last 12-month period.

Ernst & Young has an amazing program called Pinnacles which is really reaching out and helping them their top professionals to work on their wellness and their vitality and resilience. And that, I think, is particularly valuable this year.

So these eight interventions, I think all of them have many case examples, they are things that companies are trying but it's about feeding the cell, restoring the spirits, knitting together the motivation of the folks that you are totally reliant on for the next stage.