What is Big Think?

We are Big Idea Hunters…

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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Transcript

Question: What is the difference between leading a small business and a major corporation?

Thomas Cooley: You know, there-- it's a much bigger job leading a large corporation and there's some aspects of luck that determine who rises to the top in large corporations, but you know, they're all important skills. And when you meet powerful business leaders, the one thing you do understand very clearly is that there is something about them that led them to rise to the top, that there are these definable characteristics of strong leaders.

Question: What are those characteristics?

Thomas Cooley: Well, they're, you know, a sense of assurance about what you're doing, a sense of vision about what your role in society is, and you know, the ability to articulate that vision, certainly self-confidence and a strong sense of values.

Recorded: 3/21/08