Big Think+ Blog

Big Think+ Blog

Learn leadership development from the world’s biggest thinkers

Use humor to enchant your audience, with John Cleese
 You can practically see them slipping away. Yes, they’re still in the conversation with you, at least physically, but you know: The other person has disengaged. Who knows where their […]
Barbara Oakley: How too much focus can limit your creativity
 Have you ever had the experience of giving up on a problem and coming back to it some time later to find its solution suddenly obvious? According to Barbara Oakley, […]
From rut stories to river stories: Take these steps to change your internal dialogue
 Angie McArthur, CEO of Professional Thinking Partners and the co-author of Collaborative Intelligence, talks about keeping a relationship “clean.” She’s talking about dealing with misunderstandings before they have a chance […]
Chris Voss: Close deals like an FBI negotiator
 Negotiating is often a white-knuckle affair, but the stakes are rarely higher than when the FBI is trying to come to terms with a kidnapper. Chris Voss, now CEO of […]
For growth, identify what’s fixed and what’s flexible
For a startup, growth is a straightforward matter of scaling up: adding employees, setting up distribution channels, and so on. But, says David Butler in his Big Think+ video “Design […]
Say goodbye to panic: Build your emotional agility
 As the world seems to spin ever faster, “agility” has become more than something to which a business might aspire — it’s become an absolute necessity for any company looking […]
Maajid Nawaz: Respect your adversaries and dialogue will follow
 Disagreements are inevitable — we all have different experiences that lead us to be who we are and to what we believe. Almost as inevitable are distrust, suspicion, and even […]
5-year plan? How about a 500-year plan?
Sal Khan, founder of Khan Academy, is a programmer. When he got the idea to begin posting free online classes, he was able to get the basic infrastructure in place […]
Business drinks: China’s thousand-year-old test of trust
 The Taoist idea of wu wei is deeply rooted in Chinese culture. Often translated as “non-doing” or “non-action,” it’s an effortless state in which you’re not explicitly aware of yourself […]
Negotiation 101: Master research, empathy, and stagecraft
 Journalist Ronan Farrow says he’s not a great negotiator, but he’s certainly had a unique opportunity to see how one works. Just out of law school, he was recruited by […]
China’s economy: The good, the bad, and the future
 Weijian Shan, chairman of the PAG group, sees a bright future for investors in China, as long as they understand the evolving nature of the country’s economic growth. Though China’s […]
Winners and losers: Understand Asia to stay on top of your game
 “History is always written by the winners,” goes the saying. It’s also true that history is continually being made, and the identity of the “winner” continually shifts. In his Big […]
Why 85% of the business world thinks differently than you do
 Business, on every level, is becoming more multi-cultural. Whether it’s embracing diversity internally, expanding to multiple sites around the world, or entering distant markets such as China, never has it […]
Big Think’s CEO on how Big Think got built
 Building Big Think from little more than an idea to 30 million monthly visitors, co-founder Victoria Rachel Montgomery-Brown knows something about being an entrepreneur. Her idea, together with co-founder Peter […]
Quality over quantity: What companies just don’t get about work hours
 Jody Greenstone Miller is founder and CEO of Business Talent Group. She’s seen companies lose great people simply because of the way management assumes a job must be structured: To […]
How leaders rise: Do this to move up the ladder at work
 As companies begin to recognize diversity as an opportunity — and not just a problem to be solved — you might assume that your natural leadership ability will be obvious […]

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