This Is 'Out Of The Box' Thinking.

Apple engineer rebuilds an ancient Greek mechanism — the oldest known computer - known as The Antikythera Mechanism.

Out Of LEGO. Watch:

Are You In A Slump At Work? (My WSJ Article)

Interviewed by the Wall Street Journal this morning on dealing with falling into a 'slump' at work:

"Some workers can pull out of a slump by asking for new responsibilities or challenges on the job, or brainstorming new ideas to streamline or improve their work, says Rich Gee, a Stamford, Conn., executive coach. In other cases, people who think they are in a slump realize they have simply grown tired of battling their own weaknesses or lack of interest, Mr. Gee says. In that case, a career change can be the answer."

I also spoke with Sue Shellenbarger at the WSJ about many other strategies about jumping out of a slump (but the kind editors at the WSJ are concise editors . . . so my stuff was trimmed):

How can you tell when you are in a slump?

• SOS - Same Old Stuff - you find yourself doing the same things, day after day, with no change, no challenges.
• Clock Watching - Late to work, long lunches, leave early and watch the clock while you're there.
• You Find You Don't Care - More and more things are obstacles rather than opportunities. You complain more than compliment.

What are some techniques you can use to get out of a slump? Change The Game:

• Stay in your position - Ask for increased responsibilities, brainstorm new ideas and efficiencies. Modify your job!
• Leave your position, same company - Look for lateral positions that better use your talents. New people, new responsibilities.
• Leave your company - You might need fresh air. We/Companies/Positions all change/evolve - what do you want to do now?

Have you worked with clients in slumps? Absolutely!

• Client #1: Bored/Dying at current job - helped them move to running a full-time website/blog on a hot and growing area! Making big bucks now.
• Client #2: In Marketing - didn't like the work or the people - helped them move to Sales in a key account position - they are loving getting out of the cubicle culture and interacting with clients.
• Client #3: C-Level - Tired of the 'soap opera' politics that come with the position, now out doing incredibly creative things with non-profits.

Here's the entire article.

Isn't the word 'slump' one of the ugliest words in the English language? I don't want one! Neither do you!

P.S. Sue is one of the nicest and most professional reporters I know. When she asks for help, she delivers. Thank you Sue!

If you want to subscribe to the WSJ - just click here - it's the best resource you can buy to help you with your career!

Buffett Predicts Bright Economic Future.

Famed investor Warren Buffett declared that the country and world will not fall back into the grips of the recession. "I am a huge bull on this country. We are not going to have a double-dip recession at all," said Buffett, chairman of Omaha, Neb.-based Berkshire Hathaway Inc. "I see our businesses coming back across the board."

Buffett said the same things that worked for the country through a century of two world wars, a depression and more – all while increasing the standard of living – will work again. He said banks are lending money again, businesses are hiring employees and he expects the economy to come back stronger than ever.

"This country works," Buffett said during a question-and-answer session via video at the Montana Economic Development Summit. "The best is yet to come."

By Matt Gouras at The Huffington Post

How To Be The BEST At What You Do.

All you have to do is watch this video:

What can you do RIGHT NOW to add this kind of focus and customer service to what you do?

Make It Happen. NOW.

Gasoline, Hybrid, & Electric Cars Are Not The Answer.

Am I not getting this? I follow this news track often because I am very interested in this country's future energy needs. What I keep seeing is a concerted (and in my opinion, a highly misguided and uninformed) focus on alternative energy vehicles that still require energy from dirty energy sources. Let me explain:

Gasoline - This is a no brainer. Don't even add what's happening in the Gulf right now. Our attention to gasoline puts this country at risk by forcing us to do business with unstable countries. This should stop.

Hybrids - Great idea, but it still uses gasoline. And if you ever drove one, the pickup is not quite what you'd expect. And at the end of the day, the mileage is still equal (or surpassed) to a VW Polo Diesel (check it out). Also - just wait when you need to replace your batteries - there will be a lot of angry people out there.

Electric Cars - All I read today focuses on the Nissan Leaf and the Chevy Volt. Where will the electricity come from? The air? No - it will come from Oil, Coal, and Nuclear - all three are very dirty. And you have to plug them in everywhere since they only get 100 miles per charge.

So where do we go from here? I have three words: Honda FCX Clarity - the most important car since the car was invented.

Check out this video:

No Oil. No Gasoline. No Electricity. It runs on Hydrogen - the most abundant element in the universe and it spits out water vapor. How do we do it?

This should be Our Five Year Plan:

Step 1: Government subsidies (Manhattan Project) to help automakers retool to produce hydrogen cars. Begin to incrementally tax gasoline to painfully move the public to hydrogen. Trucks can still use diesel (or natural gas) - we can focus on them in the second round. Step 2: All gas stations are refitted not to dispense gasoline, but to dispense liquid hydrogen. Step 3: State rebates to help owners purchase and own new hydrogen cars (you can probably throw in federal too). Step 4: Convert all refining stations that turn petroleum into gasoline into refining stations that turn water/seawater into hydrogen. Same energy expended - different results. Step 5: Leverage the existing distribution system for gasoline to now carry hydrogen. Step 6: Slowly wean the American public off gasoline - still have it around - just for antique cars - and keep it really expensive.

It's that easy - or am I missing something in my logic?

I know it will be a hard 5 years - but no harder than the trillions we have spent on wars to keep the oil flowing.

Hard Time Getting Started On Monday? Try This.

Whenever I have a dip in energy or productivity, I watch 30 to 60 seconds of this video. It works.

Honesty from Clay Bennett.

Check out more Clay here.

Everyone For Themselves OR The Sinking Boat Syndrome.

Years ago (I'm talking 1970's - 80's), there was a common bond that held groups together. Things like citizenship, affiliations, or just plain ethics. Today, all I see in the media, business, and life is a habitual replaying of a sinking ship - everyone for themselves - and screw the rest.

We as a nation have to come to grips with reality - our family has been spending too much for too long - and the credit card is due. We can't flip the balance to another card - we have to begin paying down our balance or face bankruptcy, foreclosure and ruin. This is prevalent at the national, state, and local levels. Folks - there are three choices (and only three choices) when it comes to this situation:

• Increase money coming in (raise taxes).
• Decrease money going out (reduce benefits).
• Cut services (employees, depth & breadth of programs).

That's it. It's that simple. Unfortunately both political parties cannot bring themselves to make these hard changes. Why? Because they fear for their political lives AND hope that someone will come along with another credit card to help them bounce the balance.

From a business perspective, there are many managers out there that manage to save their own skin - and no one else's. They are risk-averse and toe the company line like a deer in the headlights. No innovation, no risk, no ideas - and they change direction as often as the wind blows to ensure that they maintain their bonuses and status quo. In business there are three states also:

• Growing
• Flat
• Shrinking

But I maintain that there are two - you are either growing or shrinking - up or down - because flat is not an option for long if you want a healthy company. To grow is to take risks, compete, try new things, grow successful programs . . . think different. I only see this happening in a smattering of large companies and many startups (who will probably eat the lunch of the big fish very soon  . . . Google?).

And this affects our homes, neighbors, friendships too. We are too busy, too unfocused to help one another. It's time we begin to reach out and personally help one another - that's why we are on this earth. Think about it.

I heard that many people are leaving the U.S. because they feel that the government, our states, and our cities are dysfunctional.Why not stay and try to fix it? They are more interested in saving their bank accounts so they can buy another boat.

Bottom line - stop thinking like you're on a sinking ship - because if you do - EVERYONE GOES DOWN. Trust me.

You Have To Listen - My Favorite Podcasts!

I began listening to the Radiolab Podcast about six months ago and I am riveted to every episode. RIVETED. Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility.

In late 2001, Jad Abumrad was asked to host a showcase of documentary radio. He called it Radiolab. For a few years, Jad picked pieces that he liked and played them on Sunday nights. Every so often, Jad would make his own story ... or conduct his own investigation...and include it in his show. More and more, Radiolab featured Jad's original work, and played fewer and fewer of his favorite documentaries from around the world.

Then one day in November of 2003, Jad was having breakfast with his friend Robert Krulwich. As Jad aired more of his own work, Robert was becoming impressed with how different and wonderful the show was sounding. On this November morning, Robert and Jad were discussing the mystery of how memory works, when one of them came up with the idea of taking that conversation into the recording studio.

Whether that idea came from Jad or Robert may be lost to the still-unsolved mystery of how memory works. But they went ahead and talked to some scientists, and Jad embroidered and illustrated the resulting conversations with sounds and music. Before long, Robert and Jad decided to team up and re-launch Radiolab in its current form.

Some great episodes: The Placebo Effect - My Favorite! Numbers - For Anyone Confused or Attracted To Numbers! Limits - Testing the Limits of Human Endurance Afterlife - What happens at the moment when we slip from life...to the other side?

Radiolab is heard around the country on over 200 stations. Check it out!

Time For Wall Street CEOs To 'Earn Back' America's Trust.

Bailout watchdog and Middle Class advocate Elizabeth Warren has accused Wall Street CEOs of abusing consumer trust and challenged them to step up and support financial reform — for the nation's benefit as well as their own. In an opinion piece to be published in Tuesday's Wall Street Journal, Warren writes:

For years, Wall Street CEOs have thrown away customer trust like so much worthless trash.

Banks and brokers have sold deceptive mortgages for more than a decade. Financial wizards made billions by packaging and repackaging those loans into securities. And federal regulators played the role of lookout at a bank robbery, holding back anyone who tried to stop the massive looting from middle-class families. When they weren't selling deceptive mortgages, Wall Street invented new credit card tricks and clever overdraft fees.

The Harvard Law professor and TARP overseer added that the bankers "squandered what little trust was left" when they took taxpayer bailouts.

The piece, titled "Wall Street's Race to the Bottom," explains how bankers can reclaim that trust. An important piece — read it.

America's "Can't-Do" List.

Lately, I've been studying the melting of glaciers in the greater Himalayas. Understanding the cascading effects of the slow-motion downsizing of one of the planet's most magnificent landforms has, to put it politely, left me dispirited. By Orville Schell at The Los Angeles Times.

It is impossible to focus on those Himalayan highlands without realizing that something that once seemed immutable and eternal has become vulnerable, even perishable. Those magnificent glaciers are wasting away on an overheated planet, and no one knows what to do about it.

Another tipping point has also been on my mind lately, and it's left me no less melancholy. In this case, the threat is to my own country, the United States. We Americans too seem to have passed a tipping point. Like the glaciers of the high Himalaya, long-familiar aspects of our nation are beginning to seem as if they are, in a sense, melting away.

In the last few months, as I've roamed the world from San Francisco to Copenhagen to Beijing to Dubai, I've taken to keeping a double- entry list of what works and what doesn't, country by country. Unfortunately, it's become largely a list of what works elsewhere but doesn't work here. In places such as China, South Korea, Sweden, Holland, Switzerland and (until recently) the United Arab Emirates, you find people hard at work on the challenges of education, transportation, energy and the environment. In these places, one feels the kind of hopefulness and can-do optimism that used to abound in the United States.

China, a country I've visited more than 100 times since 1975, elicits an especially complicated set of feelings in me. Its Leninist government doesn't always live up to Western ideals on such things as political transparency, the rule of law, human rights and democracy. And yet it has managed to conjure an economic miracle. In China today, you feel an unmistakable sense of energy and optimism in the air that, believe me, is bittersweet for an American pondering why the regenerative powers of his own country have gone missing.

As I've traveled from China's gleaming, efficient airports to our often-chaotic and broken-down versions of the same, or ridden on Europe's high-speed trains that so sharply contrast with our clunky, slowly vanishing passenger rail system, I keep expanding my list of what works here at home and what doesn't.

Over time, the list's entries have fallen into three categories. There are things that are robust and growing, replete with promise, the envy of the world. Then there are those things that are still alive and kicking but are precariously balanced between growth and decline. Finally, there are those things that are irredeemably broken.

Here is the score card as I see it:

Aspects of U.S. life that are still vigorous and filled with potential:

• , which is delivering much of the world's most innovative research and ideas.
• Silicon Valley, which has enormous inventiveness, energy and capital at its disposal.
• Civil society, which, despite the collapse of the economy, seems to be luring the best and brightest young people, and superbly performs the crucial function of goading government and other institutions.
• American philanthropy, which is the most evolved, well funded and innovative in the world.
• The U.S. military, the best-led, -trained and -equipped on the planet, despite being repeatedly thrust into hopeless wars by stupid politicians.
• The spirit and cohesiveness of small-town American life.
• The arts, including our film industry, which remains the globe's sole superpower of entertainment, along with the requisite networks of orchestras, ballet companies, theaters, pop music groups and world-class museums.

Aspects of U.S. life that still function but need help:

• Higher and secondary school education, in which America boasts some of the globe's preeminent institutions. Increasingly, though, many of the best institutions are private, and jewel-in-the-crown public systems such as California's continue to be hit with devastating budget cuts.
• Environmental protection, which compares favorably with that in other countries despite being underfunded.
• The national energy system, which still delivers but is overdependent on oil and coal, and depends on a grid badly in need of upgrading.

Aspects of U.S. life in need of drastic intervention:

• Public elementary education, which in most states is desperately underfunded and fails to deliver on its promise to provide all children with high-quality schooling.
• The federal government, which is essentially paralyzed by partisanship and incapable of delivering solutions to the country's most pressing problems.
• State governments, which are largely dysfunctional and nearly insolvent.
• American infrastructure, including highways, docks, bridges and tunnels, dikes, waterworks and other essential systems we aren't maintaining and upgrading as we should.
• Airlines and the airports they service, which are almost Third World in equipment and service standards.
• Passenger rail, which has not one mile of truly high-speed rail.
• The financial system, whose over-paid executives and underregulated practices ran us off an economic cliff in 2008 and compromised the whole system in the eyes of the world.
• The electronic media, which, except for public broadcasting and a vital and growing Internet, are an overly commercialized, broken-down mess that have let down the country in terms of keeping us informed.
• Print media, which from newspaper publishing to book publishing are in crisis.
• Basic manufacturing, which has fallen so far behind it seems headed for oblivion.

I started keeping these lists because I was searching for things that would banish that dispiriting sense that America is in decline. And yet the can-do list remains unbearably short and the can't-do one grows each time I travel.

American prowess and promise, once seemingly as much a permanent part of the global landscape as glaciers, mountains and oceans, seems to be melting away by the day, just like the great Himalayan ice fields.

Orville Schell is the director of the Asia Society's Center on U.S.-China Relations. He is the former dean of the Graduate School of Journalism at UC Berkeley and the author of many books on China. A longer version of this article appears at tomdispatch.com.