Do You Have a Growth Mindset?

Mindset is everything. If that statement seems too strong, consider that we bring these basic assumptions to every decision and action we make. Left unexamined, they may unnecessarily restrict us or lead us in the wrong direction altogether. Perception may not truly be reality, but when it comes to how we approach challenges and opportunities, mindset determines the world we encounter and possibilities we apprehend. Achieving the power of pull requires us to make our assumptions explicit and examine them in different contexts — testing, challenging and refining.

As we began to discuss in our last post, adapting to the Big Shift and harnessing the potential of pull requires embracing a new mindset. This posting will focus on another key set of assumptions.

In her 2006 book, Mindset: The New Psychology of Success, Stanford Professor Carol Dweck distinguishes two extremes of the mindsets people tend to have about their basic qualities:

In a fixed mindset, "your qualities are carved in stone." Whatever skills, talents, and capabilities you have are predetermined and finite. Whatever you lack, you will continue to lack. This fixed mindset applies not just to your own qualities, but to the qualities of others.
In a growth mindset, "your basic qualities are things you can cultivate through your efforts...everyone can change and grow through application and experience." Qualities like intelligence are a starting point, but success comes as a result of effort, learning, and persistence.
The distinction between fixed and growth mindsets has tremendous implications — as individuals and organizations — for how we address the growing pressures around us.

The Mindset Paradox: The greatest threat to success is avoiding failure. One of the most provocative aspects of Dweck's work is what it says about our approach to challenges. In a fixed mindset, you avoid challenging situations that might lead to failure because success depends upon protecting and promoting your set of fixed qualities and concealing your deficiencies. If you do fail, you focus on rationalizing the failure rather than learning from it and developing your capabilities. With a growth mindset, you focus on learning and development rather than failure and actively pursue the types of challenges that will likely lead to both learning and failure. This sounds a lot like the questing disposition we have discussed previously.

Mindset profoundly shapes key business practices:
Business Ecosystems. If you have a fixed mindset, you believe that there are a finite set of smart people and valuable resources outside your company. The challenge is how to identify, connect with and mobilize them to deliver more value to the marketplace — static resources tied together in a static ecosystem. The ecosystem benefits from the network effects of adding more and more participants because more diverse capabilities are connected and accessible.

If you believe that both the resources and the ecosystem itself are dynamic, then the role of the ecosystem is not just to connect and mobilize existing resources but to build relationships that help all participants get better faster. This leads to a more powerful form of increasing returns — not just network effects but new mechanisms to accelerate learning and performance improvement — as each participant learns faster as more and more participants join the ecosystem.

Talent Management. A fixed mindset leads you to focus almost exclusively on attracting and retaining talent. The assumption: each person's skills and capabilities are set. You will tend to devote too many resources to those with a perceived stock of knowledge and overlook (and eventually lose) employees with limited stocks but great learning potential. Worse, because you underestimate the value of learning and development, you won't likely get the most out of those employees you do value.

With a growth mindset, you understand that individual and organizational capabilities can be cultivated and developed, to improve performance and to expand in new directions. You focus more on talent development, creating work environments and practices that enable employees, regardless of work classification, to develop new skills and to learn by working with others, by problem-solving and experimentation.

Amadd wrote on Nov 27^th, 2010 at 4:08am:


The trickle down effect was never meant to fix the problems, it was only a delaying tactic!

Capitalism is certainly in need of some new directions!

Thanks for the map muso, very interesting. China wins....if they are telling the truth. We should be very worried.

THE NEXT WIKILEAKS WILL BE ABOUT A MAJOR BANK

The next Wikileaks will be about a major U.S. Bank.

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange told Forbes that early next year, a major U.S. bank will suddenly find itself turned inside out.

And now everyone's clamoring to find out which bank will be the subject of the massive data breach.

Will it be the biggest US bank? Asked Forbes' Andy Greenberg, who interviewed Assange.

"No comment," said Assange.

The one clue we get is this:

"With regard to these corporate leaks, I should say: There’s an overlap between corporate and government leaks."

Perhaps that means it's a bailed out bank. But really, no one has a clue.

Here's the bulk of what Assange did say:

Tens of thousands of its internal documents will be exposed on Wikileaks.org with no polite requests for executives’ response or other forewarnings.

The data dump will lay bare the finance firm’s secrets on the Web for every customer, every competitor, every regulator to examine and pass judgment on.

Early next year, the Wikileaks document, which Assange compares to containing the damning e-mails that poured out of the Enron trial, will hit.

Obviously this is huge news. We'll have to wait for more information.

Link -
http://www.businessinsider.com/the-next-wikileaks-will-be-about-a-major-bank-201...
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That could cause a ripple on the financial waters OR a Tsunami, depends on what is exposed!

Though the situation is grim, it is not hopeless

HOPE IN HARD TIMES: This is an opportunity to learn about what matters

“Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out” – Vaclav Havel

ASIDE FROM the political and societal fallout of the recession, the ongoing crisis has taken its toll on the mental health of the nation.

Over the past two years and particularly in the past two weeks, we have experienced a great trauma to our collective psyche. In a way that has not happened in generations, Irish citizens have been taken through a bewildering set of emotions from rage to despair and now are genuinely frightened by the future and what will happen next.

This ongoing trauma has challenged our nation’s self-esteem and self-worth. In two short years, we have moved from the hubris of the Celtic Tiger and seeing ourselves as an economic miracle within Europe to the ignominy of having financial control removed from us, and now being held internationally as an example of excess and poor self-management.

The situation has been made much worse by the reactions of our political and economic leaders, who have pursued a course of denial about the reality of the crisis. So often they have tried to “talk up” the economy to persuade us (and perhaps the markets) that we have turned a corner, only for the news to be worse the next week.

At best, their actions could be interpreted as a display of naive optimism, or, more cynically, they could have been motivated by a desire to cling onto power at all costs, indicating the failings of our political system in which we are all complicit – if our leaders tell us the hard truths then we will not re-elect them. Either way, such denial displays a lack of empathy for the nation’s mood and a lack of skill in how to lead and inspire people in a crisis.

Gaining perspective and an understanding of where we are at is crucial to moving forward. Each person needs to take responsibility to educate themselves about the situation we are in rather than just trusting the leaders who let us down. We are now facing into a very uncertain and difficult future, which will include economic hardship.

While our nation’s problems have been created by the uncontrolled spending of the Celtic Tiger years, we must also understand the worldwide dimension.

Some groups like Feasta, the Foundation for Economics of Sustainability, understand the root of the crisis as a worldwide system failure in our politico-economic model of the world. The whole world has been pursuing an unsustainable path of economic growth and consumption which has led to overwhelming debt, resource depletion and environmental degradation, not to mention future dangerous climate change as well as social inequality. Though we have been warned for decades, we are now reaching the limits of this expansion and a resultant worldwide bubble is at the point of collapsing. Though not widely reported, the current international financial crisis coincided with a peaking of oil production, meaning that worldwide future economic growth will be limited by dwindling oil supplies, which could result in economic contraction in the long term. This has huge implications for civilisation and our way of life.

Though the situation is grim, it is not hopeless. Just as the pivotal point of psychological change is a moving from denial to an acceptance of reality, so we are at point where we can collectively make a choice to face what is ahead so we can take hopeful and courageous action.

While we do not have much choice about economic cutbacks and sacrifice, we can choose to do it in a way that is fair, and that allows us to support the vulnerable. While we may all have to get used to doing with less, we can use this as an opportunity to learn about what matters and about the important things in life. While the future may be uncertain and at times fearful, we can commit to courageous action and make certain our support and care of one another.

We now need a leadership that is prepared to bravely tackle the problems we face, while also being able to inspire hope and constructive action. How we collectively cope will depend largely on whether we can build communities that nurture hope rather than despair and keep people together rather than apart.

Link -
http://www.irishtimes.com/newspaper/health/2010/1130/1224284419032.html
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That hits a number of the right buttons, but not all!

Extend and Pretend: Hitting the Maturity Wall

With $492 Trillion outstanding in the notional value of global Interest Rate Swaps it is reasonable to conclude that, since one party on either side of these counterparty trades WILL GET HURT when rates rise, there is going to be a lot of hurting in a total global economy of only $45 Trillion.

All indications are that by 2012 the global economy is going to run headlong into a funding wall.

Markets always anticipate events at least 6 months in advance. This wall is so huge I doubt the market will wait and likely will begin adjusting 12- 14 months ahead!

All bets are off if we get another sovereign or possible US State surprise. This would move our Maturity Wall even 'closer in'.



Link -
http://www.safehaven.com/article/16303/extend-and-pretend-hitting-the-maturity-w...
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This is only one issue of concern, in a wall of worry, which is currently heading our way!

The Employment / Population Ratio

http://economistsview.typepad.com/.a/6a00d83451b33869e20147e04ce338970b-800wi

Link -
http://seekingalpha.com/article/239637-the-employment-population-ratio?source=em...
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Of far more interest, in coming decades, would be the Employment to TOTAL Population Ratio!

Why?

Because this will reflect the huge numbers of Baby Boomers that are now starting to exit the workforce, as well as those who are becoming unemployed & under-employed, due to Economic circumstances.

The ETPR would more accurately reflect the pulse of the Economy, as the ratio of Employed to Non Employed is likely to continue to decline and with that will come fewer Employed Worker Tax $'s supporting a greater number of those Unemployed, Under-employed & Retired.

This will mean a much greater Tax on those Employed, particularly when including the large increase in anticipated Health Care costs for the Baby Boomers and the spiralling costs of Government Debt.