Doug Hall, a chemical engineer and entrepreneurial giant, encourages business leaders to step out bolder in what he calls capitalist creativity. I call it reframing hard and soft skills to what I term smart skills. 
In his book, Jumpstart your Business Brain, Doug shows how smart people tend to use and celebrate multiple approaches to solving business problems for more profitability. It’s common practice for those who already possess or who develop strengths located in both sides of the brain, but what about the rest of us? Simply put, people can learn skills that would show brain activity in many areas if they wired their heads as Doug did, with a dozen electrodes. What do you think?
To develop both sides of the brain is to sharpen hard and soft skills into tools for the trade. For example, Doug wrote: “when I do math problems, both sides of my brain light up as I both calculate and visualize the numbers.” When Einstein flunked math class and his eighth grade teacher called him a bonehead, she might have been measuring hard skills.
Perhaps she should have looked at the way Einstein visualized himself riding the curve of the arc so that he could calculate solutions that became a Theory of Relativity.
If naming skills as soft tends to take the punch out of capabilities that generate new growth in any workplace, then celebrating these as smart skills open up solutions to problems that escape most people.
How do you jumpstart your brain? Opening up any new pathways that escape others?
Interesting, if I had more time in my life I would read this book, I'll just keep checking your blog! You have some great posts, keep up the great work!
Posted by: Michelle Dunn | April 16, 2006 4:50 AM | Permalink to Comment