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Tom Friedman has penned a thought-provoking oped, "One Country, Two Revolutions."

In discussing the ongoing social media revolution underway in Silicon Valley, Friedman turns to 21st century leadership:

Marc Benioff, the founder of Salesforce.com, a cloud-based software provider, describes this phase of the I.T. revolution with the acronym SOCIAL. S, he says, is for speed - everything is now happening faster. O, he says, stands for open. If you don't have an open environment inside your company or country, these new tools will blow you wide open. C is for collaboration because this revolution enables people to organize themselves within companies and societies into loosely coupled teams to take on any kind of challenges - from designing a new product to taking down a government. I is for individuals, who are able to reach around the globe to start something or collaborate on something farther, faster, deeper, cheaper than ever before - as individuals.

What we are today comes from our thoughts of yesterday, and our present thoughts build our life of tomorrow: Our life is the creation of our mind." ~ BUDDHA

While the Buddha may have said that over 2,500 years ago, today's neuroscience is helping us to understand the mind's complex hard-wired mechanisms with stunning speed.

A 2007 study, conducted by Norman Farb at the University of Toronto showed that most of us are not consciously focused and are on "auto-pilot" 46.9% of the time. Our minds are wandering, not attentive to the tasks at hand or on immediate outside experience, instead we're looking into our own thoughts.

In chaotic times, an executive's instinct may be to strive for greater efficiency by tightening control. But the truth is that relinquishing authority and giving employees considerable autonomy can boost innovation and success at knowledge firms, even during crises. Our research provides hard evidence that leaders who give in to the urge to clamp down can end up doing their companies a serious disservice.

Although business thinkers have long proposed that companies can engage workers and stimulate innovation by abdicating control-establishing nonhierarchical teams that focus on various issues and allowing those teams to make most of the company's decisions-guidance on implementing such a policy is lacking. So is evidence of its consequences. Indeed, companies that actually practice abdication of control are rare. Two of them, however, compellingly demonstrate that if it's implemented properly, this counterintuitive idea can dramatically improve results.

What is This List of Lenses? The list is essentially what I have been using and building upon for 15 years dealing with social software and the hurdles and headaches that can come from it. These 40 plus lenses (sometimes nearly 50) are questions, models, and frameworks I use when working with clients or in workshops.

Question: What does Oprah Winfrey have in common with World War II General George S. Patton? Answer: Being an avid diarist.

Recently, Oprah offered her readers glimpses into her diaries, along with encouragement to keep their own. Many well-known figures throughout history, from John Adams to Andy Warhol, have faithfully kept records of their daily lives. Undoubtedly, some have had an eye toward history in their devotion to journaling. But aside from the shot at immortality, are there any real benefits of keeping a diary?

There are. In particular, there are four reasons for keeping a work diary: (1) focus, (2) patience, (3) planning, and (4) personal growth.

Welcome to the Complete QS Guide to Self-Tracking!
Here you will find tools, apps, and projects that are tagged, rated, and reviewed by the global Quantified Self community (that includes you!) This guide is funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Pioneer Portfolio, which supports bold ideas at the cutting edge of health and health care, in partnership with Institute for the Future. Our goal is to gather and organize the world's collective self-tracking resources in one place, in a way that is useful and encourages collaboration between self-tracking experts and beginners who are just starting out. Dive in now and explore some of the Tools or Members who are part of this site...

About Quantified Self
Are you interested in self-tracking? Do you use a computer, mobile phone, electronic gadget, or pen and paper to record your work, sleep, exercise, diet, mood, or anything else? Would you like to share your methods and learn from what others are doing? If so, you are in the right place. This short intro will help you get you oriented.

What is Quantified Self?
Quantified Self is a collaboration of users and tool makers who share an interest in self knowledge through self-tracking. We exchange information about our personal projects, the tools we use, tips we've gleaned, lessons we've learned. We blog, meet face to face, and collaborate online. There are three main "branches" to our work.

*The Quantified Self blog and community site. You are here! This is the central hub, where we keep track of all important goings-on, and you will soon be able to make connections, develop ongoing collaborations, and share detailed documentation of your personal projects.

A site where you can set up a goal and monitor your progress.

A Habit of Mind is knowing how to behave intelligently when you DON'T know the answer.
Employing Habits of Mind requires drawing forth certain patterns of intellectual behavior that produce powerful results. They are a composite of many skills, attitudes and proclivities including:
Value:  Choosing to employ a pattern of intellectual behaviors rather than other, less productive patterns.
Inclination:  Feeling the tendency toward employing a pattern of intellectual behaviors.
Sensitivity:  Perceiving opportunities for, and appropriateness of employing the pattern of behavior.
Capability:  Possessing the basic skills and capacities to carry through with the behaviors.
Commitment:  Constantly striving to reflect on and improve performance of the pattern of intellectual behavior.

Aart de Geus, video 5:07

Tony Schwartz. Managers at the breaking point

Maxwell: 21 laws of leadership

Still, a recent Twitter conversation about daily habits and successful business leaders, prompted  me to ask 14 top performers in a wide variety of fields to share one thing they do, every day, they feel has contributed significantly to their success.

key beliefs that are held by the best bosses - and rejected, or more often simply never even thought about, by the worst bosses

An important book for taking stock of one's aspirations. Personal strategy development tools. "The Personal Enterprise Plan" aims to help individuals make the best use of their freedom inside institutions.. Freedom allows us to identify ourselves, to express our potential ad aspirations and to use the resources of the institution to realize ourselves or to change institutions if the resources cannot be provided."

It found that 43% of those surveyed described their company's culture as based on command-and-control, top-down management or leadership by coercion-what Mr Seidman calls "blind obedience". The largest category, 54%, saw their employer's culture as top-down, but with skilled leadership, lots of rules and a mix of carrots and sticks, which Mr Seidman calls "informed acquiescence". Only 3% fell into the category of "self-governance", in which everyone is guided by a "set of core principles and values that inspire everyone to align around a company's mission". The study found evidence that such differences matter. Nearly half of those in blind-obedience companies said they had observed unethical behaviour in the previous year, compared with around a quarter in the other sorts of firm. Yet only a quarter of those in the blind-obedience firms said they were likely to blow the whistle, compared with over 90% in self-governing firms. Lack of trust may inhibit innovation, too. More than 90% of employees in self-governing firms, and two-thirds in the informed-acquiescence category, agreed that "good ideas are readily adopted by my company". At blind-obedience firms, fewer than one in five did.