Mark van Vugt and Anjana Ahuja think it’s because there is a “mismatch” between the way we lead and follow today and the way our ancestors operated. Further, they suggest, leading and following are adaptive behaviors, and our current ambivalent attitude toward those who lead us is likely to be rooted in evolutionary biology. Their new book, Selected: Why some people lead, why others follow and why it matters, examines how leading and following have emerged over tens of thousands of years from primitive eras through modern cultures and the worlds of business, politics and religion. 

“Where our forebears clustered in small groups on the African savannah, half the world’s population now lives in cities,” Ahuja writes in “The Natural Selection of Leaders,” an article in NewScientist. “Where leadership was dispersed among the many, it is now concentrated in the hands of a political and corporate elite. Could this be why we feel disconnected from our leaders?”

Van Vugt, a professor of psychology at VU University  Amsterdam, who studies group and organizational processes from an evolutionary and social psychological perspective, and Ahuja, a science writer, say that leaders in hunter-gatherer communities tended to be picked in a fluid, bottom-up way, and assigned by peers who recognized  individuals with specifically needed skills. Domineering types who wanted to boss others or foster their own interests, Ahuja writes in the article, were “more likely to be assassinated than obeyed.”   Van Bugt writes in an earlier NewScientist article that while there was little difference in status or wealth between leaders and followers in ancestral societies, average salaries for US CEOs are now 179 times that of their workers.

Tall politicians tend to win contests over shorter rivals, corporate chiefs are disproportionately tall, and children can often identify leaders by looking at pictures. The authors suggest leaders often owe their positions in part to an “ability to push a ‘leader button’ in the human psyche.”

The good news, they suggest, is that insights from the past may help explain why some modern leadership practices work better than others: companies where workers participate in decision making tend to have better success and higher employee retention rates.  Good bosses and politicians know the value of solidarity with the rank and file. Read more about the book and van Vugt’s work here.

With traditional peer review,  a small group  of specialized experts rule, often anonymously, on whether academic work will be published in the most prestigious journals. The process can take months or years. The wait is distressing for professors whose route to tenure is at stake, and a release of information to other scholars and the public is delayed.  In the age of the internet, scholarly writing and research can be swiftly exposed to the judgments of a much broader and more diverse audience.

“Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review,” a New York Times story by Patricia Cohen,  describes how Shakespeare Quarterly, a prestigious 60-year-old academic journal, became the first elite humanities publication to  post essays online for review. A core group of experts was invited to post signed comments on Media Commons, a scholarly digital network,  and others who signed in with their own names could comment as well. More than 350 comments came from 41 people.  Authors of the four posted essays were able to respond to the comments and could choose to revise their work. The journal’s editors will make the final decision on what appears in the September 17 issue.

 Katherine Rowe, a Renaissance specialist and media historian  at Bryn Mawr College, is quoted in the Times story as saying: “What we’re experiencing now if the most important transformation in our reading and writing tools since the invention of moveable type. The way scholarly exchange is moving is radical, and we need to think about what it means for our fields.”

Several online sites post recent scholarly work in economics, medicine and the physical sciences. LiquidPubication is a European research project whose founders want to revolutionize the ways scientists share and evaluate their work. H-Net.org published free interactive newsletters from humanities and social science scholars all over the world.

Michele Lamont, a Harvard sociologist who analyzed peer review a 2009 book, has expressed skepticism about reviews by amateurs,  but notes that debates at the site Sociologica.mulino.it are considered “frontier knowledge” even though they are not peer reviewed. 

The emergence of a dangerous mutation that can make some bacteria resistant to almost all known antibiotics has infectious disease experts worried. The rise of antibiotic resistance has concerned scientists for years, but the new mutation poses some new threats. The mutation, called MDN-l, jumps easily from one strain of bacteria to another, and it has been found in gram negative bacteria such as Klebsiella pneumoniae, which has already caused outbreaks in hospitals in the US and abroad. 

The British medical journal  Lancet Infectious Diseases has reported that bacteria with the MDN-l gene has become increasingly common in India and Pakistan and has been found in patients in the United Kingdom and the US who received medical care in those countries.   The Lancet story “Emergence of a new antibiotic resistance mechanism in India, Pakistan, and the UK: a molecular, biological, and epidemiological study,” says isolates from India were from community acquired infections, indicating MDN-1 is widespread in the environment. The authors say the problem is serious, and that possibilities for international spread are “clear and frightening.”  The mutation makes e. coli and  Klebsiella pneumoniae bacteria resistant to nearly all powerful carbapenem antibiotics, often the last resort when other drugs have failed.

A New York Times story by Donald McNeil says the CDC noted the first three cases of NDM-l in US patients in June and advised doctors to be alert for MDN-l in patients who received medical care in South  Asia.  (The initials, the Times story says, stand for New Delhi metallo-beta-lactamase.) Experienced surgeons and sophisticated hospitals in India provide less expensive care than is available in Europe and the US, increasing the number of medical tourists seeking organ transplants, cosmetic surgery and other complex treatments.

One of the Lancet authors, Tim Walsh, is quoted in a Guardian story by Sarah Boseley as saying the emerging mutant may herald the end of antibiotics.  “This is potentially the end,” he said. “There are no antibiotics in the pipeline that have activity against MDN-l producing enterobacteriaceae.  We have a bleak window of maybe 10 years where we are going to have to use the antibiotics we have very wisely, but also grapple with the reality that we have nothing to treat these infections with.”

MRSA and Clostridium difficile, two other common health care-associated infections, are gram positive. Gram positive and gram negative bacteria differ in the structure of their cell walls. The Lancet article says gram negative bacteria pose the greater threat to public health because increase of resistance is faster in gram negative bacteria, and because few new antibiotics are being developed to treat gram negative bacterial infections and none fight MDN-l.

Henry Blumberg, a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Emory University School of Medicine, was not involved in the study, but he is alarmed about the emergence of multi-drug resistant organisms. “We are getting close to the post-antibiotic era,” he is quoted as saying in a PBS news blog by Talea Miller. “We are going to have organisms that are resistant to all the antibiotics we have” and that are essentially untreatable.  The end of antibiotics could plunge medicine nearly a century backwards.

One such scholar is Didier Sornette,  a professor of geophysics, physics and finance, who has studied earthquakes, epileptic seizures, and the popularity of YouTube videos.  A Wall Street Journal feature by Eleanor Laise describes Professor Sornette as man who enjoys personal and professional risk and has a passion for predicting events in complex systems. He likes to windsurf, water ski and ride motorcycles at frightening speed. He also likes to contemplate how similar principles might underlie such diverse phenomena as the rupture of rocket tanks and disruptions of financial crashes.  Last year he launched a controversial Financial Bubble Experiment to show that financial markets are not impenetrable and that reasonable forecasts are possible.

Sornette is director of the Financial Crisis Observatory at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich. In the experiment, he and colleagues predicted that four specific assets would form financial  bubbles within a six month period.

A PhysOrg.com story notes that to date, no one has a reliable method of saying whether a particular market or asset is in a bubble state, and further, no universal agreement exists on what a bubble is. Research by Sornette and his group, whose members view the question through the lenses of physics, math, geology, earth science, and economics, may change that.   Their experiment shows financial markets have an identifiable structure, and are subject to phases of growth that can change slowly or radically. They call the changes “regime shift,” and a crash is an extreme example.  The PhysOrg story reports all four of the selected assets experienced regime shift as Sornette and colleagues predicted, and two were in bubble state.  A bubble is said to occur when the price of any commodity rises far above its actual value.

Greater understanding of markets and bubbles can help prepare for economic upheavals, these scientists believe. Financial and geological earthquakes change environments. In a New York Times story “A Richter Scale for Markets” by Eric Dash, Sornette is quoted as saying: “Great earthquakes shape landscapes. Great crashes shape regulation, the perception of risk, and the psychology of people.”

But forecasting is still ambiguous and the impact of a major event can have extraordinary reach. The Times story notes that a group of  econophysicists wrote to billionaire philanthropist George Soros urging his support for a multidisciplinary approach to economics.

Recent financial crises, they wrote, have “damaged the economic system to the extent that several countries are on the verge of bankruptcy,  and social systems have become  dangerously vulnerable. The problem we have seen may be just the beginning of a larger crisis. The situation may get totally out of control, endangering social peace and cultural achievements.” They urged support for FuturIcT,  a trans-disciplinary initiative in which scholars from all over the world will attempt to build computer simulations to develop new understanding of economic and social systems.

 A group of artists who started the Conflict  Kitchen, a restaurant in Pittsburgh, take that question seriously.  “We’re using food as an entry point to help people explore cultures that aren’t talked about in the mainstream media,” Jon Rubin, an assistant professor of art at Carnegie Mellon University explains in a story in Salon. The Conflict Kitchen serves only food from countries Americans think of as enemies. Rubin and colleagues aren’t after controversy or a political agenda. They think food can help us look beyond politics and government policies to the human interests we share.

 The Salon story reports that the Conflict Kitchen recently held a meal simultaneously in Pittsburgh and Tehran, with diners, joined by web cams, eating the same food and conversing with each other by way of microphones and speakers. Discussion that began with food, buying it and growing it, veered into edgier issues  such as dating, social customs and job hunting.

 Right next door to the Conflict Kitchen is the Waffle Shop, another project by Rubin and friends, that features home made waffles and lets diners participate in a talk show broadcast over the Internet. Digestive diplomacy can foster interesting questions and explorations among people whose cultures differ starkly.  Diners soothed by comfort food included a young black man and an elderly Jewish woman who engaged in a frank discussion about race.

 An NPR interview by Robert Smith expands on the idea. He chats with Chris Fair, author of the book Cuisines of the Axis of Evil: A Dinner Party Approach to International Relations.  Fair is a foreign policy analyst and former political affairs officer for the United Nations.  She is also a self-described food nut, who thinks food is  one of the most interesting symbols of nationalism. Smith says her book embodies “a kind of Martha Stewart meets Henry Kissinger” point of view. Fair has made a practice of sampling food and collecting recipes in every country she has visited.

 Pandemic is a new multi-player cooperative board game that that lets up to five players test their kills at halting the global spread of fatal afflictions and absorb some science at the same time.  Play the Game, a story by Richard Grant in TheScientist.com  explains how it works. You start at a CDC research lab in Atlanta. Four deadly diseases are represented by 96 wooden cubes. Other pieces include 59 player cards, 48 infection cards, reference cards, a stack of city cards, and some special circumstance cards. An epidemic card—and there are six of them—can cause a chain reaction of disease outbreaks in cities all over the world.

 An interesting thing about this game is that the players all win or lose together, and they have to work really hard collaborate against the spread of disease.  If all the cities in this global game become infected, which can happen fast with adverse circumstances and inopportune timing and strategies, everyone loses. There are no dice, and players have to respond to random events created by shuffled decks of cards, and they have to consider the strengths and weaknesses of their colleagues. Players are assigned roles with differing abilities.  A medic, for instance, may be able to treat infected cities more effectively than other players, but the researcher can change cards with greater ease than other players. A dispatcher can mover other players around, an operations manager can build research labs in any city, and scientist needs only four cards of the same color to “cure” a disease. Other players need five. Several reviewers say it’s addicting for adults. Elaborate rules could make it frustrating for young children.   Watch a demonstration onYouTube,  Click here for the story and read reviews by game geeks and scroll down on the Amazon site to read reviews by other players.

  96 wooden cubes (for diseases)

•   5 pawns
•   6 wooden research stations
•   6 markers: 1 outbreak marker, 1 infection rate marker, and 4 cure markers
•   115 Cards
•   48 infection cards
•   59 player cards
•   4 role cards
•   4 quick reference cards

 Reviews – http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/531895/pandemic-a-board-game-odyssey-review

 http://www.boardgamegeek.com/thread/295883/whats-up-with-pandemic

 http://www.plexusinstitute.org/ontheedge/

Can one minute of silent reflection change the outcome of a meeting?

Can the majority of people in an organization be willing and able to contribute something that will make a significant difference?

Can meetings be fun?

 With Liberating Structures, answers to all those questions can be an enthusiastic “Yes.”

 Henri Lipmanowicz and Keith McCandless tell how Liberating Structures work in their article in Performance, a quarterly business publication of the Global Business Thinktank of Ernst & Young.  Liberating Structures are a growing collection of processes and methods that make it quick and easy for a group of any size  to change how its members interact and collaborate. They are designed to tap into  collective intelligence,  liberate energy and stimulate creativity. You have probably heard of Open Space Technology, Conversation Cafes, and Storytelling.  There are many more, and some may surprise you. They interesting to learn, productive to use,  and engaging for participants who discover that their own ideas are significant, and that people in conversation together can produce solutions for all kinds of thorny issues.  

 In the experience of these authors, both Liberating Structure pioneers,  including and unleashing everyone brings  hope and trust to organizational life.  Henri Lipmanowicz is a founder of Plexus Institute and chairs its Board of Trustees. He retired in 1998 after a30 career at Merck, where he was president of  International Region and Japan division. Keith McCandless, a founding partner of the Social Invention Group, is a consultant with expertise in  strategis planning, leadership and organizational development.  Lipmanowicz and McCandless both served as coaches for healthcare organizations in in  the Positive Deviance MRSA  Prevention Partnership, an initiative  to halt the spread of  MRSA in healthcare.

 Read their article here and learn  how these innovative practices can bring about positive change in large and small organizations of all kinds.

 The effort is led by Dirk Helbing, a physicist, traffic scientists and sociologist at Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich.  Many economists called the world wide financial troubles  a scientific and moral failure, and several have recommended large scale research initiatives to be able to understand,  predict and mitigate emerging crises.

The FuturIcT website (IcT stands for Information and Communication Technologies) describes projects and provided access to informative articles. Mark Buchanan’s  piece on economic meltdown modeling is especially interesting. As he explains, no war room  analysis presently exists that will indicate trouble brewing in the joint economic activities of the banks, governments and hedge funds that makeup the world’s biggest financial players.

 “The need is clearly intense in the social and economic sphere if we want to successfully avoid or mitigate similar crises in the future,” Helbing says in a ScienceDaily story. But he also says many problems result from our inability to understand and manage human systems, especially as they relate to interactions with the complex global environment. He adds that out understanding of social ills and human conflict is also surprisingly inadequate.

Joshua Epstein, a scholar of agent based modeling and a sociologist at the Brookings Institution,  says in the story, “This is an experiment we cannot afford NOT do to.”  The European Commission’s Flagship Programme will support the effort with one billlion Euros over  10 year period. Epstein says today’s social, economic and environmental issues “dwarf the capacity of any individual’s comprehension”, and that only a “collective  mind”  enabled by unprecedented modern technical resources can provide  “credible and actionable forecasts” to policy makers.

 Virtual social experiments, in which scientists build computer models of human systems that let computer agents behave like people, are becoming increasingly sophisticated.  Helbing has developed physics-based models that offer insights into human morality and other elements of human behavior.

 Some goals for the FuturIcT Knowledge Accelerator are: A Living Earth Simulator, in which as many as 10 billion agents can provide an experimental model of  environmental interactions;  Crisis Observatories, in which massive data will be mined to human and natural crises, and model for Global System Dynamics and Policy, which will focus on assembling expertise from all branches of science for contributions to future policies. Click here for more information

A Bloomberg Business Week story by Sabine Pirone explains what volcanic ash can do to air planes. The ash plumes contain abrasive silica-based materials that can clog engines and sandblast windscreens.  Planes flying through these clouds can spark an electrical discharge known as St. Elmo’s fire, and speed sensors and power can be disrupted. A researcher quoted in Pirone’s story reports 80 incidents of adverse events and near-disasters when planes flew into ash clouds.   But nothing on the scale of the Iceland eruption has been recorded in recent times.

So what does this mean, and what should we learn? John Brockman, publisher and editor of  Edge.org, invited scientists, philosophers, psychologists, economists, artists and theoreticians from diverse fields to contribute their thoughts to The Ash Cloud- An Edge Special Event.

Here’s a sampling of comments from the essays 32 scholars and thinkers have contributed so far to make sense of an unexpected event of world-wide importance.

Haim Harari, physicist, says the ash crisis and the financial crisis have much in common:  Most decision makers don’t understand math and science, he says, and most mathematicians and scientists “have no feel for the real implications of their calculations.”  He says we need scientifically trained political decisions makers.

Peter Schwartz, futurist and cofounder of the Global Business Network,  is among those who say the consequences of the eruption are “a true Black Swan.”  He also says the event may not be over. If the volcano continues to erupt, or the even bigger adjacent volcano erupts, the ash cloud could be bigger, spread further, and have even greater consequences.

Emanuel Derman,  professor of financial engineering, contributed two pithy lines.  “Old technology-propeller driven planes-would not have been grounded by ash. More efficient, more vulnerable.”

Joel Gold, MD, clinical assistant professor of psychiatry,  says, “The world, shrunken by smart phones, red-eyes and the Web, is once again immense.” The illusion that we can conquer the earth is dissolved.

Eduardo Salcedo-Albaran, social scientist: “Uncontrollable forces of nature outside ourselves are similar to those inside us: Geological phenomena are similar to strong emotions…” which can also be uncontrollable.  He goes on to say, “we easily forget that nature is a continuum that transcends humanity: from star dust to genes to neurons.”

Lawrence Krauss, physicist: The ash cloud demonstrates that with major events there is no such thing as local or regional  He says a nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan could disrupt global climate for a decade. He adds, “If a simple volcano in Iceland  can immobilize much of the world, even a small scale nuclear conflict has the capacity to affect all of humanity so profoundly that mere airline flight cancellations would be the least of our worries.”

J. Doyne Farmer, physicist, sees the volcanic cloud as a reminder of the earth’s power. “Volcanic eruptions are something we have to live with in order to enjoy the benefits of the nuclear power that keeps the earth’s core hot.” He goes on to explains that life on earth seemed doomed 700 million years ago in a phase when the entire surface of the earth was covered with ice.  This period ended because volcanic action continued.  So the volcanoes saved us. 

Roger C. Schank, psychologist and computer scientist, says: “We are confused, as we should be.”

Other contributors wrote about our need to understand risk, the trouble with risk aversion, the fallibility of models, and our relationship with chaos.  Click here to read all of these  provocative essays.

 New York Times columnist David Brooks raises a philosophical issue:  “Would you exchange a tremendous professional triumph for a severe personal blow?” No evidence suggests Ms. Bullock traded her marriage for the award, but the question still resonates.  Which matters most—worldly success or personal relationships?

 “If you had to take more than three seconds to think about this question, You are absolutely crazy,” writes Brooks, decisively favoring relationships. He alludes to research by Canadian scientists showing Oscar winners can be expected to outlive their non-winning colleagues by four to six years. But he goes on to say teams of researchers have consistently found that good personal relationships bring greater happiness than monetary or professional success, and that harmonious and trusting relationships in societies are related to better overall health and economic growth.    Brooks says being married “produces a psychic gain equivalent to more than $100,000 a year, ” and research does show that married people live longer than unmarried people.   Research by Nicholas Christakos and James Fowles, authors of Connected:  The Surprising Power of Social Networks and How They Shape Our Lives, has documented the vital importance of connections and relationships to the quality of our lives. They’ve even shown that happiness is contagious.

Still, the outpouring of responses to Brooks’s column, including a Wall Street Journal blog, letters to the editor and hundreds of answers on line, show this complex issue touches a nerve.  Readers observed that hard driving executives and entrepreneurs who sacrificed personal lives for careers have created institutions and inventions that benefit the rest of us; that both love and work are crucial; and that happiness is a mysterious condition that some find in spirituality and others find in wealth. One writer wondered whether Brooks pondered the either/or question when Sean Penn won an Oscar as his 20 year relationship with Robin Wright was dissolving.

 Some readers can’t buy a downgraded importance for money. “Trust me, David,”  wrote one, the guys who made billions selling the worthless mortgage backed securities that wrecked the economy are happier than the working stiffs who lost their pensions, jobs, and homes. Another observed that money is the source of many a marital fight.  

  While the relationship between happiness and income is complicated and ambiguous, as Brooks notes, studies do show interesting, creative work makes people happy, that autonomy matters, and that conscientiousness and career success are linked to longevity. 

Brooks says government should pay attention to trust and well-being, not just material growth. To which one readers replied,  “By all accounts Hamlet wasn’t hurting financially, and look what happened to him.” So money won’t buy happiness, but she worries about turning that idea into public policy: “Depending on your perspective, you could use it to regulate banks and the salaries of CEO’s or work to get rid of the minimum wage. “ If governments created fair, stable societies, she wrote, all citizens would have a chance to pursue happiness.

 Brooks glosses over  America’s growing economic inequality by asserting  it “doesn’t seem to have reduced national happiness.”  If columnists didn’t gloss over things, they’d  never finish their columns.  However, centuries of history display traumatic upheavals rooted in economic and social inequality.  And many studies have explored the sense fairness that seems to drive both people and animals. It’s not insignificant that a monkey can get pretty steamed when a peer gets grapes for a task that only got him a cucumber slice.   

 Would that this challenge were both/and, not either/or. But not all life situations are in our control, so the question remains: If you had to choose, would you take professional and financial success or happy well-tended personal relationships?