Amazon are now offering the “next generation” gizmo a lightweight electronic reading device called Kindle. Apart from the fact that the screen flashes black on every page turn, and takes two seconds to load each page, and has some DRM issues, as the reviews by users at amazon.com themselves forlornly admit; does no-one else think that this is kind of souless?

The immense pleasure in paper, opening the book, smelling the book even(!), carefully preserving the spine and dust covers and building a library over the years that tells a life story?

That can now be replaced by a push button.
[I do think this is useful installed at airports and at Starbucks for newspapers and magazines, but as a way of owning books, no thanks.]

I love real books, and so do my children. I used to spend wonderful mornings as a geeky teenager in the book shops on the Charing Cross in London loving every minute. They have all gone, beaten out by huge conglomerates. As a business thinker I admire the strategic efficiency and clout, but as a human being I mourn the lovely sensation of serendipity of finding an old 19th century leather-bound edition of Tennyson, or a wine list from the 1940s, or old Hotspurs, and Beanos (The heyday of British comics), or just that good novel that I never got round to reading in the 5p pile.

What’s next for publishers? Is this a symptom? Is it really good-bye books? I don’t think so, but I think it is a trend. Already libraries are buying e-books rather than books. Now publishers would make lots of money - no print or distribution costs - and libraries will become a thing of the past. They’ll say they won’t of course, but eventually…

The more paranoid will see a conspiracy. I see an attempt by Amazon to reduce logistics and stock - but when and why do we accept the social cost? I like paper, it’s organic, cellulose, and beautiful. I also live in Sweden where paper matters to companies like Södra.

I would also argue the neurological event of reading and the memory process are curtailed. Further, I can’t give the book to a friend, I can’t take out from the shelf a vloume a once baby chewed on (!) and I’d never hold a wonderful oversized colour atlas again, and that’s a thing of immense beauty.

And beauty will be gone, for on Kindle all books will become the same size. No special bindings, or bookmarks, no dog-eared interruptions, or books with watermarks, and flyleafs, tracing paper, and watercolours, and jammy fingers that bring smiles of memories of midnight snacks, torches, and childhood. More than that, I fear that books, the absolute pinnacle of human learning and the repository of thought and ideas, laughter, sorrow, and wisdom will become just another commercial commodity. I wouldn’t even want a Kindle for the train or the beach, and yes, I get that I can get thousands of books that I can’t get in a bookstore - but for me that’s hardly the point.

My suggestion to Amazon would be to emphasize that printed books will continue to be the number one way of enjoying reading; and to bundle the book and electronic version together for a dollar more (As in buy two get one free) for those who want that. Me, no thanks. You, maybe both? Maybe just Kindle?

Just think this though, every purchase or read of an electronic book, somewhere a printed book dies. The logic of the strategic model might be that we really are meant to lose most printed books to an electronic e-book format over the next 50 years…So kindle or kindling? You judge.

For me every real book is a wonderful testament to human freedom - I run my hand across my bookshelf from Beatrix Potter to Essays On Exchange Rates: Deterministic Chaos and Technical Analysis on my bookshelf and feel a lifetime of memories…The loss of that seems to my way of thinking as bad as losing childhood itself…Or am I wrong?

The strangest most motivating video I’ve seen in a while: featuring a fabulous song from Five For Fighting to the soundtrack to the Highlander films beautifully edited by Hollywood hopeful GJoves - thanks for the emails guys and keep up the great work!

One of the biggest problems in OD is office politics.

People split into factions, pull their organizations apart, make gaps to charge through, and generally act in ways that show a total lack of emotional intelligence.

Here are ten ways to make the organization work, keep people competitive, and still let success shine:

1. Promote the best. There is a tendency to promote the pushiest, the strongest, the one who people are afraid to stand up to. We should be promoting the best, the most capable, and the one who shows best results. There is increasing evidence to show that those who are best at self-promotion are usually not the best performers in holding, guiding, and building the vision of the organization. It is finding that vision that really distinguishes performance.

2. Promote networkers, not dividers. Internal politics requires that alliances are built and that means creating factions. Networking requires a genuine ability to understand all within the organization and build genuine relationships.

3. Promote emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is not about weak emotions, it is using the maximum  emotional intelegance in the best way to create the most authentic relationships, and is proven to have real bottom line results.

4. Create culture across the organization that is truly open and does not blame. Happiness and balance at work is a central tenet of new work: real, authentic communication that allows us to talk in a 360° way.

5. Build education programs that replace the need for internal politics with real business education.

6. Understand what and who causes internal conflict and confront them. Well-performed interventions are very effective.

7. Look at the internal structures: how and why are you promoting; is the organization itself causing people to fight each other? This can be resolved by good organizational design, and clear promotion guidelines.

8. Self-elective promotion: allow candidates to put themselves for promotion. This allows a trial period, of say six months, where if they do not perform as required they get knocked back again. This can be hardened up with an exam based on company and general business skills and psychometric testing.

9. Internal politics can be very harmful and stressful, as bad as sexual harassment, real education about why unhealthy competition destroys organizations, and education on the positive the flip-side, in how to compete in real terms pays massive dividends. A positive action program may seem far-fetched, but so was sexual harassment in the 1970s.

10. Finally, the desire to end office politics and instead to be excellent to one another is a keystone of Intelegance. No relationship: raising children, marriage, friendship, or work can truly succeed where the effort is to gain the upper hand rather than promote the relationship, in this case the workforce…

I hope that in the next decade success and results will become the main criteria for career advancement…

A quick search of the web reveals a dearth of resources on education on how our brains work at work.There are some good blog resources around the web on neurology. They are asking questons, collecting articles, and news, and even making news. Here are some favourites:1. Brain. Published by Oxford Journals, this is absolutely the best place on the web for in detail research: Brain was first published in 1898 and the total archive is available online - an extraordinary rich, detailed, and useful research archive.2. Cognitive Daily is part of the excellent Science Blog network, and one of the most popular science blogs on the web as it is part of the Google Science Blog package. It promises “a new article nearly every day”. A great source for up to date and easily accessible information, Greta and Dave Munger write in a lively and accurate fashion. Warmly recommended.3. Mind Hacks is interesting, relevant, and even quirky. With an emphasis on how our brain works it is the kind of blog I would like to see more of.4. Scientific America 60 second Psychology Podcast does exactly what it says on the label. A truly intelegant solution for the busy brain surgeon, and good fun too.5. On The Brain by Michael Merzenich Ph.D is great writing - and one of the nicest looking blogs around - very clean and easy to navigate.6. Corante, named after the first English language newspaper published in 1621, is the future of blogging - a full-blown media company - but they may well be justified. Well researched and thought out it is excellent journalism. A great example is an article by Zach Lynch that lists the top ten trends in neuroscience in 2007. Highly professional, and definitely eye candy.7. TedBlog I believe TedBlog will continue to become one of the most popular sites in 2008. A forum for new ideas around design and computing using video, and great speakers, with a yearly conference on the West Coast TedBlog is a great place to go when you want to get in the creative juices running. It covers many aspects of cognitive intelligence and information processing and much, much more.8. Eide Neurolearning is a mixed bag of posts on learning, cognition, by Brock and Fernette Eide. It is particularly good on developmental cognition and the child.9. Neuroscience For Kids definitely deserves a mention. If you simply want to discover more about brain anatomy, and what the parts do this is a wonderful place to begin: very clear and concise.10. Sharp Brains. This is the new trend of the past eighteen months: brain exercises and training. It has some excellent interactive exercises, and some great ideas on how to keep your brain going.11. Lumosity A blog for everything related to brain health with guest writers. Deserves more readers: it is good content.12. Brain Today: clear and informative articles, and a nice list of resources and links. Could do with an update on the web design; ignore how it looks and get into the content.13. BrainBlog by Anthony Risser Ph.D it is especially useful for the information on events and also for other resources available around the net.