Breakpoint Book

Helping Others Helps You, Stibel Explains How Kindness Comes Back Around

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While on business in New York, frequently pegged as a stereotypically unkind city, Jeff Stibel was shown extreme kindness. After he broke his foot, strangers were helping him out of cabs, carrying his bag at the airport, and giving him extra pizza. He explains on LinkedIn that helping others can actually help you, too. When we’re kind to someone else, our brain releases oxytocin, and oxytocin makes us feel happy. So why don’t we show everyone the same kindness we reserve for those who are hurt? Especially when it comes to our co-workers? Try brightening your workplace by showing some kindness every day, you’ll literally be happy you did.

Are Apps Killing the World Wide Web? Jeff Stibel Gives His Take to The Wall Street Journal

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The internet is evolving, but it’s also shrinking. Confused? Jeff Stibel explains how apps have killed the world wide web in this video with the Wall Street Journal. He also explains why this phenomena isn’t a bad thing and why our brains are actually identical to the internet (they’re shrinking, too!).

There’s more to learn about than just killer apps and our brains, though. Stibel covers everything from ant colonies to cat videos, and yes, it all makes perfect sense.

Photo Credit: Jason Howie, Flickr

Business, Biology, and Technology: “The truth about Competitive Advantage”

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In case you haven’t already heard, Breakpoint, by Jeff Stibel is being cited as a must read for business people. The book has made it into the Top 20: “What Corporate America is Reading” list compiled by Brian Solis and is rapidly gaining interest amongst America’s brightest leaders. Stibel is the Chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corp. and Chairman of BrainGate, as well as on the boards for University of Southern California, Brown, and Tufts University.

In addition to Breakpoint, Mr. Stibel has published a number of books and academic articles related to business, economics and other topics, such as neuroscience, and artificial intelligence. Business books play an integral role in the evolution of business development, strategic thinking, corporate culture and the overall way that leaders mature, grow and adapt to our ever-progressing society.

The book is distinct from other influential books because it looks at business through a different lens than the rest. Rather than focusing primarily on corporate strategies and other traditional business topics Breakpoint examines correlation between biological systems and technology.

Within the complex world of biology, bigger is rarely better in the long run, and the deadliest creatures are usually not the large or aggressive ones like the lion but the small, out-of-sight ones like viruses and bacteria. Mr. Stibel compares this biological phenomenon to the internet and he takes the position that it is the quality of a network that is important for survival, not the size, and all networks—the human brain, Facebook, Google, even the internet itself—eventually reach a breakpoint and collapse.

The corporate and technological success equation is Quality ≠ Size

Exceptional companies are using their understanding of the internet’s brain-like abilities to create a competitive advantage by building more effective websites, using cloud computing, engaging social media, monetizing effectively, and leveraging a collective consciousness.

The mantra that Jeff has established around the Malibu office is “Work Hard, Play Hard” and because of this focus on quality the company has been able to achieve amazing things. From the company culture to innovative product development, Mr. Stibel truly does lead by example as he encourages both internal and external company initiatives that encourage small business and community growth.

Amidst all the peripheral noise of traditional business books Mr. Stibel has written a truly impactful piece that shows the reader where biology, technology, and business intersect. In a consumer-driven market where corporate responsibility matters and corporate cultures are thriving, it is important to remember that quality will always trump size in the long run.

 

Photo Credit: Mo Riza, Flickr

 

How to Cope with What the Internet Does to Your Brain – by Jeff Stibel

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Would it surprise you to learn that our brains have been shrinking for the last 20,000 years? It’s true. In a major reversal from the two million years before that, our brains have actually been growing smaller. We’ve lost about a baseball sized amount of matter in a brain that’s not any bigger than a football. One reason for that is our bodies are smaller as well (except for maybe Shaq), but that only accounts for a small amount of the loss.

Read the full article on LinkedIn where it originally appeared.

When Teams Prevent Greatness – By Jeff Stibel

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Our society reveres individual greatness. We root for the Kobe Bryants and Peyton Mannings of the world, we are mesmerized by the likes of Meryl Streep and Steven Spielberg, we follow every move made by Warren Buffet and Elon Musk. Individuals have a special place in our world, and we attribute much of society’s success to unique people—Einstein, Newton, Da Vinci, Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr.—instead of the teams and movements behind them. It goes without saying that there is often an army of people that drive an individual to success. But individuals, acting alone, can do extraordinary things.

Read the whole article where it originally appeared.

This Is The Best Way To Process Failure

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After you fail, sometimes it helps to read the writing on the wall.
That’s what Jeff Stibel, chairman and CEO of Dun & Bradstreet Credibility Corporation — a California company not affiliated with the more famous Dun & Bradstreet on the East Coast — came to realize.

About two years ago, Stibel and his assistant snuck into the office at night and created what they called a Failure Wall. The point was to…Read the full article on Business Insider where it originally appeared.

Breakpoint, book review: Is the internet really a brain? – Excerpt from ZDNet

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Our brains are shrinking, and this is a good thing. Having read, long ago, Stephen Jay Gould’s book The Mismeasure of Man, I’d argue it’s probably an irrelevant thing: the quality of brains is not effectively measured by their size. Otherwise, elephants would be running Congress and the shutdown wouldn’t have occurred.

But this is sort of Jeff Stibel’s point in Breakpoint (subtitled ‘Why the Web will Implode, Search will be Obsolete, and Everything Else you Need to Know about Technology is in Your Brain’): highly interconnected systems grow like crazy until they reach some inherently unsustainable size limit and then they break.

The original article appeared on ZDNet.

Author interview – Jeff Stibel, ‘Breakpoint’ – An Excerpt from Engineering and Technology Magazine

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Screen Shot 2013-09-18 at 10.07.15 AMThere will come a point when the Internet will reach its physical limit and hit what author Jeff Stibel calls ‘breakpoint’. But that is not necessarily as catastrophic as it sounds.

We could be forgiven for thinking that the Internet is infinite. In scale it is certainly the biggest thing humans have ever invented, and there is no doubt, at least not in Jeff Stibel’s mind, that it has grown to “epic proportions”.

We’re used to reading that if an alien arrived on Earth it would probably assume that the Internet was the largest living organism on the planet, and yet the author of ‘Breakpoint’ says that it has a long way to go before it becomes as sophisticated as a human brain. This is because, while computers are very good at storing information and making calculations, they have nothing like the brain’s power to communicate. In fact, when we hook up two computers together the result is only a “rudimentary brain”.

Original article appeared on Engineering and Technology Magazine. Read the full article.

Is the Internet Hurting Our Brains?

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What are some of your biggest fears? If your list is anything like mine, I’m guessing spiders, snakes, the dark, and heights may appear amongst your list of worst nightmares. But the real question is: Are you scared of the internet?

Turns out that one of the questions most often asked to brain scientists is, “Does the internet damage your brain?” This is a genuine concern for a lot of people. But as you’ll soon learn through Jeff Stibel’s video, the internet doesn’t so much change our brains as ours brains adapt to it.

http://youtu.be/OQr7HWfcjdo

One of the main points Stibel makes is that “we are fundamentally changing our beliefs on what intelligence actually is, what is important in society through an intelligence stand point.” This means that what people used to consider as smarts is now accessible through the internet. Thus, the internet is simply expanding our horizons and changing our idea of what smart really is.

Because the internet is storing knowledge for us, the focus of society can change to what makes us uniquely human. That has the power to benefit society in the years to come.

 

(CC photo by: epSos.de)

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