First, I want to point out a cool new feed that Maddie created related to our book, Humanize. Maddie is an amazing curator. She had to put on hold her “link love monthly” posts on SocialFishing because they took too much time (but those posts would keep me reading for more than a month!). She has a real gift at sifting through gobs of posts and articles and sharing the best ones. So she now has a new feed using a tool called ScoopIt that is just posts and articles that are directly related to the topics we cover in Humanize.

And just to show you the gems that are hidden in there, here’s a post by David Kennedy that makes an important point about learning (courageous organizations have learning cultures, as we argue in the book), and even makes a Matrix movie reference (you’ll see a few of those in our book too).

It makes an important point about the difference between learning and “learned” (as in the two-syllable version of the word, like “learned scholar”). It’s certainly an honor if someone calls you “learned,” right? But here’s the quote from the post:

In times of change, the learners inherit the Earth, while the learned find themselves beautifully equipped to deal with a world that no longer exists.

Being learned immediately loses its value when you stop being a learner. Learned is past tense. It’s over. Done. In the defense of the learned, most do actually keep learning. But it’s not automatic, and there is actually a natural tendency, once you have discovered the “answers” to something, to stop learning (so you see why I hate “best practices?”). While we are, by our nature, learners, it still takes constant effort, particularly in the context of an organization, to ensure we keep learning.