Deeply engrained biases often sabotage the effectiveness of many meetings.  Failing to proactively counter such biases can badly undermine the quality of decision making, strategizing and planning in any meeting.

This McKinsey article outlines some steps you can take to manage bias effectively and mitigate its impact on your meeting outcomes. Key steps include thorough preparation, efficient sharing of ideas, productive interaction and effective follow-up.

BB has this post on wormholes which is what they're calling always-on two HD video link between two places.

Mozilla quotes $2000 for the setup (skype, hdtvs, macminis, webcams and skype), but I think you could probably mange it for half that.

One immediate improvement I can think of is using projectors instead of HDTVs, and you could have a human scale, life-sized window. Imagine remote offices, thousands of miles apart, virtually sharing a glass wall.

This kind of thing is exciting to me, because it shows how subtle changes (making it full-screen and always-on) can make what was technically quite an ordinary achievement, something much more interesting. It's simplified to the point where the technology and logistics become transparent, and you're left with the magic window.

Evernote just introduced Evernote Peek - what they call the first smart cover app. It's a cute, elegant implementation of Q/A flash cards which uses the ipad 2's 'smart cover' to hide answers but show the question Users tilt up just the first flap of the cover to see the question, then open it further to see the correct answer. Closing and reopening again reveals the next question.

Renowned futurist, Paul Saffo, once commented that we are moving on to the "The Creator Economy”

“Now we are entering a third age in which the central economic actor is someone who both produces and consumes in the same act. I like the term ‘creator,’ as this new kind of actor is doing something more fundamental than the mere sum of their simultaneous production and consumption. Creators are ordinary people whose everyday actions create value.”

Many a times when we work, be it at a large MNC, a mid-size company or a two-man startup, we are creating value. But the word "value" is so widely used that it starts to lose track of its meaning. How about taking a step back and check if we are being passive or active value creators? When you write out a piece of document in Word, or create a model in Excel, considering if your action is part of something bigger? Is it part of an effort by you and your teammates to pursue a bigger cause? Gone are the days whereby workers are passive individuals executing mere instructions. Most projects are starting to become steps that will accumulate to become a new project, product or organization.

In the application to web businesses, the drive towards “The creator economy” is close to Reid Hoffman‘s prediction of Web 3.0. Reid Hoffman predicted that beyond Web 2.0 will be about Data. Data in its pure and raw form is meaningless. But it is about interpreting these data, and responding back with a relevant creation that will spur off an era of web businesses.