At Brighthouse, an Atlanta-based innovation consulting firm, staff members get five week's vacation, AND five Your Days.  The five Your Days are free days that the staff are encouraged to use to visit someplace conductive to reflection and thinking.  No particular goal to solve anything - just what they call "blue-sky thinking."  CEO Joey Reiman believes this unstructured thinking is just as important to their success as time spent hunkered down in client meetings or looking at computer screens.

Other companies like Maddock Douglas and Google also encourage their workers to spend up to 20 percent of their work hours pursuing whatever intrigues them.

Here's a favorite book of mine that addresses this issue:  How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci:  Seven Steps to Genius Every Day.  Few people have ever been as creative or inventive as da Vinci.  But he was also a thoughtful philosopher.  Leonardo reflected sadly that the average human "looks without seeing, listens without hearing, touches without feeling, eats without tasting, moves without physical awareness, inhales without awareness of odour or fragrance, and talks without thinking."  In his writings he constantly calls us to improve our senses - and our sensibility and sensitivity.

I hear repeatedly from people who are asking "What is the meaning of life?"  Leonardo da Vinci would encourage them to ask, "How can I make my life meaningful?"

Make sure you're spending time thinking - and making your life meaningful.

Perhaps even more remarkable than the phrase itself is that it was used in the context of discussing new enterprise technology solutions.   The social computing mindset is different: powerful and enabling and dangerous to old modes of thinking.  It is changing the way we brand and the way we work.  They are becoming one. "Soulful Excellence" is evidence of that.  Chew on that phrase and watch out for more.

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The reason I'm bringing this up is not necessarily to talk about BrightHouse, but more to talk about the process they use to achieve their results. Are you ready for this? It's thinking. No joke. They literally take a significant amount of time thinking and brainstorming. BrightHouse assembles panel-like sessions from its cadre of enormously influential people in various fields (usually they are matched according to the industry of the client company, however, there is also an effort to get thinkers from outside the field to add a new view).

And what do they do at the end? They sell their idea to the company. There's not a campaign, or a poster design, or a new commercial. Just an idea.

It's a beautiful thing. To me, thinking is the most crucial action in life (aright, perhaps involuntary actions like... I dunno, breathing, might be more crucial, you get me though). Thinking is what separates the men from boys. You can't act effectively without thinking. And the more you can broaden your thought process in general, the more effective and diverse your thinking will be when it's needed the most (execution).

There should be more thinking in the world as far as I'm concerned. So pick up a book, or ask your coworker what her hobbies are (and then ask her about those), or watch a pigeon in the park, or a kids cartoon. Something. Anything. Get the juices flowing.

Aright, I feel like I just preached the power of thinking. I did preach the power of thinking. I'm allowed one soap-box entry a month, how about that? Then I'll stop and be funny next time.