Over the last few weeks, I read with much interest a discussion among members of a particular LinkedIn group where they attempted to define the single most important attribute to leadership. For some participants, the most important trait was integrity; others felt that awareness was the key to effective leadership. As I perused through the various answers – and there were many good ones – it was clear that a consensus was unlikely to be reached over what characteristic is the most critical to the role of leading others.

Naturally, this wasn’t the only time where there’s been some challenge and debate surrounding the quantification of leadership. One only needs to look at when discussions are started over how to define leadership to notice how blurry the boundaries are in delineating this particular role. It doesn’t take long for such exercises to cause more confusion and debate over how we should view leadership than they do to help clarify the concept of being a leader.

The difficulty that seems to persist in defining or quantifying this particular function got me thinking about whether we should be looking at leadership as more of an art than a science. In other words, that we should view leadership as something that is understood more through the eye of the beholder, and how it’s perceived being very much dependent on the environment in which it’s presented. Click here to continue reading »”Is Leadership an Art or a Science?”

I went out for dinner last night with an old friend from my university days and invariably it was a night filled with sharing recent news as well as reminiscing about our time spent in all those lab sessions and seminars. During the course of one of our many conversation threads, we ended up comparing notes over the growing debate between religion and science and the typical rise in louder and more obnoxious participants on each side as such issues go “mainstream”. It was no surprise to me that, as products of a science education and from working in the sector, we were in agreement about the need for both the science body and the general public to wrestle back control over these two aspects of our society from those who are clearly abusing both to further their own myopic agendas. It’s thanks to that wonderful and engaging conversation that I decided to write this entry to start clearing the air on this whole absurd debate.

The reality is that there is no need to draw lines in the sand between science and religion any more than one would need to do such between politics and cooking. Simply put, one cannot put science and religion on the same yardstick Click here to continue reading »”Religion Vs. Science – Oh, Enough Already”

While going through some correspondence I received over the holiday break, I came upon this wonderful news piece that I wanted to share. Last week, the international team behind the Cassini-Huygens mission released new images of the planet Saturn, including one that features a “natural colour view” of the planet. As you can see in the image above, this new look at Saturn reveals a colour scheme that differs greatly from the one we’re all probably familiar with when we think of what Saturn looks like.

To demonstrate, let’s compare this new image of Saturn from the Cassini space probe taken this past July against the image of this same planet taken by Voyager 2 in 1981 – Click here to continue reading »”Saturn’s True Colours – A Majestic View From The Heavens”