Resourcefulness: the new intelligence?

Confessions of a Bright Young Thing (BYT) …

1) “Aiden, please put together a Recruitment & Selection Policy for our Co”, Big Boss requests. Aiden replies, “Sure!” So Aiden promptly Googles “Recruitment & Selection Policy”, reads a few of the examples that the search identifies, then amalgamates the best of them – adding in a bit of the Co’s spicy nuances – into a pretty good document.

Lazy, or resourceful?

2) In writing a comment yesterday to Graeme’s entry on the F1 debacle, Mike Stop uses the word “Indomitable” … an intelligent word. But did he find it on the thesaurus page of www.dictionary.com or in the intro to Asterix’s comic’s … “One small village of indomitable Gauls still holds out against the Roman invaders”?

Well-read, or resourceful?

In our journey into the connection Economy the availability and speed of information is astounding. Even for my relatively young life, I am blown away by the developments made monthly on the access to info. Gone are the days in which a student goes to the Library to source info for a school project (Even MS Encarta is becoming redundant) … Google is the Library. Gone are the days in which a student has to photocopy pics for a presentation, one can simply print them out yourself. Gone are the days of the need to keep info in your head for ready access … the internet is our support. Gone are the days of superb spelling ability … Spell Check (with those nice red lines) is our refuge.

Last month Steve posted an entry entitled “Is Google God?”. The issue he raised was how quickly one can have access to reams and reams of info. This access drastically improves our ability to be “intelligent”. Now I’m not speaking of the various IQ’s, EQ’s, etc, but I am speaking of regarding people as intelligent/clever/with-it/switched-on.

Nowadays, being intelligent is not about what you can remember and have read, BUT it is about how quickly you can find your info on the net, cut & paste it and then email it. But Steve raised a pertinent concern: we have all this access to info, but that’s all it is … info. Useless without our ability to sift through it, categorise it and assess its relevance.

In days gone by, being resourceful was about having physical resources at your disposal that you could pull together for a cause. Today, everybody can be resourceful by simply having access to the web. But is being resourceful being intelligent? Or are we in need of intelligent resourcefulness … a “RQ” perhaps?

As a BYT I often get told that I suffer from laziness (no guesses to the age of the accusers!). Is the way I put together a policy lazy, or intelligently resourceful? Am I lazy because I did not drudge through writing an original policy using my own creativity and experience? Am I not using my savvy by utilising the resources I have at my disposal so that I do not need to waste my time by reproducing something that has already been done a million … million times? Is it not my intelligence that has then tweaked the policy so that it is differentiated from the rest?

Is Mike Stop any less intelligent if he found the word “Indomitable” on www.dictionary.com than having it as a word in his vocab?

So, when does intelligence=resourcefulness, and when does resourcefulness=intelligence?

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