David Waters is a fortunate young man. At 24 years, he had only months to live, but received the heart of a 17 year old teenager Kaden Delaney who died in a car crash. A life-saving gesture of kindness. (Reported in the “Sunday Mail,” Dec 27, page 13.)

However, straight after the transplant, David Waters reported a desire for Burger Rings. “That’s all I seemed to want to eat after my surgery” he said. “I never used to eat them before.”

Six months after the operation, the Delaney family made contact with David who asked if the donor Kaden had ever liked Burger Rings. The response from the family was that Kaden “loved” Burger Rings.

Scientists have long theorised that the brain is not the only organ to store memories or personality traits, and that memory can be stored in other parts of the body such as the heart. This has been termed “cellular memory.”

For the record, David’s craving for Burger Rings lasted about three weeks before slowly disappearing.

But don’t be fooled, you have memory in parts of your body you never dreamed of!

It was only a small heading in “The Advertiser” and the column that went with it was short, but it came as no surprise to that group of us who are organisational psychologists and career guidance counsellors. The heading read, “Drop out rate shock.” It went on to say that one in three university students considered leaving their course before graduation.

Although the attrition rate is actually somewhere around 20%, this statistic belies the fact that a significant proportion of university students, as well as those in TAFE colleges and vocational or training institutes, are dissatisfied and de-motivated. Maybe they did actually complete their course for a degree, a diploma or a certificate, but they end up just turning up and finishing it for the sake of doing so. What a waste of human potential.

In our so-called “clever” country, we are NOT clever when it comes to providing career guidance to our secondary and tertiary students.

How is it that we are so good at providing courses and educating young people, but so woeful at providing direction for their actual career goals and pathways?

When the “Herald-Sun” from Sydney asked me what I thought about office open plan, it was a request too good to refuse. For years now, I have considered that office open plan that came in about 15 years ago (as I recall) was not in employees’ best interests, but was really about the company both cutting its bottom line (it’s cheaper with less internal infra-structure and we can herd more people into less space) together with an element of being able to “watch” everyone.

Why doesn’t open space work? We get distracted and are more easily interrupted (both visual and auditory) which affects productivity, and we also lack privacy, as well as the fact that we like to have our own space or territory, all of which ultimately affects morale. Doctor John Medina in his brilliant book, “Brain Rules” says quite clearly that our brains are not wired to do multi-tasking ie., paying attention to more than one thing at a time (I know that one radio commentator said to me today that woman are very good at multi-tasking, but for the record, Doctor Medina says that they actually have good working memories capable of paying attention to several inputs at one time.) For most of us though, we have difficulty focusing on more than one thing. That’s why we say when we’ve been interrupted and we need to get back to it, something like, “Now where was I?”

But here’s the kicker re open plan offices. Studies show that a person who is interrupted takes 50% longer to accomplish a task. Not only that, he or she makes up to 50% more errors.

On top of that is the “Hot desk” where staff are not allocated a permanent spot to work and need to take whatever is available. All the issues with open plan are only accentuated with this notion. What on earth are managers thinking?

Still, it is trendy to have open plan offices. Let’s see how long it will take for the wheel to finally turn back to closed offices.

What we do know is that by about 2018, half of the current of the current workforce would have disappeared.

The Babyboomers will be retiring in droves (and probably we would have already seen a decided trend in this direction if the Global Financial Crisis had not occurred where the Boomers have now had to remain longer in the workforce to boost their savings and help their retirement funds). Remember that the first Boomers turned 60 in 2006.

Now, as it happens, most of the leadership positions in the public service and in commercial enterprise including small business, are held by the Boomers. To make matters worse, there seems to be a total lack of leadership training within organisations. Once in our nation’s history there used to be a federal government initiative called the “training levy” where organisations were compelled to spend 10% of their budget on training and they frequently did so by grooming young people for leadership. Gone are those days….long gone.

So where are our leaders going to come from? We are undoubtedly going to have a crisis of leadership in the next decade.

I am encouraged by a small minority of companies such as AG Coombs in Melbourne who have recognised the problem and have undertaken a leadership program for 36 of their staff. They need to be congratulated. Heartily so.

The rest of the nation had better wake up. If we really want to be the clever country, we’d better do something about our leadership. And now, before it is too late.

Someone asked me this week, “How is it that there seems to be so much strife in families recently, especially as we’ve seen it played out in the media?”

What they’re referring to is child abuse, child neglect, children who are devoid of social skills and who are not loved or cared for.

There is no one answer, but there is a definite trend that can be observed. There has been, what has been called by some, “social engineering” or “liberalism” where there has been a slow erosion of family values. This has happened slowly over time. It is insidious and often sinister.

Take just a few issues:

• Poker machines are introduced with the suggestion that because we’re all adults or big people, that we can control our impulses to gamble — just tell that to the the young man who has lost his wife and family as well as the family home through compulsive gambling.
• Easy access to condoms, the pill and the morning after pill encouraging adolescents to explore and try it out — tell that to young adolescent mothers.
• With drugs, a philosophy of “harm minimisation” that says something like “as long as they don’t do themselves too much harm” then it’s ok — tell that to the addict who has lost everything.
• Legalisation of marijuana — it’s safe in small quantities — tell that to the school drop-out who can’t concentrate now, who hallucinates and who is developing a psychosis from substance abuse.

It’s like we’ve said to a small child, “Here’s a box of matches. Go play with them, but be careful and use them wisely.” All this means is that we become desensitised to how to really live life effectively.

We’re heading for a train wreck as a community.

What’s the answer? Seems like there a few places where politicians have finally made a stand and where the government and the family have stood together and built a community on the same sorts of values. Take Singapore. It’s safe and secure. I understand that places like Vancouver are similar.

There are some answers there. But do we have any pollies or leaders willing to stand up?