John Seely Brown is the former head of Xerox PARC and a renowned thinker and writer on the art of management. He is deservedly famous for a number of statements. The one I like best is, "The job of the leader isn’t just to make decisions, it’s to make sense."

Making sense is actually everyone’s job. The better you are at it, the better you’ll do in the working world.

Can you connect the invisible dots? Can you improve the signal-to-noise ratio in all the data that’s streaming at you? Take all the information that comes at you in the course of just one day. The morning newspaper: How many do you read? Two? Three? There’s the Times and the Journal, plus your hometown paper. What about magazines? Fortune, Forbes, BusinessWeek, Fast Company? How about professional journals and industry-specific publications like Variety, Advertising Age, Adweek, Institutional Investor, CEO, CFO, CIO? Do you try to keep up with weekly newsmagazine like Time, Newsweek, U.S. News & World Report, The Economist? What do you read for fun? Magazines about golf, fishing or hunting, home decoration or design, health and fitness, or just gossip? Do you watch TV? The nightly news? Sports or made-for-TV movies? How about email? Get a few of those each day?

Now, from all that stuff, how good are you at making sense? . . .

The premise is that your job as a leader, a sensor, a future-finder, is to weave these outside threads together faster, smarter, and better than the competition.

That’s the way it has been – at least up until now. Smart businesspeople making sense of the world, gathering and synthesizing external data.

Now we get to the interesting part.

Think of it as quantum mechanics come to business sense making.

Now the sense maker is part of the sense making.

Now the interior landscape is part of the connect-the-dots effort.

In other words, now the job of the business leader isn’t just to gaze out at a dizzying world full of streaming data. It’s to gaze in, at the long-ignored interior landscape. . . .

The way the world works now, the way the rules of engagement operate, you can’t claim to make sense out of the exterior without booking voyages into the interior. Think about it: How can you understand "it" if you haven’t make any effort to understand "you"? Because what you’re really doing is establishing a living, electrical, vital, energetic connection between it and you. You’re creating both of them, simultaneously. A lot like quantum physics. . . .

So what to do?

Do what Jim Collins did when he was a student. Treat yourself like an experiment, like your very own lab rat. Do you dream at night? Start writing them down.

Do you wish you could be a writer? You are! Reserve an hour every day to record you thoughts in a special file on your PC. Build up a journal, an inventory of your inner life. . . .

How many museums or art galleries have you visited in the last six months? How many contemporary artists can you name? If you only know the names of you competitors, and you can’t name a single artist, your outer and inner life are seriously out of balance.

Take time to go in side. Learn to meditate, to do yoga. Take time to exercise – you think you’re toning your body, but your also redirecting your mind. Gradually, over time, you’ll find that you can make more and better sense of what’s outside and what’s inside. And what’s the difference.