The Best Thought in the World - Twitter in Business

Here we go again, I am trying to do something extraordinary, like good old Don Quixote in his time. This time it occurred to me that it might be interesting to find The Best Thought in the World. Or what do you think, wouldn’t it be just nice to know what is the best thought which has ever existed and shared?

Lets get started! We may have some work to do here before the best thought has been located and we do not have too much space for this search - this is a blog post after all, and we have decided in Avance that the length of our blog posts is one page or bit more.

How should we proceed? How could we find out what is the best thought? How would you solve this conundrum? I think that we need to do some choices which determine what we are actually looking for here. May I propose, as a starting point here , that the thought is something like a sentence, which might include few words, perhaps more than five but no more than twenty, otherwise it would be too much, or what do you think?

So we are looking for a sentence which in our mind would represent be the best thought in the world. What now, how to move on from here? Surprisingly the path ahead is obvious, because we now have a system which shares excellent thoughts in short format - the system is Twitter. So the best thought is the best tweet - is it so simple? Well no, and please read why it was not that simple.

I did some work in looking different lists which name best/funniest etc tweets. In my mind those lists may not be applicable here because here we focus in business and deep thoughts which could be connected to business life. Mostly the publicly highlighted tweets seem to relate to big global upheavals or to some celebrities and well known public figures.

Hence I decided to turn to my own twitter list. As an avid Twitter user I have collected tweets which in my mind are excellent thoughts and which at least somehow can be linked to the business. Here I must warn that in my mind business is not a technical subject but it is very much about people and understanding people.

Without opening my selection process any further may I just tell what I did? Thanks for the kind permission, so what I did was that, I read through some some tweets which had caught my attention in the Twitter world during the last few months and which I had stored for later use. After reading those tweets I just picked up one which I propose here as the Best Thought in the World. And the winner is:

"GreatestQuotes: "We don't see things as they are, we see them as we are." - Anais Nin"

The competition for the best thought was a fierce one and there certainly was many excellent tweets which also could have received this prestigious nomination to be The Best Thought in the World. Just to show couple of those tweets which competed extremely well, please read the ones below:

"Zen_Moments: I am always doing that which I can not do, in order that I may learn how to do it. ~ Picasso"

"GreatestQuotes: "The greatest danger in times of turbulence is not the turbulence; it is to act with yesterday's logic." - Peter Drucker"

Excellent. May I restrain myself commenting those tweets any further here, instead I wish to leave it to you to make your own interpretation and judgement whether those tweets above fall into category excellent thoughts.

To sum up this blog post I would like to make few more general remarks. First, as such it is interesting to pause to think what is The Best Idea in the World. Here I have very briefly touched this topic which would merit careful elaboration, and I think we all have to do our own personal reflection in finding best thoughts for us. Secondly, it is interesting to think how much wisdom we or anyone can put to one sentence. Is the wisdom the property of the sentence or the property of the reader - and what this means? Thirdly as a person who works in executive education it would be interesting to examine further what are best thoughts in: leadership, marketing, strategy and of course in accounting.

I end this blog with sincere hope that some reader would suggest the best thought in accounting - there would be extra demand for that. Also all other comments are most welcome.


ari.manninen(at)jyu.fi