Fly Your Way to Mental Fitness

The general opinion here at MWonline Global Headquarters in Monheim is that the best present this Christmas was a remote controlled miniature helicopter. I gave my nephew one and he loved it. CEO gave The OMM one and he crashed it. I gave CEO one and his son stepped on it. I gave myself one ... and brought it to the office to play with it!

As I was walking out of the house this morning my wife gave me an understandably strange look as she saw the helicopter, so I carefully informed her that it was part of our new "Cognitive Fitness Programme" at work. Yes, the November copy of the Harvard Business Review, which I had just finished reviewing, had come to my rescue! You see, it included an article about cognitive fitness and, although the article itself didn't contain much that was new, it did make one or two very important suggestions as far as our internal culture here at MWonline is concerned.

Amongst the list of suggestions was "Play games" - so we did as we were told and started seeing who could fly the helicopter most competently, with target landings and the like. Another suggestion was "Manage by walking about" - no problem, since you have to walk behind the helicopter wherever you go, otherwise you'd lose control of it. "Try new technologies" was another idea - well, none of us had flown a helicopter before, so that was perfect and finally, my favourite HBR brain-jogging tip: "Read funny books" - well trust me, reading the Chinese translation of the instructions on how to trim the tiny rotor blades was good for a giggle or two indeed.

Anyway, must stop now as I can hear CEO warming up the helicopter ready for a ground attack on my desk and I need to prepare my surface-to-air missile defence system, repel the invader and enjoy the fact that all of this is keeping me cognitively fit - well, keeping one or two cogs rust-free at least.