Getting the impression that I may have caught up on a little HBR reading over the holidays? What makes you think so?
I did read The Power of Unwitting Workers recently, though, and thanks to so many of you for contributing … unwittingly … to energy conservation and other worthy, albeit clandestine, activities. Like the other side of the pillow, this article is pretty cool.
It describes several circumstances where employees, and others … unknown to them … contribute benefits of all kinds. Power Walking to take advantage of the piezoelectric effect (how about that 25¢ word?). Would you believe that all of the CAPTCHAs  we complete almost every day have helped to transcribe nearly 150,000 books a year (or that CAPTCHA stands for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”). Read the for more interesting stuff … and, students, if you’re planning to take the SAT anytime soon, thanks for working your butt off to figure out 10% of the questions that aren’t scored at all.
BTW, with the CAPTCHA acronym construct described above, it does gives all of us a chance to create any old acronym we want, doesn’t it? How about IBBSTWIFLI (“I’ll be back sometime tomorrow when I feel like it.”)