research

ageism

Noam Scheiber, Silicon's Valley's Brutal Ageism | New Republic http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117088/silicons-valleys-brutal-ageism

agile

Twitter Breaks Down How Its Engineering Teams Work - Mike Isaac - Social - AllThingsD http://allthingsd.com/20131209/twitter-breaks-down-how-its-engineering-teams-work/?refcat=social #autonomy #hyperlean¹

Why Intuit Founder Scott Cook Wants You To Stop Listening To Your Boss | Fast Company | Business + Innovation http://www.fastcompany.com/3020699/bottom-line/why-intuit-founder-scott-cook-wants-you-to-stop-listening-to-your-boss #scott-cook #eric-ries #google #toyota #decisions-by-experiment #science-not-folklore²

anthropology

Ethan Waters, We Aren't The World -- Why Americans Are the Weirdest People in the World - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society http://www.psmag.com/magazines/magazine-feature-story-magazines/joe-henrich-weird-ultimatum-game-shaking-up-psychology-economics-53135/ #joe-heinrich #perception #americans

artifical intelligence

deep learning

Luke Dormehl, Why Google Is Investing In Deep Learning ⚙ Co.Labs ⚙ code + community http://www.fastcolabs.com/3026423/why-google-is-investing-in-deep-learning?utmcontent=buffer5bc33&utmmedium=social&utmsource=twitter.com&utmcampaign=buffer #andrew-ng #deepmind #google

danger of AI

Upshot, A Discussion of the Danger and Promise of Tech #hawking

big data

Nick Halstead, Introducing VEDO: DataSift's Next Generation Processing Engine | DataSift Blog http://blog.datasift.com/2013/12/12/introducing-vedo-datasifts-next-generation-processing-engine/ #queue #big-data #VEDO³

biology

Scientists discover double meaning in genetic code | UW Today http://www.washington.edu/news/2013/12/12/scientists-discover-double-meaning-in-genetic-code/ #genetics #duons #codons #DNA⁴

blogging

themes

Blogging - Within | ThemeForest http://themeforest.net/item/within/5532266

Blogging - Flattery Tumblr Business Theme | ThemeForest http://themeforest.net/item/flattery-tumblr-business-theme/5228641

Benvolio - A Business Tumblr Theme Preview - ThemeForest http://themeforest.net/item/benvolio-a-business-tumblr-theme/fullscreenpreview/4594479

Nimble - A Responsive Business Tumblr Theme Preview - ThemeForest http://themeforest.net/item/nimble-a-responsive-business-tumblr-theme/fullscreenpreview/4568030

Blogging - Squared Magazine - Tumblr News / Magazine Theme | ThemeForest http://themeforest.net/item/squared-magazine-tumblr-news-magazine-theme/241898 related posts widget

Blogging - Ellisium - A Business Minded Tumblr Theme | ThemeForest http://themeforest.net/item/ellisium-a-business-minded-tumblr-theme/4620479?ref=PixelMoxie

bureacracy

Andre Spicer's review of Managing Modernity: Beyond Bureacracy? https://www.dropbox.com/s/88l5hvv7ic4ka8n/Andr%C3%A9%20Spicer%20review%20managing%20modernity%20beyond%20bureaucracy.pdf #david-courpasson #stewart-clegg #david-speed #martin-harris #mats-alvesson #dan-karreman #sociocracy #jannis-kallinikos #exitutions #biocracy #peter-fleming

business transformation

Adam Bryant, Perry Evans of Closely, on Craftsmanship and Early Rising - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/18/business/perry-evans-of-closely-on-craftsmanship-and-early-rising.html?ref=business #transformation #innovation⁶

BYOD

Who SUNCS at your office? Probably everyone. | Stupid ** system! http://stupidsystem.org/2013/10/20/who-suncs-at-your-office-probably-everyone/ #queue #suncs #google-drive #email #sweden

change management

CIO

The future of corporate IT: Surfing a digital wave, or drowning? | The Economist http://d.pr/Cmnh #cio #cdo #dell #adriana-karaboutis⁷

cities

Steven Johnson, What A Hundred Million Calls To 311 Reveal About New York http://d.pr/qoMz #arup-big-data-sources #steven-johnson #call311 #maple-syrup #fenugreek⁸

civic innovation

10 Steps for Creating a Safe Space for Local Innovation http://www.livingcities.org/blog/?id=221 #ash-center #public-innovation #innovation #beacon-open-forums⁹

climate change

UK flooding

Stanley Reed, British Floods Could Be a Harbinger - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/06/business/international/british-floods-could-be-a-harbinger.html #england #somerset-levels #flooding¹⁰

Elisabeth Rosenthal, The Cost Of Cool

Sophie Yeo, Climate movement needs radicals like Nelson Mandela - Naomi Klein http://www.rtcc.org/2013/12/11/climate-movement-needs-radicals-like-nelson-mandela-naomi-klein/ #radical-ecology #naomi-klein¹²

Eric Holthaus, The only way to stop climate change now may be revolution - Quartz http://qz.com/154196/the-only-way-to-stop-climate-change-now-may-be-revolution/#/h/36345,2/ #radical-ecology #james-hansen¹³

Ocean Warming

Jeff Tollefson, Climate change: The case of the missing heat : Nature News & Comment http://www.nature.com/news/climate-change-the-case-of-the-missing-heat-1.14525 #pacific-warming #climate-change #global-warming #el-niño #la-niña¹⁴

coediting

editorially

Editorially — Shawn Blanc http://shawnblanc.net/2013/11/editorially/ how he uses it for The Sweet Setup

cognition

Orly Lobel, My Ideas, My Boss’s Property - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/14/opinion/my-ideas-my-bosss-property.html?ref=todayspaper #intellectual-property #cognition #ownership¹⁵

Ezra Klein, How politics makes us stupid - Vox http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid #identity-protective-cognition¹⁶

cognitive-bias

What Umpires Get Wrong - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/opinion/sunday/what-umpires-get-wrong.html?ref=todayspaper #baseball #umpires

Dolly Chugh, Katherine L. Milkman, and Modupe Akinola, Professors Are Prejudiced, Too - NYTimes.com #prejudice¹⁷

cognitive modes theory

STEPHEN M. KOSSLYN AND G. WAYNE MILLER, How the Brain Creates Personality: A New Theory - Stephen M. Kosslyn and G. Wayne Miller - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2013/11/how-the-brain-creates-personality-a-new-theory/281287/ #cognitive-modes #top-and-bottom-brains¹⁸

stowe boyd, alexander pentland call center study

Stowe Boyd, FRIENDLY SOCIAL INTERACTION AND SOCIAL COGNITION²⁰

Frank Rose, The Selfish Meme

Groupthink: The Brainstorming Myth - Jonah Lehrer http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2012/01/30/120130fafactlehrer?currentPage=all #groupthink

Alex Osborn's brainstorming is a myth #brainstorming

Chalan Nemeth's work on #dissent²³

success on broadway - Brian Uzzi's Q analysis²⁴

Building 20²⁵

community

community kitchen

Build a Kitchenspace… Unleash Food Creatives. Generate Wealth Locally. http://www.resilientcommunities.com/build-a-kitchenspace-unleash-creative-food-wealth-locally/ #john-robb #food #kitchenspace #queue

communization

Communization and its Discontents, Benjamin Noys https://www.dropbox.com/s/j8xpefx0nzmiy60/Communization%20and%20its%20Discontents%20Benjamin%20Noys.pdf²⁶

complexity

UNDERSTANDING IS A POOR SUBSTITUTE FOR CONVEXITY (ANTIFRAGILITY) - Nissim Nicholas Taleb http://www.edge.org/conversation/understanding-is-a-poor-substitute-for-convexity-antifragility²⁷

Gordon Ross's post with great stuff from Donald #Schön http://www.thoughtfarmer.com/blog/what-would-donald-schon-think-of-your-social-intranet/ #overload #uncertainty²⁸

Renee Boucher Ferguson, The Science of Managing Black Swans | MIT Sloan Management Review http://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/the-science-of-managing-black-swans/ #queue #uncertainty #risk²⁹

consulting

Clay Parker Jones, How strategists level up — Undercurrent’s Greatest Hits — Medium https://medium.com/undercurrents-greatest-hits/14964abd7042 #strategists #undercurrent #skills-matrix @queue

context

Miguel Helft, Fortune Exclusive: Larry Page on Google - Fortune Tech http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2012/12/11/larry-page/ #larry-page #context³⁰

Andy Hickl, Tracking Is Dead: The Next Wave of Wearables Is Context | Re/code³¹

Molly Wood, The Move Toward Computing That Reads Your Mind - NYTimes.com

Apps

EverythingMe #android #context³²

Vurb

Aviate

cover #android

Saga #lifelogging #quantified-life

conversation

Elizabeth Dunn and Michael Norton, Hello, Stranger - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/26/opinion/sunday/hello-stranger.html #talking-to-strangers #commuting #connection #elizabeth-dunn #michael-norton³³

coworking

Daniel Zweig, A Communal Space, but Still My Own - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/30/jobs/a-communal-space-but-still-my-own.html?ref=todayspaper

anticafe

Finally a Cafe That Values Your Time As Much As You Do | Anti Cafe on GOOD http://www.good.is/posts/finally-a-cafe-that-values-your-time-as-much-as-you-do #beacon

Simon Terry • The Power of Collaboration http://simonterry.tumblr.com/post/70735959210/the-power-of-collaboration³⁴

cooperation

Mark Pagel, Wired For Culture #RSA #video http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=XdhG7WX9Fmg #cooperation

Martin Nowak, Five rules for the evolution of cooperation http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3279745/ #cooperation

Hisashi Ohtsuki, et al, A simple rule for the evolution of cooperation on graphs and social networks #nexalogy #cooperation #socialnetworks

growth trends

Just Ahead, Your Next Office - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/18/business/at-the-next-stop-an-office-and-co-workers.html?ref=todayspaper³⁶

creativity

Jessica Ollen, Creativity is rejected: Teachers and bosses don’t value out-of-the-box thinking. http://www.slate.com/articles/healthandscience/science/2013/12/creativityisrejectedteachersandbossesdontvalueoutofthebox_thinking.html³⁷

Best of 2013: How to Waste Time Properly - Issue 8: Home - Nautilus http://nautil.us/issue/8/home/best-of-2013-how-to-waste-time-properly #creativity #productivity #greg-beato³⁸

Joseph V. Sinfield, Tim Gustafson and Brian Hindo, The Discipline Of Creativity file:///Users/stoweboyd/Dropbox/research/The%20Discipline%20of%20Creativity%20_%20MIT%20Sloan%20Management%20Review.pdf

Belle Beth Cooper, How to Optimize Your Environment for Creativity with The Perfect Temperature, Lighting and Noise levels - The Buffer Blog http://blog.bufferapp.com/how-to-optimize-your-environment-for-creativity-with-the-perfect-temperature-lighting-and-noise-levels

crisis

Audub Farbrot, Intuition and analytical skills matter most in a crisis | ScienceNordic http://sciencenordic.com/intuition-and-analytical-skills-matter-most-crisis #crisis #intuition #analytic-reasoning

culture

cultural criticism/culture theory

The Psychology Of Ruin Porn, Joann Greco³⁹

Nathan Jurgenson, The Faux-Vintage Photo #nostalgiaforthepresent⁴⁰

Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

on Postmodernist Theory⁴¹

on the term Postmodernism⁴²

on the term 'late capitalism'⁴³

Paul Parauan, Postmodernity and Consumer Culture #readlater⁴⁴

Robert Borofsky (Professor of Anthropology, Hawaii Pacific University), WHEN—A Conversation about Culture (in American Anthropologist, New Series, Vol. 103, No. 2, Jun., 2001) #anthropology #culture #robert-borofsky⁴⁵

decision-making

Klocke 2007 How To Improve Decision Making #dissent #interventions https://www.dropbox.com/s/l5m73zm6agb1f9h/Klocke%202007%20How%20To%20Improve%20Decision%20Making.pdf⁴⁶

democracy

Direct Democracy

Joshua Davis, How Selecting Voters Randomly Can Lead to Better Elections | Wired Opinion | Wired.com http://www.wired.com/opinion/2012/05/stessayvoting/ #james-fishkin #center-for-deliberative-democracy #david-chaum

Pirate Party

Dominic Basulto, Does America need a Pirate Party? http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/innovations/wp/2013/05/02/does-america-need-a-pirate-party/ #pirate-party #bigitta-jonsdottir

Amy Goodman, Birgitta Jónsdóttir on Criminalization of Cyber-Activists, Bradley Manning & Iceland’s Pirate Party (Pt. 2) | Democracy Now! http://www.democracynow.org/blog/2013/4/8/birgittajnsdttironcriminalizationofcyberactivistsbradleymanningicelandspiratepartypt_2 #bigitta-jonsdottir #pirate-party

Nulpunt

1. (nulpunt) is a Dutch project envisioning a near... | Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/45763309732/0-nulpunt-is-a-dutch-project-envisioning-a-near

FOIA with friends: social platform Nulpunt looks to abolish government secrecy | The Verge http://www.theverge.com/2012/7/17/3151336/foia-social-network-nulpunt-government-secrecy⁴⁸

Mariko is also involved in 0. (nulpunt). It’s her... | Stowe Boyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/54202352047/mariko-is-also-involved-in-0-nulpunt-its-her⁴⁹

holocracy

depression

Kristian Sjøgren, The boss, not the workload, causes workplace depression | ScienceNordic http://sciencenordic.com/boss-not-workload-causes-workplace-depression #workplace-depression #depression⁵⁰

design

design-fiction

http://www.slate.com/blogs/future_tense/2012/03/02/bruce_sterling_on_design_fictions_.html

Eileen Gunn, How America’s Leading Science Fiction Authors Are Shaping Your Future | Arts & Culture | Smithsonian http://www.smithsonianmag.com/arts-culture/how-americas-leading-science-fiction-authors-are-shaping-your-future-180951169/?no-ist

design-thinking

IFTF: Futures Thinking is the New Design Thinking http://www.iftf.org/future-now/article-detail/futures-thinking/ #futures-thinking

This App Is A Roll Of Duct Tape For The Internet Of Things - John Brownlee http://www.fastcodesign.com/3021114/innovation-by-design/this-app-is-a-roll-of-duct-tape-for-the-internet-of-things⁵¹

design and entreprenuerialism

IDEO Launches A Start-Up Incubator (But Don't Call It An Incubator) | Co.Design | business + design http://www.fastcodesign.com/1670261/ideo-launches-a-start-up-incubator-but-dont-call-it-an-incubator #queue #ideo

discourse

Tom Scocca, On Smarm http://gawker.com/on-smarm-1476594977

David Brooks, The Thought Leader - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/opinion/brooks-the-thought-leader.html?ref=todayspaper shoplifts Tom Scocca without reference, the snake

disruption

Steve Sinofsky, The Four Stages of Disruption | Re/code http://recode.net/2014/01/06/the-four-stages-of-disruption-2/ #steve-s

drones

Alex Carp, James Bridle: The Drone Shadow Catcher : The New Yorker #drones #james-bridle http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/elements/2013/12/the-drone-shadow-catcher.html⁵³

dropbox

Y Combinator Funding Application from Dropbox

DWYL

Miya Tokumitsu, In the Name of Love | Jacobin https://www.jacobinmag.com/2014/01/in-the-name-of-love/ #jacobin #miya-tokumitsu #dwyl #exploitation-of-workers #class

ecology

Richard Smith, Green Capitalism: The God That Failed http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/21060-green-capitalism-the-god-that-failed #ecological-collapse #eco-socialism #anti-capitalism #collapse #green-capitalism #anti-growth⁵⁴

economics

academic economics

Rober Solow, Dumb and Dumber in Macroeconomics, 2003 http://www2.gsb.columbia.edu/faculty/jstiglitz/festschrift/Papers/Stig-Solow.pdf

Robert J. Gordon, IS U.S. ECONOMIC GROWTH OVER? FALTERING INNOVATION CONFRONTS THE SIX HEADWINDS http://faculty-web.at.northwestern.edu/economics/gordon../Is%20US%20Economic%20Growth%20Over.pdf #growth #industrial-revolutions⁵⁵

Schumpeter: Exit Albert Hirschman | The Economist http://www.economist.com/news/business/21568708-great-lateral-thinker-died-december-10th-exit-albert-hirschman #albert-hirschman⁵⁶

emerging markets

‘Fragile Five’ Is the Latest Club of Emerging Nations in Turmoil - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/29/business/international/fragile-five-is-the-latest-club-of-emerging-nations-in-turmoil.html?ref=todayspaper #fragile-five⁵⁷

inequality

Paul Krugman, Why Inequality Matters - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/16/opinion/krugman-why-inequality-matters.html?ref=todayspaper #krugman #inequality⁵⁸

infographics

Microsoft Office goes social – infographic from the Microsoft SharePoint conference⁵⁹

meritocracy

Mandy Brown, You keep using that word http://stet.editorially.com/articles/you-keep-using-that-word/⁶⁰

minimum wage

David Card and Alan Kreuger, Minimum Wages and Employment:A Case Study of the Fast-Food Industry in New Jersey and Pennsylvania⁶¹

migration

Derek Thompson, Stuck: Why Americans Stopped Moving to the Richest States - Derek Thompson - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/01/stuck-why-americans-stopped-moving-to-the-richest-states/282969/ #migration #economics #lower-class #middle-class⁶²

postnormal economics

W Brian Arthur, The second economy | McKinsey & Company http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/strategy/thesecondeconomy #the-second-economy #autonomous-economy⁶³

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs | MIT Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/ #w-brian-arthur #andy-mcafee #eric-brynjolfsson #autonomous-economy⁶⁴

Eduardo Porter, Tech Leaps, Job Losses and Rising Inequality - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/16/business/economy/tech-leaps-job-losses-and-rising-inequality.html?ref=todayspaper⁶⁵

precariat

Guy Standing, The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class⁶⁶

Skills Gap

Paul Krugman, Jobs and Skills and Zombies

exercise

The Scientific 7-Minute Workout - NYTimes.com http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/05/09/the-scientific-7-minute-workout/?_r=0 #7-minute-workout⁶⁸

experimentation beats expertise

Leisa Reichelt, Experimentation beats expertise | disambiguity http://www.disambiguity.com/experimentation-beats-expertise/ #leanership #leisa-reichelt #user-experience #experimentation #goals #expertise⁶⁹

fun

Does Fun Pay? The Impact of Workplace Fun on Employee Turnover and Performance http://cqx.sagepub.com/content/54/4/370.abstract⁷⁰

future of work

antiwork

Peter Frase, The Politics of Getting a Life | Jacobin https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/04/the-politics-of-getting-a-life/ #kathi-weeks #antiwork #getting-a-life⁷¹

ephemeralization

Tyler Cohen, Automation Alone Isn’t Killing Jobs - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/06/business/automation-alone-isnt-killing-jobs.html #ephemeralization-of-work #tyle-cohen⁷²

ARE COMPUTERS MAKING SOCIETY MORE UNEQUAL? - JOSHUA ROTHMAN stoweboyd.com http://stoweboyd.com/post/66462698650/are-computers-making-society-more-unequal-joshua #tyler-cohen #joshua-rothman #dissent #riding-herd-on-software

Dancing with Robots by Frank Levy and Richard J. Murnane http://content.thirdway.org/publications/714/Dancing-With-Robots.pdf⁷³

freelance workforce

Ullekh NP, Sweeping changes: Peek into the way we will work in future - Economic Times http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-12-08/news/449107801freelancing-microsoft-india-mnc⁷⁴

new charter for HR

2013 TINYpulse Employee Engagement Survey - TINYpulse: Engaging Employees for Happier Companies https://www.tinypulse.com/employee-engagement-survey-2013 #embargo #2013-12-11⁷⁵

precariat

Alan B. Krueger, Judd Cramer and David Cho, Are the Long-Term Unemployed on the Margins of the Labor Market? http://www.brookings.edu/about/projects/bpea/papers/2014/are-longterm-unemployed-margins-labor-market #brookings #long-term-unemployed #precariat⁷⁶

Harold Meyerson, The 40-Year Slump http://prospect.org/article/40-year-slump⁷⁷

Mortimer Zuckerman, A Part-Time, Low-Wage Epidemic via The Wall Street Journal http://tmblr.co/Z_iwbyWjpPns⁷⁸

Paul Myerscough · Short Cuts · LRB 3 January 2013 http://www.lrb.co.uk/v35/n01/paul-myerscough/short-cuts #pret-a-manger #emotion-as-commodity #affective-labor⁷⁹

a new way of work

Steven #Sinofsky, Continuous Productivity: New tools and a new way of working for a new era

Steve Denning, A New Center Of Gravity For Management? - Forbes http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2013/11/18/a-new-center-of-gravity-for-management/ #organizational-culture #organizational-schlerosis #tapscott #umair-haque #drucker-forum⁸⁰

Raymond Hofmann, Can the elephant learn to dance? http://hofmann-management.ch/index.php/can-the-elephant-learn-to-dance/ A NEW KIND OF MANAGER AND LEADER IS REQUIRED #drucker-forum #helga-nowotny⁸¹

Aaron Dignan, The Operating Model That Is Eating The World https://medium.com/on-management/d9a3b82a5885 Today’s fastest growing, most profoundly impactful companies are using a completely different operating model #queue⁸²

Jack Martin Leith, The threefold revolution required in business, government and society | Culture is Conversation http://cultureisconversation.wordpress.com/2013/10/25/the-threefold-revolution/ #queue⁸³

women's issues

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Why Women Still Can’t Have It All http://d.pr/3BUe #the-future-of-work #feminism #balance

A seminal study of 527 U.S. companies, published in the Academy of Management Journal in 2000, suggests that “organizations with more extensive work-family policies have higher perceived firm-level performance” among their industry peers.

Anne-Marie Slaughter, Sheryl Sandberg’s ‘Lean In’ - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/10/books/review/sheryl-sandbergs-lean-in.html?pagewanted=2&pagewanted=all #lean-in #sheryl-sandberg #feminism⁸⁵

One Single Woman for Twitter's Board, One Giant Step for Equality? - Kara Swisher - News - AllThingsD http://allthingsd.com/20131205/one-single-woman-for-twitters-board-one-giant-step-for-gender-equality-in-tech-well-no/?mod=ATDfeaturedposts_widget #marjorie-scardino #twitter #feminism⁸⁶

UK #future-of-work

@flipchartcat, Work in 2030: Even more precarious than it is now | Flip Chart Fairy Tales http://flipchartfairytales.wordpress.com/2014/03/06/work-in-2030-even-more-precarious-than-it-is-now/ #queue #precarity #UK #future-of-work⁸⁷

a creative agency case study

Sandy Greene, Evolving a Creative Workplace: Step 1 « Boxes and Arrows http://boxesandarrows.com/evolving-a-creative-workplace-step-1/ #intuitive-company #creative-workplace #evolving-business

futures

Isaac Asimov, Visit to the World's Fair of 2014 http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/23/lifetimes/asi-v-fair.html #futures #isaac-asimov #worlds-fair⁸⁸

Seth's Blog: Accuracy, resilience and denial http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2014/01/accuracy-resilience-and-denial.html ... three ways to deal with the future. #seth-godin #resilience #2013-01-06

José Maria Ramos, From Critique to Cultural Recovery⁸⁹

Geeta Dayal, William Gibson on Why Sci-Fi Writers Are (Thankfully) Almost Always Wrong

Michael Horowitz and Philip Tetlock, Trending Upward

The Next Future - John Crowley - Lapham’s Quarterly 'The past is the new future' http://www.laphamsquarterly.org/essays/the-next-future.php?page=all⁹²

future londoners

Future Londoners -- Maughan's Nicki sketch is terrifying http://d.pr/tO4

Future Londoners | Nesta http://www.nesta.org.uk/news/future-londoners #futurelondoners #scenarios #nesta⁹³

Tim Maughan Zero Hours — Futures Exchange — Medium https://medium.com/futures-exchange/f68f17e8c12a #scenarios #design-fiction #tim-maughan⁹⁴

growth

The Widow's Cruse

Benjamin Freidman, The Moral Consequences Of Economic Growth⁹⁶

Robert Gordon, Is US economic growth over?

Kenneth Boulding, The Economics of the Coming Spaceship Earth⁹⁸

handwriting

Wacom lets people share handwritten notes across devices and platforms http://www.engadget.com/2014/02/26/wacom-ink-layer-language-will/ #wacom #handwriting #WILL #tablets #mobile #ux⁹⁹

happiness

Arthur C Brooks, A Formula for Happiness - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/opinion/sunday/a-formula-for-happiness.html?pagewanted=2&ref=todayspaper #happiness #workiness¹⁰⁰

Matt Richtel, You Can’t Take It With You, but You Still Want More - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/05/business/you-cant-take-it-with-you-but-you-still-want-more.html?ref=todayspaper¹⁰¹

hierarchy

pro

Hierarchy is Good. Hierarchy is Essential. And Less Isn’t Always Better | LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/today/post/article/20140112221140-15893932-hierarchy-is-good-hierarchy-is-essential-and-less-isn-t-always-better?_mSplash=1 #hierarchy #queue

history

Francis Fukuyama, The Decay of American Political Institutions - The American Interest http://www.the-american-interest.com/articles/2013/12/08/the-decay-of-american-political-institutions/ #institutions #america #economics #bureaucracy #courts #organizational-schlerosis¹⁰²

holacracy

Holacracy: The Hot Management Trend for 2014? http://mashable.com/2014/01/03/holacracy-zappos/ If all goes well, by the end of this year Tony Hsieh won't be the CEO of Zappos. In fact, he won't be anything there, just another employee without a title. #holacracy #zappos

2014: The Year of Workplace Reinvention | Pam Ross http://www.huffingtonpost.com/pam-ross/workplace-reinventionb4541805.html #self-management #zappos #ROWE¹⁰³

Five Misconceptions About Holacracy® — About Holacracy — Medium https://medium.com/about-holacracy/da84d8ba15e1 #holacracy #alexia-bowers #holacracyone

human resources

hiring

Hire by Auditions, Not Resumes - Matt Mullenweg - Harvard Business Review http://blogs.hbr.org/2014/01/hire-by-auditions-not-resumes/ #2014-01 #matt_mullenweg #auditions #human-resources #remote-work #ROWE¹⁰⁴

Trey Popp, Penn Gazette | Home Depot Syndrom, the Purple Squirrel, and America's Job Hunt Rabbit Hole http://www.upenn.edu/gazette/0113/feature2_1.html #hiring #home-deport-syndrome #peter-capelli¹⁰⁵

They're Watching You at Work - Don Peck - The Atlantic http://d.pr/bCxH #knack #oganization-man #blind-auditions #evolv #sandy-pentland #sociometric-solutions #arup-big-data-resources¹⁰⁶

Companies Say No to Having an HR Department - WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304819004579489603299910562

high tech HR

Yes, Silicon Valley, Sometimes You Need More Bureaucracy¹⁰⁷

tools

People.Co

Don't Let the Good Ones Get Away — PEOPLECO blog¹⁰⁸

hiring bias

Shaila Dewan, Study: Women Who Can Do Math Still Don't Get Hired¹⁰⁹

Tom Jacobs, What, Me Biased? Our False Sense of Fairness and Impartiality¹¹⁰

algorithmic HR

Quentin Hardy, The Consumer Revolution of Enterprise Computing Modularity is the new customization. #workday #box¹¹¹

IBM Connections

Mail Next

Thoughts on IBM Connections Mail (“Mail Next”) | Michael Sampson http://michaelsampson.net/2014/01/28/mail-next/ #michael-sampson #mail-next

IBM Mail Next | Osterman Research Blog http://ostermanresearch.wordpress.com/2014/01/29/ibm-mail-next/ #osterman #mail-next

Inequality

Robert Reich (Why There's No Outcry) http://robertreich.org/post/74519195381

innovation

THE FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS OF MEDIOCRITY http://www.efqm.org/the-fundamental-concepts-of-mediocrity #wet-blanket-list #innovation

internet access

Ezra Klein, Why the government should provide internet access http://www.vox.com/susan-crawford-internet-public-option/ for more than 77% of Americans, their only choice for a high capacity connection is their local cable monopoly #susan-crawford #ezra-klein #internet-access #public-internet #socialist-internet

job crafting

Amy Wrzesniewski and Jane E. Dutton, Managing Yourself: Turn the Job You Have into the Job You Want http://hbr.org/2010/06/managing-yourself-turn-the-job-you-have-into-the-job-you-want/ar/2¹¹²

Stowe Boyd, Shape your work, not the other way around http://research.gigaom.com/2014/04/shape-your-work-not-the-other-way-around/¹¹³

leadership

Bob Pittman of Clear Channel, on the Value of Dissent - Adam Bryant http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/17/business/bob-pittman-of-clear-channel-on-the-value-of-dissent.html?smid=tw-share&_r=0¹¹⁴

Why Mandela Was Unique - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/11/opinion/friedman-why-mandela-was-unique.html?ref=todayspaper #mandela¹¹⁵

Should Leaders Focus on Results, or on People? - Matthew Lieberman - Harvard Business Review http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/should-leaders-focus-on-results-or-on-people/ #queue #social-skills #results-oriented¹¹⁶

leanership

Breaking Workplace Taboos: A Conversation About Salary Transparency - 99U http://sto.ly/btIB #buffer #joel-gascoigne #queue¹¹⁷

Steve Blank, Why the Lean Start-Up Changes Everything - Harvard Business Review http://hbr.org/2013/05/why-the-lean-start-up-changes-everything/ar/2 #lean¹¹⁸

libraries

Tool libraries

Toronto’s Kitchen Library Brings Appliances to All http://lj.libraryjournal.com/2013/11/library-services/torontos-kitchen-library-brings-appliances-to-all/#_

Toronto Tool Library http://torontotoollibrary.com/

Who Says Libraries Are Going Extinct? - Pacific Standard: The Science of Society http://www.psmag.com/navigation/books-and-culture/says-libraries-going-extinct-73029/ With nearly 2.5 billion materials circulated through more than 16,000 public branches, 2013 was one of the strongest years for libraries in the past decade. And things are looking up.

Books take a back seat in this proposal to redesign Washington DC's historic library | The Verge http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/21/5434254/washington-dc-mlk-library-redesign-proposal #libraries #MLK-library #multipurpose-space¹¹⁹

James Temple, Pew: The Library Holds Its Own in the Information Age | Re/code http://recode.net/2014/03/13/pew-the-library-holds-its-own-in-the-information-age/?utmsource=newsletter&&mkttok=3RkMMJWWfF9wsRonu6nPZKXonjHpfsX87OwvT%2Frn28M3109ad%2BrmPBy%2B2oMFWp8na%2BqWCgseOrQ8mFkIV8izUs0TrKM%3D#038;utmmedium=email&utmcampaign=rcemaildaily

limits to growth

The metals in your smartphone may be irreplaceable | Ars Technica http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/12/the-metals-in-your-smartphone-may-be-irreplaceable/ #metals #scarcity¹²⁰

linguistics

Your Ability to Can Even: A Defense of Internet Linguistics - Tia Bahen http://the-toast.net/2013/11/20/yes-you-can-even/¹²¹

Young Women Often Trendsetters in Vocal Patterns - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/28/science/young-women-often-trendsetters-in-vocal-patterns.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 #fry

THE BATTLE LINES OF TODAY’S DEBATES OVER GUN CONTROL, STAND-YOUR-GROUND LAWS, AND OTHER VIOLENCE-RELATED ISSUES WERE DRAWN CENTURIES AGO BY AMERICA’S EARLY SETTLERS - Colin Woordward http://www.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/features/up-in-arms.html¹²²

linkedin

Heather Bussing, Why I Killed My Linkedin Account | HR Examiner

Luis Suarez, Why I, Too, Killed My LinkedIn Account

localism

neighborhoods

The Hotel as Neighborhood, Joann Greco #urbanauts #vienna #hotels #horizontal-hotel http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/hotel-neighborhood/2284/¹²³

meetings

Farhad Manjoo, Tortuous Business Meeting? Tech Is Here to Help - WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052702304202204579252640911149518 #phil-libin #aaron-levie #jeff-bezos #long-form-meeting-prep¹²⁴

messaging apps

Inside the High-Stakes Battle to Control How You Talk to Friends #facebook #whatsapp #kik #benedict-evans¹²⁵

The Rise and Fall of AIM, the Breakthrough AOL Never Wanted

microsoft

enterprise-mobility-suite

Ryan Faas, Microsoft: Enterprise Mobility Suite and Windows Phone 8.1 http://www.citeworld.com/article/2139354/mobile-byod/late-to-the-enterprise-mobility-party-microsoft-arrives-with-big-plans.html #azure #intune #enterprise-mobility-suite

Inside one of Microsoft's biggest and most mysterious teams, the Applications and Services Group | ZDNet http://www.zdnet.com/inside-one-of-microsofts-biggest-and-most-mysterious-teams-the-applications-and-services-group-7000026749/ #microsoft #qi-lu #julie-larson-green

microsyntax

Shady Characters » Miscellany № 47: great!* Another sarcasm mark.

millennials

Recruiting and managing the millennial generation: PwC HR survey: Key findings http://www.pwc.com/gx/en/managing-tomorrows-people/future-of-work/key-findings.jhtml #queue #millennials

mobile

What does mobile scale mean? — Benedict Evans http://ben-evans.com/benedictevans/2013/12/18/what-does-mobile-scale-mean Some time in the next six months, the number of smartphones on earth will pass the number of PCs. #mobile

movies

Manohla Dargis’s Top Films of 2013 - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/15/movies/manohla-dargiss-top-films-of-2013.html¹²⁶

multitasking

University of Michigan News Service | Your brain on speed: Walking doesn't impair thinking and multitasking #walking #multitasking

mutualism

Building the Structure of the New Society Within the Shell of the Old, Kevin Carson¹²⁷

Born poor? Bad luck, you have won last prize in the lottery of life - Will Hutton via The Observer

neuroeconomics

Daniel Goleman http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/rich-people-just-care-less/ #queue #wealth #the-rich-are-not-like-you-and-me

nostalgia

J Krone, Tradition and the “Social Disease” of Nostalgia http://jkrone.wordpress.com/2014/01/08/tradition-and-the-social-disease-of-nostalgia/ #nathan-jurgenson

obamacare

Harold Pollack, Reports of ACA demise: greatly exaggerated http://www.healthinsurance.org/blog/2014/04/08/reports-of-aca-demise-greatly-exaggerated/ #obamacare #medicaid-tragedy¹²⁹

offshoring

Services Offshoring, American Jobs, and the Global Economy, Brainard and Litan winter 2005 https://www.dropbox.com/s/wjo169wylqqawl9/services%20offshoring%20american%20jobs%20and%20the%20global%20economy%202005%20brainard%20litan.pdf¹³⁰

organizational culture

corporate culture

Eric van den Steen, On the Origin and Evolution of Corporate Culture #organizational-culture #eric-van-steen #burns-and-stalker¹³¹

building culture

There’s No Such Thing as a Culture Turnaround - Jon R. Katzenbach - Harvard Business Review¹³²

Jon Katzenbach and DeAnne Aguirre, Culture and the Chief Executive¹³³

I came to see in my time at IBM that culture isn’t just one aspect of the game – it is the game. In the end an organization is nothing more than the collective capacity of its people to create value. - Lou Gerstner

Culture eats strategy for breakfast, technology for lunch, and products for dinner, and soon thereafter everything else too. - Peter Drucker

Stephen Billing’s Blog » Is There Such a Thing as Organisational Culture?¹³⁴

GM culture

Jeff Bennett, Amid Recall Crisis, GM's Barra Quickens Pace - WSJ.com¹³⁵

G.M. Documents Reveal Years of Talks on Defect - NYTimes.com April 11 2014¹³⁶

2 Executives Leave G.M. After Wide-Ranging Recall - NYTimes.com April 14 2014¹³⁷

GM Culture is Simple: Our Customers and Their Safety Come First - Mary Barra April 14 2014¹³⁸

G.M. Chief Cites New Safety Moves and Says Repairs Are Now Underway - NYTimes.com April 15 2014¹³⁹

Brian Fielkow, With GM's Massive Recall, Is Corporate Culture to Blame? | Entrepreneur.com april 22 2014¹⁴⁰

At GM, Safety Could Be Mary Barra’s Silver Bullet | TIME.com April 16 2014¹⁴¹

'human resources'

hiring

How to hire?¹⁴²

moneyball

Lance Haun, Billy Beane and the Science of Talent Management, The Moneyball Way http://www.tlnt.com/2012/02/28/billy-beane-and-the-science-of-talent-management-the-moneyball-way/

culturology

Liese Gerritsen, Metaphors of the Organization: Discourse in Public and Private Worlds https://www.dropbox.com/s/wv9x67u2dyvmcfs/Liese%20Gerritsen%20Dissertation.pdf¹⁴³

André SPICER 2013 Shooting the shit: the role of bullshit in organisations M@n@gement, 16(5), 653-666. http://www.management-aims.com/PapersMgmt/165Spicer.pdf #queue #bullshit¹⁴⁴

conflict

Microaggression and Management - #Shanley #microaggression¹⁴⁵

engagement

Unlocking the passion of the Explorer - John Hagel et al http://dupress.com/articles/unlocking-the-passion-of-the-explorer/?id=us:el:pr:dup402:awa:shift:tmt:091713?id=us:el:pr:dup402:awa:shift:tmt:091713¹⁴⁶

The Organization of Your Dreams - Rob Goffee and Gareth Jones - Harvard Business Review http://blogs.hbr.org/2013/12/building-the-organization-of-your-dreams/¹⁴⁷

emergent order

Aaron Dignan, The Last Re-Org You’ll Ever Do — Medium https://medium.com/p/f19160f61500 #medium #emergent-business #valve #holacracy #sociocracy #spotify #zappos #github¹⁴⁸

biocracy

Life and work: one and the same? http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/12/131209105344.htm #peter-fleming #foucault #biopower #biocracy #queue¹⁴⁹

analytics

Don Peck, They're Watching You At Work #pentland #people-analytics #social-data #charismatic-connectors http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/¹⁵⁰

pay it forward

The Science of ‘Paying It Forward’ - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/16/opinion/sunday/the-science-of-paying-it-forward.html?ref=todayspaper¹⁵¹

performance

performance reviews

Organizational performance – a private conversation that should have been public and is now | Philip Sheldrake http://www.philipsheldrake.com/2014/03/organizational-performance-private-conversation-public-now/ #performance-reviews #philip-sheldrake

Radical change to Performance Reviews wins Atlassian prestiguous Human Capital M-Prize - Atlassian Blogs http://blogs.atlassian.com/2011/03/radicalchangetoperformancereviewswinsatlassian_prestig/ #performance-reviews

Crowdsource Your Performance Reviews - Eric Mosley - Harvard Business Review http://blogs.hbr.org/2012/06/crowdsource-your-performance-r/ #performance-reviews #crowdsourcing

Performance appraisal satisfaction: The role of feedback and goal orientation. Culbertson, Satoris S.; Henning, Jaime B.; Payne, Stephanie C. Journal of Personnel Psychology, Vol 12(4), 2013 http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/prs/12/4/189/ #performance-reviews¹⁵²

Matt Charlet, CEB's IT Blog » The Curiously Unsolved Case of Enterprise Collaboration http://www.executiveboard.com/it-blog/the-curiously-unsolved-case-of-enterprise-collaboration/ #network-performance¹⁵³

phablets

Brian X. Chen, Handset Makers Go Big on Smartphones - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/technology/handset-makers-go-big-on-smartphones.html?ref=todayspaper #samsung #phablets #handwriting #asian-markets #mobile #companions #queue¹⁵⁴

play

School ditches rules and loses bullies - National News | TVNZ http://tvnz.co.nz/national-news/school-ditches-rules-and-loses-bullies-5807957 #playground-rules #rip-up-the-rulebook #risk #bullies

politics

tea party

Theda Skocpol, Why the Tea Party Isn't Going Anywhere http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/why-the-tea-party-isnt-going-anywhere/282591/ #tea-party #ted-cruz¹⁵⁵

power

Robert Zoellick, Singing Them 1% Blues http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324735304578356461358982422 #the-end-of-power #naim¹⁵⁶

privacy

Your Personal Life Is None of Your Boss's Business - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/04/02/should-social-media-activity-cost-you-your-job/your-personal-life-is-none-of-your-bosss-business¹⁵⁷

project management

5 Evidence-Based Ways to Optimize Your Teamwork - 99U http://99u.com/articles/7285/5-evidence-based-ways-to-optimize-your-teamwork #premortems¹⁵⁸

Performing a Project Premortem - Gary Klein - Harvard Business Review http://hbr.org/2007/09/performing-a-project-premortem¹⁵⁹

psychology

Ezra Klein, How politics makes us stupid - Vox http://www.vox.com/2014/4/6/5556462/brain-dead-how-politics-makes-us-stupid #identity-protective-cognition

David Rock, SCARF: a brain-based model for collaborating with and influencing with others http://www.davidrock.net/files/NLJ_SCARFUS.pdf¹⁶¹

Matthew Hudson, Why Mark Zuckerberg Gets Away With Hoodies : The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2013/12/the-power-of-the-hoodie-wearing-ceo.html?utmsource=tny&utmcampaign=generalsocial&utm_medium=tumblr #silvia-bellezza #status #nonconformity¹⁶²

quotations

It is hardly possible to overrate the value… of placing human beings in contact with persons dissimilar to themselves, and with modes of thought and action unlike those with which they are familiar… . Such communication has always been, and is peculiarly in the present age, one of the primary sources of progress. - John Stuart Mill #diversity #john-stuart-mill

Intuition is the use of patterns you have already learned, whereas insight is the discovery of new patterns. - Gary Klein #intuition #insight #gary-klein

Everybody has a plan until they get punched in the mouth. - Mike Tyson #planning #mike-tyson

There should be no need to act as if all decisions were designed to establish certainties - John Ralston Saul http://t.co/TeFa5X7WGQ #john-ralson-saul #decisions #certainty

2013 turned out to be the year when the Digital Revolution trended Stalinist - Bruce Sterling http://t.co/BzoU5P73xU @bruces #digital-revolution #2013 #stalinist

Anxiety occurs when people try to do today’s jobs with yesterday’s tools. - Marshall McLuhan #mcluhan #todays-jobs #yesterdays-tools

We are all alike in our infinite ignorance. - Karl Popper #karl-popper #ignorance #humanism

The world is full of people who have stopped listening to themselves, or have listened only to their neighbors to learn what they ought to do, how they ought to behave, and what values they should be living for. - Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth #joseph-campbell #myth

I reject the proposition that idealism and humanism are only for the young, and that with age and experience we naturally adopt a zero-sum, dog-eat-dog philosophy because that is ‘human nature’. - Stowe Boyd #stoweboyd #idealism #humanism

reading lists

Brian Eno's 20 books for sustaining civilization http://paperbits.net/post/78497842177/seeing-like-a-state-public-library-by-james-c #reading #seeing-like-a-state¹⁶³

repair cafes

The Glorious Feeling of Fixing Something Yourself - Christina Cooke - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2014/01/the-glorious-feeling-of-fixing-something-yourself/282988/ When I mended my lamp at one of Portland's repair cafes, it was no longer "just" a lamp to me; I felt a fierce sense of attachment to it. #DIY #repair #repair-cafes¹⁶⁴

robots

Jesse McKinley, With Farm Robotics, the Cows Decide When It’s Milking Time http://www.nytimes.com/2014/04/23/nyregion/with-farm-robotics-the-cows-decide-when-its-milking-time.html?ref=todayspaper #robots #ephemeralization-of-work milking-robots¹⁶⁵

self-organizing

Snippets - What can organisations learn from desire lines of bicycles in city urban planning http://johntropea.tumblr.com/post/74492385632/what-can-organisations-learn-from-desire-lines-of

self-publishing

Eliza Kern, Gumroad wants to make selling content as easy as sharing content — Tech News and Analysis http://gigaom.com/2013/08/07/with-subscriptions-gumroad-wants-to-make-it-easier-for-you-to-sell-the-things-you-create/ #gumroad¹⁶⁶

selfies

Jason Feifer, Google Makes You Smarter, Facebook Makes You Happier, Selfies Make You A Better Person | Fast Company | Business + Innovation http://www.fastcompany.com/3023603/creative-conversations/google-makes-you-smarter-facebook-makes-you-happier-selfies-make-you- #turkle #end-of-civilization #selfie #the-war-on-multitasking¹⁶⁷

sentiment analysis

Derrick Harris, Stanford researchers to open-source model they say has nailed sentiment analysis — Tech News and Analysis http://gigaom.com/2013/10/03/stanford-researchers-to-open-source-model-they-say-has-nailed-sentiment-analysis/ #sentiment-analysis #richard-socher #stanford #recursive-neural-tensor-networks¹⁶⁸

Derrick Harris, IBM brings in academic superstars to move cognitive computing beyond Watson — Tech News and Analysis http://gigaom.com/2013/10/03/ibm-brings-in-academic-superstars-to-move-cognitive-computing-beyond-watson/ #ibm #sentiment-analysis #watson¹⁶⁹

Ingrid Lundgen, Thomson Reuters Taps Into Twitter For Big Data Sentiment Analysis | TechCrunch http://techcrunch.com/2014/02/03/twitter-raises-its-enterprise-cred-with-thomson-reuters-sentiment-analysis-deal/ #datasift #twitter #thomson-reuters #sentiment-analysis¹⁷⁰

serendipity

Rachel Emma Silverman, The Science of Serendipity in the Workplace - WSJ.com http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887323798104578455081218505870?mod=wsjvalettopemail #queue

sex

equal marriage and sex

Does a More Equal Marriage Mean Less Sex? - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/magazine/does-a-more-equal-marriage-mean-less-sex.html?smid=tw-nytimes&_r=1¹⁷¹

sharing economy

transport

Uber Might Be More Valuable Than Facebook -- Daily Intelligencer http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2013/12/uber-might-be-more-valuable-than-facebook.html There's a reason the company recently changed its tagline from "Everyone's private driver" to the much broader "Where lifestyle meets logistics." #uber #kevin-roose

silicon valley

Joel Kotkin, How Silicon Valley Could Destabilize The Democratic Party | Newgeography.com http://www.newgeography.com/content/004134-how-silicon-valley-could-destabilize-the-democratic-party #silicon-valley #andreesen #libertarianism #the-one-per-cent #inequality #marissa-mayer¹⁷²

Mic Wright, Silicon Valley geeks vote like pious Democrats. But they think and act like ruthless Republicans – Telegraph Blogs http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/technology/micwright/100008207/silicon-valley-geeks-vote-like-pious-democrats-but-they-think-and-act-like-ruthless-republicans/ #silicon-valley¹⁷³

social

social business

Mary Branscombe, Stop putting band-aids on broken back-end systems | CITEworld http://www.citeworld.com/article/2114448/consumerization/stop-building-broken-back-end-systems.html #social-layer #sap #avon¹⁷⁴

social is not collaboration

Sharon Richardson, Collaboration is not the same as Social http://www.joiningdots.com/blog/2013/02/collaboration-is-not-the-same-as-social/ #queue #collaboration #soon

examples

Google Engineering Management - Business Insider http://www.businessinsider.com/google-engineering-management-2013-11 #project-oxygen

TD Bank Group: Becoming a Social Business: Connecting TD Customers & Employees -- presented by Wendy Arnott http://vimeo.com/66663219

social crm

Insightly -- CRM and Project Management software for small business http://insightly.com/ #insightly

social data

How to split up the US « Pete Warden's blog http://petewarden.com/2010/02/06/how-to-split-up-the-us/ #facebook #geography #7-nations-of-America #pete-warden

social economy

McKinsey The Social Economy #arup-big-data-sources #mckinset #social-economy #prediction #stock-market¹⁷⁵

Rich Meehan, “Facebook and trials,” http://blog.ctnews.com/meehan/2012/03/01/facebook-and-trials/ #arup-big-data-sources #social-data #facebook #litigation #law¹⁷⁶

Lucy Tobin, Entrepreneur: How to start an online business (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2012) via McKinsey The Social Economy #arup-big-data-sources #wonga #prediction #microcredit #loans¹⁷⁷

Movenbank via McKinsey The Social Economy #arup-big-data-sources #movenbak #banking¹⁷⁸

social networks

NEW PATHS TO SUCCESS WORKING YOUR WAY UP THROUGH AN ELEPHANTINE BUREAUCRACY NO LONGER MAKES SENSE, ARGUES NOBEL LAUREATE AND BELL LABS SCIENTIST ARNO PENZIAS. TECHNOLOGY MEANS NEW CAREER LADDERS. - June 12, 1995 http://money.cnn.com/magazines/fortune/fortune_archive/1995/06/12/203821/ #company-surface #arno-penzias

The Science of Why Our Brains Are Wired to Connect | Brain Pickings http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2013/11/08/social-why-our-brains-are-wired-to-connect-lieberman/¹⁷⁹

You Can’t Always Get What You Want: Structural Determinants of Compromised Ideals in Intimate Behavior - Rachel Behler, Cornell University¹⁸⁰

Bacteria are social microorganisms: MIT researchers | KurzweilAI¹⁸¹

social media

Asur, S. and Huberman, B.A., predicting the future with social media #social-media #prediction #arup-big-data-sources #movies¹⁸²

Martin Harrysson, Estelle Métayer, and Hugo Sarrazin http://www.mckinsey.com/insights/hightechtelecomsinternet/thestrengthofweak_signals #mckinsey #tomtom #nordstrom #weak-signals #social-listening¹⁸³

social tools

Ted Greenwald, The Continuous Productivity of Aaron Levie http://www.technologyreview.com/news/522081/the-continuous-productivity-of-aaron-levie/?utmcampaign=socialsync&utmmedium=social-post&utm_source=twitter¹⁸⁴

Mordechai Benkler, The Wealth of Networks

The role of technology in shaping culture¹⁸⁵

social psychology

Vanessa Bohns, Would You Lie for Me? - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/09/opinion/sunday/would-i-lie-for-you.html?ref=todayspaper #2014-02-09 #vanessa-bohns #social-pressure #queue¹⁸⁶

sociometrics

Alex Pentland, The New Science of Building Great Teams - Harvard Business Review http://hbr.org/2012/04/the-new-science-of-building-great-teams #call-centers #scheduling #counterintuitive¹⁸⁷

Steve Lohr, M.I.T.'s Alex Pentland: Measuring Idea Flows to Accelerate Innovation - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/15/m-i-t-s-alex-pentland-measuring-idea-flows-to-accelerate-innovation/?ref=todayspaper

sources

workforce360 http://www.randstadusa.com/workforce360 #randstad

speculative design

Paul Saffo, Paul Strong Opinions weakly held¹⁸⁸

Brickstarter – Brickstarter prototype v0.1, and using sketches to ask questions¹⁸⁹

Abductive reasoning: Logic, visual thinking, and coherence - Paul Thagard and Cameron Shelley¹⁹⁰

startups

Paul Graham, Black Swan Farming¹⁹¹

Felix Salmon, The most expensive lottery ticket in the world http://blogs.reuters.com/felix-salmon/2014/04/21/the-most-expensive-lottery-ticket-in-the-world/ #start-ups

stoweboyd.com

2013-11

At the end of the day, we need to break a pattern. Face it: I’m a pattern. http://stoweboyd.com/post/67160646874/at-the-end-of-the-day-we-need-to-break-a-pattern #ballmer #microsoft #2013-11-16 #microsoft-ceo

strategy

transformational failure

Jennifer Frahm, 70% of change projects fail: Bollocks! | Conversations of Change >

Gail Severini, Time to kill the phantom 70% failure rate quoted on transformational strategy?¹⁹²

Eric Barends, Barbara Janssen, Wouter ten Have, and Steven ten Have, Effects of Change Interventions:What Kind of Evidence Do We Really Have?¹⁹³

Mark Hughes, Do 70 Per Cent of All Organizational Change Initiatives Really Fail?¹⁹⁴

The Economist, Why good strategies fail -- Lessons for the C-suite

emergent strategy

Henry Mintzberg, The Design School¹⁹⁵

Henry Mintzberg, Of Strategies, Deliberate and Emergent¹⁹⁶

surveillance

NYC

One Company Is Trying To Count And Track All Of New York City's Pedestrians | Co.Exist | ideas + impact http://www.fastcoexist.com/3025926/one-company-is-trying-to-count-and-track-all-of-new-york-citys-pedestrians #placemeter #pedestrians

Drones

Eyes Over Compton: How Police Spied on a Whole City - Conor Friedersdorf - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2014/04/sheriffs-deputy-compares-drone-surveillance-of-compton-to-big-brother/360954/?curator=MediaREDEF #drones #compton #surveillance¹⁹⁷

swarm of screens

Navigating the new multi-screen world: Insights show how consumers use different devices together¹⁹⁸

tablets

Tablet Hourly Usage Study: iPad Dominates, Surface Users More Active During Working Hours | Chitika Online Advertising Network http://chitika.com/insights/2014/tablet-by-hour

tool-fragmentation

Kostas Kastrisios, Tool Fragmentation in the Workplace and What You Can Do About It - Betterworking http://www.betterworking.com/betterworking-blog/tool-fragmentation-workplace-can/ #horizontal #tool-fragmentation #byos #shadow-it

tools

troupe chat tool https://trou.pe

traffic

Wired 12.12: Roads Gone Wild http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.12/traffic.html #monderman #traffic-calming¹⁹⁹

Controlled Chaos: European Cities Do Away with Traffic Signs - SPIEGEL ONLINE http://www.spiegel.de/international/spiegel/controlled-chaos-european-cities-do-away-with-traffic-signs-a-448747.html #monderman #traffic-calming²⁰⁰

training

apprenticeships

Nelson Schwartz, Where Factory Apprenticeship Is Latest Model From Germany http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/01/business/where-factory-apprenticeship-is-latest-model-from-germany.html?ref=todayspaper #bmw #tognum #queue²⁰¹

transparency

Breaking Workplace Taboos: A Conversation About Salary Transparency - 99U http://99u.com/articles/15527/the-age-of-salary-transparency #buffer #salary-transparency #queue

trust

Andrew Ross Sorkin, Berkshire's Radical Strategy: Trust - NYTimes.com - NYTimes.com²⁰²

Gretchen Gavett, Why a Quarter of Americans Don't Trust Their Employers - Gretchen Gavett - Harvard Business Review²⁰³

twitter

Author’s Unmasking Won’t Stop Book - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/26/business/media/authors-unmasking-may-undercut-book.html?ref=todayspaper #gselevator @twitter

Liar’s Jackpot - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/27/opinion/liars-jackpot.html?ref=todayspaper #gselevator

How to Actually Get a Job on Twitter - Alexis C. Madrigal - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/07/how-to-actually-get-a-job-on-twitter/278246/ #robinson-meyer #the-atlantic #alexis-madrigal

Johan Bollen, Huina Mao, and Xiaojun Zeng, “Twitter mood predicts the stock market,” Journal of Computational Science, Volume 2, 2011. #arup-big-data-sources #stock-market #prediction #twitter

Can Twitter Predict Major Events Such as Mass Protests? | MIT Technology Review http://www.technologyreview.com/view/524871/can-twitter-predict-major-events-such-as-mass-protests/ #prediction #twitter #nathan-kallus²⁰⁴

Twitter Mood Predicts The Stock Market | MIT Technology Review #arup-big-data-sourceshttp://www.technologyreview.com/view/421251/twitter-mood-predicts-the-stock-market/²⁰⁵

unconditional regard

Alfie Kohn, Do Our Kids Get Off Too Easy? - NYTimes.com²⁰⁶

urbanism

There's Something About Cities and Suicide - Olga Khazan - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2014/02/theres-something-about-cities-and-suicide/283975/ #cities #suicide #murder²⁰⁷

The Economist, Vive la révolution #bikes #transport http://www.economist.com/node/21562252²⁰⁸

The Hotel as Neighborhood, Joann Greco #hotels #urbanauts²⁰⁹

Demographics

http://www.theatlanticcities.com/politics/2013/11/suburbs-are-new-swing-states/7706/ (The Suburbs Are the New Swing States - Richard Florida - The Atlantic Cities)²¹⁰

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/11/26/opinion/the-death-of-the-fringe-suburb.html (The Death of the Fringe Suburb - NYTimes.com)²¹¹

Smart Cities

Dan Hill, Essay: On the smart city; Or, a 'manifesto' for smart citizens instead http://www.cityofsound.com/blog/2013/02/on-the-smart-city-a-call-for-smart-citizens-instead.html²¹²

Highways

Why Crumbling Urban Freeways Should be Torn Down And No New Ones Should be Built - Firefly Living http://fireflyliving.com/2013/10/28/why-crumbling-urban-freeways-should-be-torn-down-and-no-new-ones-should-be-built/ #urban-highways²¹³

Mark Oppenheimer, Technology Is Not Driving Us Apart After All - NYTimes.com http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/magazine/technology-is-not-driving-us-apart-after-all.html?ref=technology #william-whyte #public-space #sociality #queue²¹⁴

video production

12 Stars Media - Video Production, Editing and Strategy http://12starsmedia.com/ #podio

walking

Navigating Our World Like Birds and Bees - NYTimes.com http://well.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/01/navigating-our-world-like-birds-and-bees/ #levy-walk #wandering #flaneur²¹⁵

web design

http://stylifyme.com create a stylebook from any website

work graph

http://semanticweb.com/hojoki-goes-mobile-drives-the-social-work-graph_b28578 Looks like Martin Böhringer of Hojoki was the first to use the term 'work graph', back in 2012. #work-graph

Here's a storify with some relatively knowledgeable folks talking about the 'work graph'. https://storify.com/roundtrip/using-work-graph-model-to-represent-context I plan to interview these guys about the term. #greg-lloyd #mike-gotta #cecil-dijoux #work-graph

Justin Rosenstein, The Way We Work Is Soul-Sucking, But Social Networks Are Not the Fix http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:cBj5Do_IqDsJ:www.wired.com/2013/10/its-time-to-focus-on-the-work-graph-not-social-networks-at-work/+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us #work-graph²¹⁶

Marie Wallace, The People Network is a Social Semantic Network | Marie's Ramblings & Ruminations

Angela Guess, Why Graph Theory is Key to Understanding Big Data - Semanticweb.com

work tech tools

conversation tools

layer

Layer Loves YC²¹⁷

curation

Convo

Enterprise Social Network for Business Collaboration | Convo https://www.convo.com/ #queue #convo #work-

file sync-and-share

Syncplicity

Heads Up on News: EMC Syncplicity and SharePoint Integration - stowe.boyd@gmail.com - Gmail https://mail.google.com/mail/u/0/#inbox/144899d799b6a08b #file-sync-and-share

presentations

Bunkr

rvl.io -> slides

haikudeck

http://www.haikudeck.com/p/UsrnrC1CKD/leanership-a-new-way-of-work

task management

Harmonia · Task management for modern, self-organising teams²¹⁸

work media

Unison

Unison · the faster and more organized way for teams to work securely together https://www.unison.com/pricing #queue #work-management

workplace

How Microsoft's Developer Division changed its workspace, and transformed how it works - GeekWire http://www.geekwire.com/2014/microsoft-developer-division/

open office

Maria Konnikova, The Open-Office Trap : The New Yorker http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/currency/2014/01/the-open-office-trap.html #open-offices #maria-konnikova²¹⁹

Matthew Clark et al The Physical Environment of the Office https://www.dropbox.com/s/g2jeikfrmncv766/ThePhysicalEnvironmentoftheOffice%20Matthew%20Davis%20LeachClegg_2011.pdf #open-offices #matthew-clark the low cost and flexibility of open offices are the primary driver for their use: they are the primary mode these days. Companies will have to examine how to create a 'palette' of spaces to boost productivity, but more importantly, to treat the workplace as a place for working socially, rather than a place for reflective work.

How the Modern Office Shapes American Life - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic Cities http://www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2014/04/how-modern-office-shapes-american-life/8871/

Steelcase: Reports from the Nomadic Fringe http://360.steelcase.com/articles/reports-from-the-nomadic-fringe/²²⁰

Vicky Hallett, Workout Wear Friday - The Washington Post http://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/wellness/workout-wear-friday/2013/12/30/50ea53cc-6dc5-11e3-a523-fe73f0ff6b8d_story.html #workout-wear-fridays #casual-fridays #levis²²¹

Asana Office http://customspaces.com/office/agtwhQqM2X/asana-office-san-francisco/

Why Square Designed Its New Offices To Work Like A City | Fast Company | Business + Innovation http://www.fastcompany.com/3021752/most-creative-people/why-square-designed-its-new-offices-to-work-like-a-city #square #chris-gorman

13 Playful Work Environments That Reinvent Office Space http://mashable.com/2014/01/09/playful-workspaces/ #gallery

Our Cubicles, Ourselves: How the Modern Office Shapes American Life - Rebecca J. Rosen - The Atlantic http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/04/our-cubicles-ourselves-how-the-modern-office-shapes-american-life/360613/ Hierarchies don’t disappear when you place everyone at a communal table or “superdesk”; they persist in more subtle modes of workplace interaction.

Infographic: The Death Of The Office | Co.Create | creativity + culture + commerce

Notes

1. Krikorian stressed the importance of the engineering org’s compact, five-to-seven-person teams that sit together, are dedicated to specific areas of the site, and can operate autonomously, according to Krikorian’s slideshow pitch (no audio, but the slides are informative). Krikorian stressed how much control the individual groups have over how their teams work — likely a nice way to pitch would-be engineer recruits at the conference.
2. Both companies [Toyota and Google] make much better decisions because they don't rely on hierarchy, PowerPoint, persuasion. They're making decisions based on real experiments. So I said, wait a minute. Whenever reasonable, let's move from decisions by persuasion to decisions by experiment.
3. So today we are announcing VEDO – an extension of our core platform that brings programmable intelligence to the masses. Building upon our incredibly rich text pre-processing and parsing capabilities, we have added a whole new engine that allows customers to take advantage of advances in machine learning, statistical models, rich taxonomies and much more all through a simple and unified approach. As with the rest of our platform, we want to reduce the cost of developing this kind of functionality for our customers and let them focus on innovation and not on infrastructure.
4. Since the genetic code was deciphered in the 1960s, scientists have assumed that it was used exclusively to write information about proteins. UW scientists were stunned to discover that genomes use the genetic code to write two separate languages. One describes how proteins are made, and the other instructs the cell on how genes are controlled. One language is written on top of the other, which is why the second language remained hidden for so long.

   “For over 40 years we have assumed that DNA changes affecting the genetic code solely impact how proteins are made,” said Stamatoyannopoulos. “Now we know that this basic assumption about reading the human genome missed half of the picture. These new findings highlight that DNA is an incredibly powerful information storage device, which nature has fully exploited in unexpected ways.”

   The genetic code uses a 64-letter alphabet called codons. The UW team discovered that some codons, which they called duons, can have two meanings, one related to protein sequence, and one related to gene control. These two meanings seem to have evolved in concert with each other. The gene control instructions appear to help stabilize certain beneficial features of proteins and how they are made.

   The discovery of duons has major implications for how scientists and physicians interpret a patient’s genome and will open new doors to the diagnosis and treatment of disease.

   “The fact that the genetic code can simultaneously write two kinds of information means that many DNA changes that appear to alter protein sequences may actually cause disease by disrupting gene control programs or even both mechanisms simultaneously,” said Stamatoyannopoulos.

5. The authors of Managing Modernity certainly provide us with some an- swers about the state of bureaucracy in the early 21st century. They put forward a strong case according to which bureaucracy continues to be an influential and important mode of organizing. In this sense, the book provides further confirmation for the lines of argument set out by Paul du Gay (2000) and David Courpasson (2000). However, the con- tributors to Managing Modernity also pose some novel questions. In particular, many of them ask how we might think about these reformed bureaucracies which dominate today’s organizational landscape. The contributors try to grapple with those bureaucracies that seem to incor- porate elements of flexibility, markets, networks, entrepreneurialism, community engagement, virtuality and all manner of other manage- ment and public policy fashions. They put forward a number of new concepts in an effort to think through these reformed bureaucracies. Stewart Clegg's chapter provides a useful overview of some of the concepts which have been commonly used to understand 'post-bu- reaucracies'. He also suggests that projects are increasingly used as core organizing units in these neo-bureaucracies. David Buchanan and Louise Fitzgerald suggest the notion of accessorized bureaucracy as a way of capturing bureaucratic structures which add on various aspects of markets, networks and community orientation to a bureaucratic core. By embracing this idea, contemporary bureaucracies can build a de- gree of legitimacy. Looking at the case of the NHS, David Speed sug- gests that the idea of 'soft bureaucracy' may correspond to the NHS re- forms, which have been driven by attempts to introduce choice-based policies. Another consideration of the NHS, by Martin Harris, finds that notions of network governance have been used to supplement exist- ing bureaucratic procedures. This theme of networks is expanded on by Jannis Kallinikos, who highlights how many bureaucratic processes have been increasingly driven into virtual networks. In some cases, on- line communities and virtual production networks have taken on many of the administrative tasks usually undertaken by bureaucratic admin- istrators. Mats Alvesson and Dan Kärreman argue that two manage- ment consultancies which claimed to be paragons of post-bureaucracy actually relied on heavy bureaucratic measures (particularly personnel management systems); these bureaucratic systems often worked not to ensure that employees followed the rules but to encourage aspirational control which would tether employees to the company. In this sense, rules and regulations come to infuse the life-world and identity projects of people within the firm. To capture this, they suggest the concept of 'sociocracy'. Finally, Mike Reed puts forward the idea of bureaucratic hybrids as a way of conveying new modes of control in contemporary organizations.

   [...]

   Perhaps that which comes closest to achieving this is Kallinkos's discussion of the role of open-source communities. If we really mean to understand how these new forms of bureaucracy operate, however, we must understand how they try to harness the world beyond the bureau. In an attempt to further this line of enquiry, I would argue that neo-bureaucracies work through the cre- ation of extitutions.

   Extitutions

   The concept of the extitution was first posited by Michel Serres (1994). He used it to refer to forms of control which no longer have a strict place or setting, but rather come to be distributed or spread throughout a society (for more detailed discussion, see Tirdaro and Domènech, 2001, cf. Spicer, 2010). ‘Extitution’ refers to a form of authority where there is no inside and outside. There are no walls to this bureau. Rather, relationships of administrative authority spread throughout society in various networks and other flexible structures. An extitution is a par- ticular type of bureaucratic arrangement whereby services are no lon- ger provided within a strictly bounded space. Rather, service provision becomes infused into all aspects of society. This can be seen in forms of deinstitutionalization, whereby various social services are no lon- ger provided within the walls of a strictly bounded institution, but are distributed throughout society, with responsibility for this being largely placed on communities (Vitores, 2002). Some instances of this include the closure of asylums, the rise of 'care in the community', the increase of prisoners being placed under community supervision, and patients being pushed out of hospitals into virtual healthcare networks (eg. Mil- ligan, Roberts and Mort, 2011). All these de-institutionalized settings share a lack of any strict division between what is inside and outside the bureaucratic institution; the bureaucracy seems to exist everywhere and nowhere at the same time.

   Extitutions do not strictly work through rules, regulations and proce- dures. Rather, they seek to work through people’s everyday lives: through their interests, passions, identities and so on. Many of the con- tributions to Managing Modernity note that neo-bureaucracies focus significantly on public involvement. Being involved, engaged, enthusi- astic and ever present have become watchwords for the contemporary bureaucrat. These neo-bureaucrats are asked to bring their lives (pri- vate passions and personal identity) to work, but the blurring of bound- aries does not end there. As well as bringing life into bureaucracy, we have witnessed processes where bureaucracy has begun to infuse certain aspects of life. Instead of entrusting our health or emotional well-being to institutional clinics, we are asked to manage them our- selves through careful self-monitoring. Bureaucracy has increasingly taken root in our everyday lives.

   [...]

   In some cases various shady private or non-government organizations take on the mantel of bureaucratic administration. But in other cases bureaucratic processes, rules and procedure become increasingly self-administered. We become bureaucrats for and of ourselves. When we begin to adopt a mantel of self-administration, a kind of collapse of the life-world and the systems world takes place. Bureaucracy begins to know no bounds and becomes ever-present, infusing all aspects of life and often working through them. In the words of Peter Fleming (forthcoming), it becomes a kind of 'biocracy' that seeks to control and modulate life itself. We become our own biocrats, with the primary task of self-administering our own lives.

   [...]

   Our sense of identity becomes something to be harnessed in the administration of culture.

   [...]

   Perhaps this reaches a kind of crescendo with Big-Society-style policies which ask us not only to pay our taxes but also to club together to provide the very services which these taxes are supposed to fund. The result is that our lives become saturated with constant demands to be involved. This comes at the very time when employers’ expectations regarding our involvement in the workplace have also increased significantly. This means that people's lives be- come increasingly saturated with demands to be constantly involved and active in everything from managing one's weight to running one's local library. The demands of (hyper-)active citizens may seem to be reasonable to some; however, they come at a high cost. Constant activ- ity shifts the expectations from the bureau itself onto the individual, but as Kafka was all too aware, bureaucratic expectations are unending. The result is that even the most diligent of self-administering individu- als finds it difficult to keep up. When this happens, self-administrators have no-one to blame but themselves. Such blame is then frequently directed internally and can often transform into a pervasive sense of guilt (Spicer, 2011), anxiety (Salecl, 2006) or even depression (Ehrenberg, 2010).

   [...]

   Resistance to modern bureaucracies has often been often mobilized through calls to replace cold instrumental reason with true and meaningful human con- nections. However, the over-saturated neo-bureaucracies which we see today call for precisely the opposite reaction. Rather than creating more connections, perhaps the central task of resistance movements is one of disconnection. This would involve seeking to disconnect our everyday lives from the administrative apparatus which tries to work through them. In recent years, a range of different strategies of discon- nection have been suggested. For instance, Paul du Gay has sought to revive existing modes of disconnection found in classical bureau- cratic thought. He makes an argument for the dissociation of political and administrative power. He also makes an argument for a distinction between one's own private interests and the various projects which are rationally pursued as part of a bureaucratic apparatus.

6. Q. You’ve worked in the digital space a long time. Thoughts on innovation?

   A. I’m a real student of business transformation. In any transformation I’ve seen, the winner is always the one who takes out a clean sheet of paper and says, “This is how you would do it if you didn’t have the drag of your traditional business.”

7. Impatient marketers The digital world, however, runs faster than the typical IT department’s default speed. Other bits of the business are not always willing to wait. Marketing, desperate to use digital wiles to woo customers and to learn what they are thinking, is especially impatient. Forrester, another research firm, estimates that marketing departments’ spending on IT is rising two to three times as fast as that of companies as a whole. Almost one in three marketers thinks the IT department hinders success.

   The IT crowd worry that haste has hidden costs. The marketers, points out Vijay Gurbaxani of the Centre for Digital Transformation at the University of California, Irvine, will not build in redundancy and disaster recovery, s...up”. Whatever the digital team comes up with still needs to fit in with the business’s existing IT systems.

   So IT chiefs somehow have to let a thousand digital ideas bloom, while keeping a weather eye on the whole field. At Dell, a PC-maker shifting towards services and software, Adriana Karaboutis, the chief information officer, says that she works closely with the marketing department: people there have developed applications which, once screened by the IT team, have ended up in Dell’s internal and external app stores. With such co-operation, says Ms Karaboutis, “people stop seeing IT as something to go around, but as something to partner with.”

   Corporate IT bosses are right to fear being overwhelmed. But cleaving to their old tasks and letting others take on the new unsupervised is not an option. Forrester calls this a “titanic mistake”. The IT department is not about to die, even if many functions ascend to the cloud. However, those of its chiefs who cannot adapt may fade away.

8. On January 29, 2009, another maple syrup event commenced in northern Manhattan. The first reports triggered a new protocol that routed all complaints to the Office of Emergency Management and Department of Environmental Protection, which took precise location data from each syrup smeller. Within hours, inspectors were taking air quality samples in the affected regions. The reports were tagged by location and mapped against previous complaints. A working group gathered atmospheric data from past syrup events: temperature, humidity, wind direction, velocity.

   Seen all together, the data formed a giant arrow aiming at a group of industrial plants in northeastern New Jersey. A quick bit of shoe-leather detective work led the authorities to a flavor compound manufacturer named Frutarom, which had been processing fenugreek seeds on January 29. Fenugreek is a versatile spice used in many cuisines around the world, but in American supermarkets, it’s most commonly found in the products on one shelf—the one where they sell cheap maple-syrup substitutes.

9. Below is a list of 10 steps that a city or local government might take to create a ‘space’ where innovating and risk-taking are encouraged and protected. They are taken from our new series of occasional papers from the Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation at Harvard Kennedy School. Each step can help a city take advantage of the untapped potential for new ideas and practices from across city government and from among local nonprofits, foundations, businesses, civic associations, hackers, advocacy groups, and of course citizens.
   1. Ensure mayoral and public support: Aversion to risk and fear or unwillingness to engage in a political battle over change to the status quo can be enough to sink any innovation—despite its potential. Mayoral leadership is critical for driving public innovation. Prioritizing innovation in the public sphere, recruiting outside thinkers, and protecti...agencies early in the process. Successful efforts to support and promote innovation involve operational partners in their planning from the earliest stages of ideation and development. A key to the Center for Economic Opportunity’s success is that it has partnered with some 30 city agencies in every stage from finding new ideas and designing and implementing pilot programs to collecting and analyzing performance data.

   While we approached our framework for improving a local innovation landscape with government innovation teams in mind, these 10 steps and other elements of the framework have broader applications. For those who are not in government but see their role as promoting and supporting local innovation, many elements of the framework could be applicable to your work. And those who consider themselves entrepreneurs, whether in government or out, can lobby city government to deploy these strategies—benefitting both the broader city population and their own enterprise or idea.

10. In an interview, Mr. Jongman said flood damage in Europe, which averages five billion euros, or $6.9 billion, a year but can vary widely, was likely to increase to almost €24 billion a year by 2050. While much of that increase would be because of people’s growing wealthier and living in more expensive homes, more frequent and intense storms from climate change would also be a big factor, he said.

    Mr. Jongman said spending money on flood defenses like dikes and other water management systems would be effective, possibly preventing as much as eight times their cost in damage. “The trouble is the investment has to be made now,” he said, while the disaster being guarded against will come later, if ever.

11. http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/19/sunday-review/air-conditioning-is-an-environmental-quandary.html

    airconditioning #climatechange #globalwarming

    >A new report by the McKinsey Global Initiative predicts that one billion city dwellers “will enter the global consuming class by 2025.” And, for most of them, an air-conditioner will most likely be a first purchase since almost all of the cities with the highest potential cooling needs, according to Mr. Sivak’s research, are in developing countries that are in hot climates. These include Chennai, India; Bangkok; Manila; Jakarta, Indonesia; Karachi, Pakistan; Lagos, Nigeria and Rio de Janeiro. Sales of air-conditioning units are already growing by double digits annually in many emerging economies.

    >So researchers say the best hope is that we all adjust our air-conditioning expectations and behavior.

    >Building managers could increase airflow in hot buildings, for example, which improves comfort. Workers could wear lighter, looser clothing to work in summer — instead of carrying sweaters to protect themselves from over-chilled air. Architects could design office blocks using materials that did not conduct so much heat and where humans could open the windows to take advantage of natural ventilation and breezes.

    >Stan Cox, author of “Losing Our Cool,” suggests that one solution might be a return to room air-conditioning, so we only use energy to cool spaces that people are actually using. He believes that people are accustomed to working in frigid offices but could acclimatize to warmer conditions.

12. The climate change movement needs to be as radical as Nelson Mandela’s fight against apartheid, said Naomi Klein, speaking to an audience in London today.

    Gathering at the Royal Society for a conference on how global carbon emissions can be reduced drastically and immediately, speakers including Naomi Klein, Kevin Anderson and Corinne le Quéré argued for a new wave of radical environmental action.

    “Transformative policies must be backed by transformative politics,” said Klein, a Canadian journalist and author on the green movement, via weblink. “An agenda capable of delivering radical emissions reductions will only advance if accompanied by a radical movement.”

    As with the battle against apartheid in South Africa, fighting climate change requires “a clear moral vision of the alternative being fought for,” said Klein. Just as Mandela fought for a new “rainbow egalitarian society” rather than simply against racism, environmentalists need to establish a new approach to society.

    It is time for a new generation of environmental activism to emerge, she said—one that is not dominated by acceptance of the prevailing world view, but one that breaks free from the “ideologically shackled environment in which we all operate”.

13. Why revolution is the only way

    Hansen and his associates admonish the environmental community for doing the same things over and over again—advocating for renewable energy, recycling, and hybrid cars—and expecting different results. The change that is produced in this way is much, much too slow, they say. Their study concludes with what can only be characterized as a call to arms: a global challenge akin to the anti-slavery and civil rights movements, begging the world’s young people to disrupt their governments and demand immediate action on climate change. + In short, we’re talkin’ ’bout a revolution—or in the words of the paper, “a human ‘tipping point’.” + Are there no other options? Hansen and his co-authors argue there is a sliver of hope the world could stay near a 1°C goal if there were a bilateral agreement between the...lping youth fight climate change through the court system in a recent op-ed for CNN. + And indeed, the US military already seems to be preparing for climate-induced mass protests, the Guardian reported in June, based on documents leaked by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden. + But as with all revolutions, the fight for the climate will need a catalyst. It’s unclear what that might be, especially when the very consumption culture that forms the bedrock of the present-day economic system is so ubiquitous—and also at the root of the climate problem itself. Young people growing up now contemplating their futures may have the biggest reason for alarm, but with a problem like climate change that feels complex, distant and abstract, it may be hard to make the urgency that Hansen expresses resonate broadly. + And even if a “human tipping point” comes—an Arab Spring for the climate—will it sustain its momentum or, like most of the recent uprisings, burn out or collapse into factional bickering?

14. “I believe the evidence is pretty clear,” says Mark Cane, a climatologist at Columbia University in New York. “It’s not about aerosols or stratospheric water vapour; it’s about having had a decade of cooler temperatures in the eastern equatorial Pacific.”

    Heated debate Cane was the first to predict the current cooling in the Pacific, although the implications weren’t clear at the time. In 2004, he and his colleagues found that a simple regional climate model predicted a warm shift in the Pacific that began around 1976, when global temperatures began to rise sharply9. Almost as an afterthought, they concluded their paper with a simple forecast: “For what it is worth the model predicts that the 1998 El Niño ended the post-1976 tropical Pacific warm period.”

    It is an eerily accurate result, but the work remains hotly contested, in part beca...He says the models suggest that global warming has a greater impact on temperatures in the relatively cool east, because the increase in evaporation adds water vapour to the atmosphere there and enhances atmospheric warming; this effect is weaker in the warmer western Pacific, where the air is already saturated with moisture.

    Scientists may get to test their theories soon enough. At present, strong tropical trade winds are pushing ever more warm water westward towards Indonesia, fuelling storms such as November’s Typhoon Haiyan, and nudging up sea levels in the western Pacific; they are now roughly 20 centimetres higher than those in the eastern Pacific. Sooner or later, the trend will inevitably reverse. “You can’t keep piling up warm water in the western Pacific,” Trenberth says. “At some point, the water will get so high that it just sloshes back.” And when that happens, if scientists are on the right track, the missing heat will reappear and temperatures will spike once again.

15. A world where what is fair and what is law diverge so markedly raises a number of important moral, legal and economic questions, the most basic and important of which is: How does a reality in which we own so little of what we create affect our drive to make something new and original?

    To answer this question, the marketing professor On Amir and I researched how ownership over our skills and creative ventures affects our motivation to perform. In a study published this year in the Harvard Business Review, we reported on a series of behavioral experiments in which we asked over a thousand participants to perform various tasks and solve problems.

    We divided the subjects into two groups. We told one set that they were free to later perform similar work for other “employers” in the virtual workplace of our experiment. We asked the others to sign over ownership of their skills to, and sign noncompete agreements with, their current “employers.”

    All of the participants were assured that they would be paid for the tasks they performed in the experiment. But the effects of giving up future control over one’s own skills and products of the mind were significant. When we asked participants to relinquish ownership of their skills, they became less focused on the problem, spent less time on the task and made twice as many errors as the unconstrained group.

    These effects were mitigated when our subjects found the tasks particularly interesting in and of themselves, but even then, the constraints we imposed on their human capital suppressed their motivation to perform well.

16. Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.

    [...]

    To spend much time with Kahan’s research is to stare into a kind of intellectual abyss. If the work of gathering evidence and reasoning through thorny, polarizing political questions is actually the process by which we trick ourselves into finding the answers we want, then what’s the right way to search for answers? How can we know the answers we come up with, no matter how well-intentioned, aren’t just more motivated cognition? How can we know the experts we’re relying on haven’t subtly biased their answers, too? How can I know that this article isn’t a form of identity protection? Kahan’s research tells us we can’t trust our own reason. How do we reason our way out of that?

17. Now for the bad news. We computed the average response rates for each category of student (e.g., white male, Hispanic female), dividing the number of responses from the professors by the number of emails sent from students in a given race or gender category. Our analyses, which we reported recently in a second paper, revealed that the response rates did indeed depend on students’ race and gender identity.

    Professors were more responsive to white male students than to female, black, Hispanic, Indian or Chinese students in almost every discipline and across all types of universities. We found the most severe bias in disciplines paying higher faculty salaries and at private universities. In a perverse twist of academic fate, our own discipline of business showed the most bias, with 87 percent of white males receiving a response compared with just 62 percent of all females and minorities combined.

18. First, the top parts and the bottom parts of the brain have differ­ent functions. The top brain formulates and executes plans (which often involve deciding where to move objects or how to move the body in space), whereas the bottom brain classifies and interprets incoming information about the world. The two halves always work together; most important, the top brain uses information from the bottom brain to formulate its plans (and to reformulate them, as they unfold over time).

    Second, according to the theory, people vary in the degree that they tend to rely on each of the two brain systems for functions that are optional (i.e., not dictated by the immediate situation): Some people tend to rely heavily on both brain systems, some rely heavily on the bottom brain system but not the top, some rely heavily on the top but not the bottom, and some don’t rely heavily on either system.

    Third, these four scenarios define four basic cognitive modes— general ways of thinking that underlie how a person approaches the world and interacts with other people. According to the Theory of Cognitive Modes, each of us has a particular dominant cognitive mode, which affects how we respond to situations we encounter and how we relate to others. The possible modes are: Mover Mode, Perceiver Mode, Stimulator Mode, and Adaptor Mode.

    [...]

    Devising and carrying out plans is the realm of the top-brain system. In particular, the top parts of the frontal lobe are concerned with these functions. But how does the top brain know what is being perceived? Information about where objects are located in space is so important for making plans that it is processed directly in the top brain; we need to know where objects are located in order to decide how to move them or how to move our bodies as we seek to approach or avoid them. (In our example, without such informa­tion, you couldn’t have known how to thread your way through the crowd to reach and talk to your friend.) But we need to know more than just where objects are located—we also need to know what they are. Such information from the bottom brain goes to the top brain, allowing the top brain to use information about the nature of ob­jects being perceived.

    The top part of the frontal lobe also contains numerous areas that control movements. Because our movements occur in our im­mediate environment, to program them appropriately our brains need to know where objects are located—to reach for them, step over them, run from them, and so forth. To walk over to your friend, you need to know where she is relative to your body; to talk to her, you need to know where she is facing, and you need to position yourself close enough (but not too close!) so that she can hear you easily.

    The top parts of our frontal lobe can take into account the confluence of information about “what’s out there,” our emo­tional reactions to it, and our goals. They then play a crucial role in allowing us to formulate plans, make decisions, and direct attention in particular ways (in part by connections to the parietal lobes); they allow us to figure out what to do, given our goals and our emotional reactions to the unfolding events that surround us.

    The bottom-brain system organizes signals from the senses, simultaneously comparing what is being perceived with all the in­formation previously stored in memory—and then uses the results of such comparisons to classify and interpret the object or event that gives rise to the input signals.

    The top-brain system uses information about the surrounding environment (in combination with other sorts of information, such as emotional reactions and need for food or drink) to figure out which goals to try to achieve. It actively formulates plans, generates expectations about what should happen when a plan is executed, and then—as the plan is being carried out—compares what is happening with what was expected, adjusting the plan accordingly (for example, by adjusting your grip as the phone starts to slip from your hand).

    [...]

    Four Cognitive Modes

    Four distinct cognitive modes emerge from how the top-brain and bottom-brain systems can interact. The degree to which each of the brain systems is used spans a continuum, ranging from highly utilized to minimally utilized. Nevertheless, for our purposes it is useful to divide the continuum into “high” and “low” categories.

    chart:

    Mover Mode results when the top- and bottom-brain systems are both highly utilized. When people think in this mode, they are inclined to make and act on plans (using the top-brain system) and to register the consequences of doing so (using the bottom-brain system), subsequently adjusting plans on the basis of feedback. Ac­cording to our theory, people who habitually rely on Mover Mode typically are most comfortable in positions that allow them to plan, act, and see the consequences of their actions.

    Perceiver Mode results when the bottom-brain system is highly utilized but the top-brain system is not. When people think in this mode, they use the bottom-brain system to try to make sense of what they perceive in depth; they interpret what they experience, put it in context, and try to understand the implications. However, by definition, people who are operating in Perceiver Mode do not often initiate detailed or complex plans.

    Stimulator Mode results when the top-brain system is highly uti­lized but the bottom-brain system is not. According to our theory, when people rely on Stimulator Mode they may be creative and original, but they do not always know when “enough is enough”—their actions can be disruptive, and they may not adjust their behav­ior appropriately.

    Adaptor Mode results when neither the top- nor the bottom-brain system is highly utilized. People who are thinking in this mode are not caught up in initiating plans, nor are they fully focused on classifying and interpreting what they experience. Instead, our theory predicts that they are open to becoming absorbed by local events and immediate imperatives. They should tend to be action-oriented, and responsive to ongoing situations.

    Each of us has a dominant mode, which is a distinctive feature of our personality—as characteristic and as cen­tral to our identity as our attitudes, beliefs, and emotional makeup. You can take a test on our website to find out which mode—Mover, Perceiver, Stimulator, Adaptor—best characterizes your dominant cognitive mode. However, our theory implies that we nevertheless sometimes adopt different modes in different contexts.

    The degree to which you tend to use each system will affect your thoughts, feel­ings, and behavior in profound ways. Here’s a crucial point: The two systems alwayswork together. You use the top brain to decide to walk over to talk to your friend only after you know who she is (courtesy of the bottom brain). And after talking to her, you formulate another plan, to enter the date and time in your calendar, and then you need to monitor what hap­pens (again using the bottom brain) as you try to carry out this plan (a top-brain activity). Moreover, the top-brain system prepares the bottom-brain system to classify expected objects and events, making that system work more efficiently. If you were expecting to see your friend in the crowd, this would actually be easier than noticing her without warning. The expectation (via the top brain) “primes” the recognition machinery in the bottom brain.

    The systems interact in various ways, however, the key hypothesis is that a person tends to use each of the two brain systems to a greater or lesser extent.

    We need to emphasize that all of us use each brain system every minute of our waking lives—we couldn’t function in the world without doing this. But we need to distinguish between two kinds of use: One kind is like using the brain for walking, which is largely dictated by the situation. If you see your friend and want to talk to her, you walk. The other kind is like using the brain for dancing, which is optional. You rarely, if ever, absolutely must dance. But you could learn to dance, and dancing might develop into a hobby—and you then might seize any opportunity to dance.

    When we speak of differences in the degree to which a person relies on the top-brain and bottom-brain systems, we are speaking of differences in this second kind of utilization, in the kind of processing that’s not simply dictated by a given situation. In this sense, you can rely on one or the other brain system to a greater or lesser degree. For example, you might typically rely on your bot­tom brain a good deal but your top brain a little less, yielding good observations but fewer complex and detailed plans. The degree to which you tend to use each system will affect your thoughts, feel­ings, and behavior in profound ways. The notion that each system can be more or less highly utilized, in this sense is the foundation of the Theory of Cognitive Modes.

19. http://stoweboyd.com/post/7765736417/short-piece-from-last-year-on-work-that-alexander

    > Mining Human Behavior at MIT, Andt Greenberg http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2010/0830/e-gang-mit-sandy-pentland-darpa-sociometers-mining-reality_2.html

    >Last year, for instance, Pentland's lab put sociometers on 80 employees at a Bank of America ( BAC - news - people ) call center in Rhode Island. The inconspicuous badges used Bluetooth and infrared signals to measure which co-workers the test subjects talked to every minute for a month and, later, another period of six weeks. After the first month the MIT researchers could see that individuals who talked to more co-workers were getting through calls faster, felt less stressed and had the same approval ratings as their peers. Informally talking out problems and solutions, it seemed, produced better results than following the employee handbook or obeying managers' e-mailed instructions.

    >So the call center tried its own experiment. Instead of staggering employees' coffee breaks as it had previously, it aligned their breaks to allow more chatter. The result, Bank of America told MIT a few months later: productivity gains worth about $15 million a year.

    >Let people form their own denser social networks and — surprise — happiness, knowledge, and better performance follows.

    >Throw away the manuals, fire the managers, get out of the way: let people figure out how to invent their own work, cooperatively.

    callcenters #socialdensity #happiness

20. http://stoweboyd.com/post/1446391431/friendly-social-interaction-and-social-cognition

    cites Oscar Ybarra's work http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101028113817.htm

    >Talking with other people in a friendly way can make it easier to solve common problems, a new University of Michigan study shows. But conversations that are competitive in tone, rather than cooperative, have no cognitive benefits.

    >"This study shows that simply talking to other people, the way you do when you're making friends, can provide mental benefits," said psychologist Oscar Ybarra, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research (ISR).

    >Ybarra is the lead author of the study, which is forthcoming in the peer-reviewed journal Social Psychological and Personality Science.

    >For the study, the researchers examined the impact of brief episodes of social contact on one key component of mental activity -- executive function. This type of cognitive function includes working memory, self-monitoring, and the ability to suppress external and internal distractions -- all of which are essential in solving common life problems.

    >In previous research, Ybarra has found that social interaction provides a short-term boost to executive function that's comparable in size to playing brain games, such as solving crossword puzzles. In the current series of studies, he and colleagues tested 192 undergraduates to pinpoint which types of social interactions help -- and which don't.

    >They found that engaging in brief (10 minute) conversations in which participants were simply instructed to get to know another person resulted in boosts to their subsequent performance on an array of common cognitive tasks. But when participants engaged in conversations that had a competitive edge, their performance on cognitive tasks showed no improvement.

21. Twitter, dopamine, and the evolutionary advantages of talking about oneself http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/10/the-selfish-meme/309080/

    >The Harvard researchers—Diana Tamir, a grad student in psychology, and Jason Mitchell, her adviser—performed functional MRI scans on 212 subjects while asking them about their own opinions and personality traits, and about other people’s. Neuro­imaging of this sort can reveal which parts of the brain are being activated; in this case, the researchers found that the mesolimbic dopamine system—the seat of the brain’s reward mechanism—was more engaged by questions about the test subject’s own opinions and attitudes than by questions about the opinions and attitudes of other people. The system has long been known to respond to both primary rewards (food and sex) and secondary rewards (money), but this was the first time it’s been shown to light up in response to, as the researchers put it, “self-­disclosure.”

    >What the study really illustrated, then, was a paradox: when it comes to information, sharing is mostly about me. The researchers weren’t trying to answer the thornier question of why—why, as they wrote, our species might have “an intrinsic drive to disclose thoughts to others.” The paper nonetheless points to an intriguing possibility: that this drive might give us humans an adaptive advantage.

    || related to Oscar Ybarra's work that shows 'friendly conversation' -- where someone asks you to tell them about yourself -- prior to a stressful situation increases performance?

    dopamine #self-disclosure

22. The first empirical test of Osborn’s brainstorming technique was performed at Yale University, in 1958. Forty-eight male undergraduates were divided into twelve groups and given a series of creative puzzles. The groups were instructed to follow Osborn’s guidelines. As a control sample, the scientists gave the same puzzles to forty-eight students working by themselves. The results were a sobering refutation of Osborn. The solo students came up with roughly twice as many solutions as the brainstorming groups, and a panel of judges deemed their solutions more “feasible” and “effective.” Brainstorming didn’t unleash the potential of the group, but rather made each individual less creative. Although the findings did nothing to hurt brainstorming’s popularity, numerous follow-up studies have come to the same conclusion. Keith Sawyer, a psychologist at Washington University, has summarized the science: “Decades of research have consistently shown that brainstorming groups think of far fewer ideas than the same number of people who work alone and later pool their ideas.”
23. >In 2003, Charlan Nemeth, a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley, divided two hundred and sixty-five female undergraduates into teams of five. She gave all the teams the same problem—“How can traffic congestion be reduced in the San Francisco Bay Area?”—and assigned each team one of three conditions. The first set of teams got the standard brainstorming spiel, including the no-criticism ground rules. Other teams—assigned what Nemeth called the “debate” condition—were told, “Most research and advice suggest that the best way to come up with good solutions is to come up with many solutions. Freewheeling is welcome; don’t be afraid to say anything that comes to mind. However, in addition, most studies suggest that you should debate and even criticize each other’s ideas.” The rest received no further instructions, leaving them free to collaborate however they wanted. All the teams had twenty minutes to come up with as many good solutions as possible.

    > The results were telling. The brainstorming groups slightly outperformed the groups given no instructions, but teams given the debate condition were the most creative by far. On average, they generated nearly twenty per cent more ideas. And, after the teams disbanded, another interesting result became apparent. Researchers asked each subject individually if she had any more ideas about traffic. The brainstormers and the people given no guidelines produced an average of three additional ideas; the debaters produced seven.

    > Nemeth’s studies suggest that the ineffectiveness of brainstorming stems from the very thing that Osborn thought was most important. As Nemeth puts it, “While the instruction ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” Osborn thought that imagination is inhibited by the merest hint of criticism, but Nemeth’s work and a number of other studies have demonstrated that it can thrive on conflict.

    > According to Nemeth, dissent stimulates new ideas because it encourages us to engage more fully with the work of others and to reassess our viewpoints. “There’s this Pollyannaish notion that the most important thing to do when working together is stay positive and get along, to not hurt anyone’s feelings,” she says. “Well, that’s just wrong. Maybe debate is going to be less pleasant, but it will always be more productive. True creativity requires some trade-offs.”

    Authentic dissent wakes people up.

    >Another of her experiments has demonstrated that exposure to unfamiliar perspectives can foster creativity. The experiment focussed on a staple of the brainstorming orthodoxy—free association. A long-standing problem with free association is that people aren’t very good at it. In the early nineteen-sixties, two psychologists, David Palermo and James Jenkins, began amassing a huge table of word associations, the first thoughts that come to mind when people are asked to reflect on a particular word. (They interviewed more than forty-five hundred subjects.) Palermo and Jenkins soon discovered that the vast majority of these associations were utterly predictable. For instance, when people are asked to free-associate about the word “blue,” the most likely first answer is “green,” followed by “sky” and “ocean.” When asked to free-associate about “green,” nearly everyone says “grass.” “Even the most creative people are still going to come up with many mundane associations,” Nemeth says. “If you want to be original, then you have to get past this first layer of predictability.”

    >Nemeth’s experiment devised a way of escaping this trap. Pairs of subjects were shown a series of color slides in various shades of blue and asked to identify the colors. Sometimes one of the pair was actually a lab assistant instructed by Nemeth to provide a wrong answer. After a few minutes, the pairs were asked to free-associate about the colors they had seen. People who had been exposed to inaccurate descriptions came up with associations that were far more original. Instead of saying that “blue” reminded them of “sky,” they came up with “jazz” and “berry pie.” The obvious answer had stopped being their only answer. Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it’s always invigorating,” Nemeth says. “It wakes us right up.”

24. >When the Q was low—less than 1.7 on Uzzi’s five-point scale—the musicals were likely to fail. Because the artists didn’t know one another, they struggled to work together and exchange ideas. “This wasn’t so surprising,” Uzzi says. “It takes time to develop a successful collaboration.” But, when the Q was too high (above 3.2), the work also suffered. The artists all thought in similar ways, which crushed innovation. According to Uzzi, this is what happened on Broadway during the nineteen-twenties, which he made the focus of a separate study. The decade is remembered for its glittering array of talent—Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, Lorenz Hart, Oscar Hammerstein II, and so on—but Uzzi’s data reveals that ninety per cent of musicals produced during the decade were flops, far above the historical norm. “Broadway had some of the biggest names ever,” Uzzi explains. “But the shows were too full of repeat relationships, and that stifled creativity.”

    >The best Broadway shows were produced by networks with an intermediate level of social intimacy. The ideal level of Q—which Uzzi and his colleague Jarrett Spiro called the “bliss point”—emerged as being between 2.4 and 2.6. A show produced by a team whose Q was within this range was three times more likely to be a commercial success than a musical produced by a team with a score below 1.4 or above 3.2. It was also three times more likely to be lauded by the critics. “The best Broadway teams, by far, were those with a mix of relationships,” Uzzi says. “These teams had some old friends, but they also had newbies. This mixture meant that the artists could interact efficiently—they had a familiar structure to fall back on—but they also managed to incorporate some new ideas. They were comfortable with each other, but they weren’t too comfortable.”

25. >The lesson of Building 20 is that when the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another in unpredictable ways—the group dynamic will take care of itself. All these errant discussions add up. In fact, they may even be the most essential part of the creative process.
26. The Fabric of Struggles, Benjamin Noys

    Barely twenty years have passed since the collapse of actually-existing so- cialism and now the crisis of actually-existing capitalism, in its neoliberal version, is upon us. The shrill capitalist triumphalism of the 1990s, or the bellicose equation of capitalism with democracy that defined the ’00s ‘war on terror’, ring more than a little hollow in the frozen desert of burst fi- nancial bubbles and devalorization. The commodities that make up the capitalist way-of-life have turned malignant, exposed as hollow bearers of debt servitude that can never be paid off. The cry ‘No New Deal’ goes up as wealth is transferred in huge amounts to save the financial sector. We are prepared for yet another round of sacrifice as structural adjustment and ‘shock doctrine’ return to the center of global capitalism after exten- sive testing on its self-defined ‘peripheries’. Whether this is terminal crisis, entropic drift, or merely the prelude to the ‘creative destruction’ that will kick-start a new round of accumulation, is still obscure.

    [...]

    The extension of real subsump- tion over life, what Italian autonomists called the ‘social factory’, generalis- es struggles. In the capitalist counter-attack, however, we witness a second phase of real subsumption, a re-making of the world in the conformity to capital and the crisis of the identity of the ‘worker’. This re-making was, of course, central to the project of neoliberalism.6

    [...]

    A second problem, which I’ve already noted in passing, is that the triumph of ‘real subsumption’, which integrates the reproduction of the proletariat to the self-reproduction of capital, seems to allow very little space, or time, for resistance. Even if we don’t think in terms of real sub- sumption, but rather the global dominance of capitalism or ‘Empire’, we still have to confront the issue of whether it can be defeated, and how. The ways in which capitalism permeates and modulates the whole of life (what Deleuze called ‘the society of control’8) leaves us with little leverage to re- sist. In particular the end of the ‘workers’ standpoint’, the end of the classi- cal proletariat, seems to deprive us of an agency to make the mass changes communization would require. While TC insists on the proletariat as con- ceptual marker, they have to struggle with its empirical non-emergence.9 The alternative articulations of possible agents of change, such as immate- rial workers or ‘whatever singularities’, by other currents of communization are very thinly-specified.

    [...]

    What is as yet unclear is what forms of struggle will make ‘the poetry of the future’.

    [...]

    In his story ‘The Two Kings and the Two Labyrinths’ Jorge Luis Borges describes the competition between two kings to construct the perfect, and so impossible to escape, labyrinth or maze.11 The first king uses the tradi-tional method of constructing a highly-complex series of tunnels, resulting in a terrible labyrinth which the second king only escapes from by the in- tervention of God. In his turn the second king lays waste to the first king’s lands and casts him into a labyrinth impossible to defeat: the desert. The impossibility of this labyrinth lies not in the choice of paths, but the ab- sence of any paths.

    What are we to do?, Endnotes

    If communization signals a certain immediacy in how the revolu- tion happens, for us this does not take the form of a practical prescription; ‘communization’ does not imply some injunction to start making the revo- lution right away, or on an individual basis. What is most at stake, rather, is the question of what the revolution is; ‘communization’ is the name of an answer to this question. The content of such an answer necessarily depends on what is to be overcome: that is, the self-reproduction of the capitalist class relation, and the complex of social forms which are implicated in this reproduction – value-form, capital, gender distinction, state form, legal form, etc. In particular, such an overcoming must necessarily be the direct self-abolition of the working class, since anything short of this leaves capi- tal with its obliging partner, ready to continue the dance of accumulation. Communization signifies the process of this direct self-abolition, and it is in the directness of this self-abolition that communization can be said to signify a certain ‘immediacy’.

    [...]

    With the growing superfluity of the working class to production – its tendential reduction to a mere surplus population – and the resultantly tenuous character of the wage form as the essential meeting point of the twin circuits of reproduction, it can only be delusional to conceive revolu- tion in terms of workers’ power. Yet it is still the working class which must abolish itself.15 [Tiqqun]

    [...]

    For us, communization does not signify some general positive process of ‘sharing’ or ‘making common’. It signifies the specific revolu- tionary undoing of the relations of property constitutive of the capitalist class relation. Sharing as such – if this has any meaning at all – can hardly be understood as involving this undoing of capitalist relations, for various kinds of ‘sharing’ or ‘making common’ can easily be shown to play impor- tant roles within capitalist society without in any way impeding capitalist accumulation. Indeed, they are often essential to – or even constitutive in – that accumulation: consumption goods shared within families, risk shared via insurance, resources shared within firms, scientific knowledge shared through academic publications, standards and protocols shared be- tween rival capitals because they are recognized as being in their common interest. In such cases, without contradiction, what is held in common is the counterpart to an appropriation. As such, a dynamic of communiza- tion would involve the undoing of such forms of ‘sharing’, just as it would involve the undoing of private appropriation. And while some might valo- rize a sharing that facilitates a certain level of subsistence beyond what the wage enables, in a world dominated by the reproduction of the capi- talist class relation such practices can occur only at the margins of this reproduction, as alternative or supplementary means of survival, and as such, they are not revolutionary in themselves.

    [...]

    Communization is a movement at the level of the totality, through which that totality is abolished.

    [...]

    In contrast to these linear conceptions of revolution, communization is the product of a qualitative shift within the dynamic of class struggle itself.

    [...]

    the social forms implicated in the reproduction of the capitalist class relation will not be instruments of the revolution, since they are part of that which is to be abolished.

    [...]

    Communization is thus not a form of prefigurative revolutionary practice of the sort that diverse anarchisms aspire to be, since it does not have any positive existence prior to a revolutionary situation.

    [...]

    This is a question which takes a spe- cific historical form in the face of the self-evident bankruptcy of the old programmatic notions, leftist, anarchist, and ultra-leftist alike: how will the overcoming of the capitalist class relation take place, given that it is impossible for the proletariat to affirm itself as a class yet we are still faced with the problem of this relation?

    [...]

    It is no longer possible for the working class to identify itself positively, to embrace its class character as the essence of what it is; yet it is still stamped with the simple factic- ity of its class belonging day by day as it faces, in capital, the condition of its existence. In this period, the ‘we’ of revolution does not affirm itself, does not identify itself positively, because it cannot; it cannot assert itself against the ‘they’ of capital without being confronted by the problem of its own existence – an existence which it will be the nature of the revolution to overcome. There is nothing to affirm in the capitalist class relation; no autonomy, no alternative, no outside, no secession.

    [...]

    The global working class is at present under a very overt attack as the functionaries of capital attempt to stabilise a world system constantly on the brink of disaster, and it has not had any need of insurrectionary pep-talk to ‘get started’ in its response.

    [...]

    this is an era in which the end of this relation looms per- ceptibly on the horizon, while capital runs into crisis at every turn and the working class is forced to wage a struggle for which there is no plausible victory.

    [...]

    The Double Barricade and the Glass Floor, Jasper Bernes

    In recent struggles (basically since the mid-1990s) TC note the emergence of new forms of struggle in which ‘class belonging [is] an external constraint.’132 It is no longer possible to propose a politics based upon the affirmation of working-class autonomy, as there is no longer an independent ‘workers’ identity.’ Every affirmation of the class of labor becomes, by necessity, an affirmation of capital: ‘in each of its struggles, the proletariat sees how its existence as a class is objectified in the reproduction of capital as some- thing foreign to it.’133 This is a limit in the double sense above – a fetter on revolutionary action, but also a generative condition which produces the possibility of superseding the capital-labor relationship. The self-abolition of the proletariat is now possible because ‘being a class becomes the obsta- cle which its struggle as a class has to overcome.’134

    [...]

    TC -- In the riots in Greece, the proletariat does not demand any- thing and does not consider itself against capital as the basis for an alternative, it simply does not want to be what it is anymore.137

    [...]

    this barrier is now itself a condition of possibility, since it renders incoherent all attempts to imagine, as past revolutions did, an egalitarian set of social relations laid atop the existing means of production. It is the end of a communist politics that is merely redistributive. If we want communism, then we will have no choice but to take our radicalism to the root, to uproot capital not merely as social form but as material sediment, not merely as relations of production but as productive forces.

    [...]

    These, then, are the limits for communism, limits that we should see as merely the other side of the limits to capital. If it is impossible to project a communist future from present bases, it is also likewise impossi- ble to project a capitalist one. This is because, returning to the point where we began, capital is a self-undermining social dynamic – the limit to capital is capital itself – one that establishes by its very own progress forward an increasingly intractable barrier to that progress: by compressing necessary labor (and gaining more surplus labor) it also compresses the pool of work- ers it can exploit. Since capital must not only reproduce itself but expand, this means that, as the mass of surplus value grows ever larger, it becomes more and more difficult to wring subsequent increases in surplus labor from a relatively shrinking mass of workers. The vanishing of an autono- mous ‘worker’s identity’ is not a mere ideological fact, but a real feature of capitalism: the vanishing of workers themselves, of the need for work.

    [...]

    The political sequence which they [TC] see emerging in Greece and elsewhere suggests that the suspension of proletarian identity which one witnesses on the part of the disenfranchised, futureless youth will migrate into the sites of exploitation proper and the mass of workers will, in real- izing the futility of revindicative struggles and self-management both, join with the fraction of rebellious youth. This is the swerve…

    [...]

    Fire to the Commons, Evan Calder Williams

    For the question is: do common things, having things in common, and what is common amongst us have to do with communism?

    [...]

    There are older vestiges of the commons, often material resources such as water, that persist, against capital’s attempts to privatize/ expropriate/enclose them, and one of our tasks is to defend them. Related argument: capital has generated – or there have gener- ated in spite of capital – new commons, often electronic resources, and one of our tasks is to defend them, ‘proliferate’ their use, and encourage the spread of the form of the common.

    [...]

    If one recognizes, as we must, that both the ‘human community’ of communism and a denser form of older community life are fully displaced by the material community of capital, and, furthermore, that appeals to either seem unconvincing as scalable models of resistance capable of contesting the social relations of capital, then the only thing common to us is our incorporation into that material community. But this is not a deadening or a subtraction of what we once had: it is the construction and imposition of a common position, the production of a negative content in accordance with a universal form. Camatte writes that, ‘The proletarian (what man has become) can no longer recognize himself in a human community, since it no longer exists[...] Men who have become pure spirits can rediscover themselves in the capital form without content.’ Without content, indeed, insofar as content is taken to be that from which form emerges. But capital (as social relation) is nothing if not the generative collapse of a distinction between form and a content. The common becomes, then, the quality across individuals that is neither a form nor a content: it is the form of general equivalence taken as general content. Marx points out that ‘The equivalent, by definition, is only the identity of value with itself.’151 The full subsumption of experience to the law of equivalence, accelerated all the more during a period of the ‘socialization of labor,’ therefore produces with it a hollow identity that defines man, an echo chamber of value with itself. Capital founds a negative anthropology, in that the subject common to it is the subject defined only by being potentially commensurable, as source of value, with all else that exists.

    [...]

    If the contradictions of capital generate a cursed dialectic of form and content, such that the form dominates the content at the same time that it cannot be separated from it, the elaboration of communist thought and strategy is to inflect and impel this worsening contradiction. Not to pathetically cheer at the failure of ‘reformist’ struggles and not to scour them in the hopes of finding the common element hidden in them, but to see in them the determined contours of the relations of capital, the de- mands placed on those bodies that work and die, the representations that bind together and mediate ‘the material conditions to blow this foundation sky-high.’ The vicious fact of it is that it simply is not our decision. We choose a period of capital as much as we choose an earthquake. Yet to make of this a principle, not of withdrawal but of holding on and forth: such would be a courage and a line worth taking. To hate the ruined and the unruined alike, with neither fetish nor indifference, to know that we cannot make our time, but that it does not, and never will, unfold untouched. Communization, then, is not an option we choose to take, but it is not an inevitability. It is a situation that will present itself, given the limits of capi- tal, and it is a situation that has no guarantee of ‘leading to communism.’ To say that such a state of affairs will come to pass is very different from saying how they will come to pass, how the necessary measures taken by what has no reserve will happen, and what kind of resistance, physical and intellectual, they meet and for how long.

27. The point we will be making here is that logically, neither trial and error nor "chance" and serendipity can be behind the gains in technology and empirical science attributed to them. By definition chance cannot lead to long term gains (it would no longer be chance); trial and error cannot be unconditionally effective: errors cause planes to crash, buildings to collapse, and knowledge to regress. taleb antifragility convexity mathematics economics
28. >The crisis which emerges from the erosion of this stable state, the onslaught of change and turbulence that exists in the “modern world,” one that Schön and others apparently felt acutely in the late 1960′s and early 1970′s when this text was written and is still felt today some 40 years later, is then described in the following pages:

    >>“In these situations there is not a lack of information. There is not an “information gap”. There is an information overload, too many signals, more than can be accounted for; and there is as yet not theory in terms of which new information can be sought or new experiments undertaken. “Uncertainty” is a way of talking about the situation in which no plausible theory has emerged. For this reason, pragmatism is no response. We cannot in these situations, say “Let us get the data,” “Let us experiment,” “Let us test,” for there is as yet nothing to test. Out of the uncertainty, out of the experience of a bewildering array of information, new hypotheses must emerge — and from them, mandates for gathering data, testing, experiment, can be derived. But in the first instance they do not as yet exist, and until they exist the method of pragmatism cannot be applied. The period of uncertainty must be traversed in order that pragmatism may become an appropriate response.

    >>The feeling of uncertainty is anguish. The depth of anguish increases as the threatening changes strike at more central regions of the self. In the last analysis, the degree of threat presented by a change depends on its connection to self-identity. Against all of this we have erected our belief in the stable state.”

29. This is where data comes into play. “Analytic competitors who leverage big data will increasingly be able to identify, model, and act to mitigate or potentially exploit these risks,” writes Pieroni.

    Even so, Pieroni contends that it’s crucial to distinguish the concepts of risk and uncertainty, two related but distinct ideas. In a 2013 blog, Pieroni wrote that the two terms are often used interchangeably, but are actually quite distinct:

    Uncertainties pose unknowable and hence unmanageable threats. Risks, however, can be explicitly accepted, avoided, or transferred. Organizations that are fully exploiting big data are actively uncovering and converting uncertainty into known risk as well as addressing and exploiting competitive vulnerabilities. Large, long-lived and historically successful organizations are often most vulnerable to confusing risk with uncertainty, says Pieroni. One big issue: insular leadership and anecdotal decision-making. “If data and analytics are not explicitly part of decision-making and outcome feedback, the organization will increasingly be in jeopardy. Unchanging strategies and tactics work, until they don’t, with often disastrous outcomes.”

30. Web search is going through a pretty significant transformation with things like the Knowledge Graph, Google Now, mobile. What do you think search should be able to do? Are things that we see today that point us to where it's going to be five, ten years from now?

    I've been saying the same thing about search in some sense for ten years or so. The perfect search engine would really understand whatever your need is. It would understand everything in the world deeply, give you back kind of exactly what you need.

31. So, why aren’t we seeing everyone race to use more contextual knowledge?

    First off, contextual knowledge is still astonishingly hard to acquire. Our phones could know a lot about us, including where we go, what we’re doing, what we search for. No one’s really taking advantage of all of that information — yet.

    That’s not to say we’re not making progress. Saga knows where I go — without me having to check in. (Disclosure: Saga is the flagship app of my company, A.R.O.) Cover and Aviate know which apps I use.

    Second, access to the best sources of contextual knowledge depends on complete and unfettered access to data. Nothing held back. Unless they can always run in the background, most apps aren’t going to know about all the little things that make up the majority of my day. Those data points make it possible to understand what I’m really up to — along with why my blood pressure is skyrocketing today.

    Finally, progress is blocked by siloed data. Even though I run with a different playlist, my wearables don’t know what I’m listening to — or catch that the timing of my run means my meeting ran late and I’m getting my workout in as the sun goes down.

    Others have already called for unifying platforms that collide heterogenous data sets, eliminating sensor silos and producing non-obvious insights. And that’s the key. We’ve got to find ways to draw meaningful correlations between the different data silos we’re populating. That’s the only cure for the lackluster results we’ve gotten so far.

    The next generation of wearables and sensor-data platforms — the ones that manage to be fulfilling and to be gratifying — will put these kinds of correlations at the center of their universe.

32. Designing a Contextual Brand | EverythingMe Blog | EverythingMe Blog http://blog.everything.me/2014/04/03/designing-a-contextual-brand/ Creating a brand that is aware of its surroundings
33. commuting is associated with fewer positive emotions than any other common daily activity

    studies on talking with strangers

34. I was recently chatting to a doctor who described to me why she still works in emergency rooms well after others may have chosen to retire from a successful career. These days she sees fewer patients but she still plays a critical role in the functioning of a ward.

    Her role is to contribute to management of the ward and most important of all she shares her wisdom and experience with her colleagues. She is a sounding board for opinions, guides the choice of tests and scans, helps read charts, and generally available to consult and guide others in the high pressure and high stress environment of an emergency room.

    Where is the special value in access to advice and experience vs more hands-on work?

    Well, the hospital asked the same question. Hospital budgets are tight and they need to be allocating their resources carefully to produce the best outcomes. Rather than assume ...cit knowledge made the entire system of the emergency ward perform better. Doctors took less time over their decisions and needed less often to wait to interrupt a busy colleague to get advice. That matters a great deal when many of the decisions are time critical and life threatening.

    This is not a story about skills. All the doctors are smart, passionate and talented. They made their own decisions on what to do and when they needed advice. The ward is always well run, but it runs better with the opportunity for more collaboration. What mattered was that the opportunity for collaboration and access to greater experience, improved the outcomes by speeding the exchange of knowledge in the ward.

    Tacit knowledge and experience matters to speed and to outcomes in knowledge work. Knowledge is a flow and comes from interactions between people with diverse experiences. Being able to draw on more of these interactions can save a great deal of rework and mitigation of doubts and concerns.

35. file:///Users/stoweboyd/Dropbox/research/a%20simple%20rule%20for%20cooperation%20Nowak%20et%20alnature.pdf
36. An estimated 207,000 members work in nearly 4,400 co-working spaces worldwide within the last 12 months, the number of spaces has increased by 81 percent, and members by 89 percent, according to Deskmag, a Berlin-based online magazine about co-working.

    Emergent Research and Deskmag estimate that up to 10 percent of co-workers use spaces when they travel.

    Recent exchange programs include the League of Extraordinary Coworking Spaces, a network whose members share a boutique hotel-like aesthetic, and the Colorado Coworking Passport, with access to 12 spaces in six cities. “It’s a recruiting tool,” said Craig Baute, the Colorado program’s founder, who is targeting corporations because many are based in the suburbs and seek young employees who prefer to live and work in cities.

    Eric van den Broek, a founder of Mutinerie, a co-working space in Paris, has also seen corporate interest. Companies that outgrow their offices, for example, can conservatively test the waters before renting or buying a larger space or while exploring new markets.

37. People don't really like creativity
38. Brent Coker, who studies online behavior at the University of Melbourne in Australia, found that people who engage in “workplace Internet leisure browsing” are about 9 percent more productive than those who don’t. Last year, Jonathan Schooler, a psychology professor at the University of California, Santa Barbara published with his doctoral student Benjamin Baird a study called Inspired by Distraction. It concluded that “engaging in simple external tasks that allow the mind to wander may facilitate creative problem solving.”
39. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/design/2012/01/psychology-ruin-porn/886/ They "offer an escape from excessive order," says Tim Edensor, a professor of geography at Manchester Metropolitan University who studies the appeal of urban ruins. "They're marginal spaces filled with old and obscure objects. You can see and feel things that you can't in the ordinary world."
40. http://d.pr/lXWE

    What I want to argue is that the rise of the faux-vintage photo is an attempt to create a sort of “nostalgia for the present,” an attempt to make our photos seem more important, substantial and real. We want to endow the powerful feelings associated with nostalgia to our lives in the present. And, ultimately, all of this goes well beyond the faux-vintage photo; the momentary popularity of the Hipstamatic-style photo serves to highlight the larger trend of our viewing the present as increasingly a potentially documented past. In fact, the phrase “nostalgia for the present” is borrowed from the great philosopher of postmodernism, Fredric Jameson, who states that “we draw back from our immersion in the here and now [...] and grasp it as a kind of thing.”

41. Whether, as with Gödel's proof, one can demonstrate the logical impossibility of any internally self-coherent theory of the postmodern -- an antifoundationalism that really eschews all foundations altogether, a nonessentialism without the last shred of an essence in it -- is a speculative question; its empirical answer is that none have so far appeared, all replicating within themselves a mimesis of their own title in the way in which they are parasitory on another system (most often on modernism itself), whose residual traces and unconsciously reproduced values and attitudes then become a precious index to the failure of a whole new culture to come to birth. Despite the delirium of some of its celebrants and apologists (whose euphoria, however, is an interesting historical symptom in its own right), a truly new culture could only emerge through the collective struggle to create a new social system. The constitutive impurity of all Postmodernism theory, then (like capital itself, it must be at internal distance from itself, must include the foreign body of alien content), confirms the insight of a periodization that must be insisted on over and over again, namely, that Postmodernism is not the cultural dominant of a wholly new social order (the rumor about which, under the name of "postindustrial society," ran through the media a few years ago), but only the reflex and the concomitant of yet another systemic modification of capitalism itself. No wonder, then, that shreds of its older avatars -- of realism, even, fully as much as of modernism -- live on, to be rewrapped in the luxurious trappings of their putative successor.
42. >The success story of the word Postmodernism demands to be written, no doubt in bestseller format; such lexical neoevents, in which the coinage of a neologism has all the reality impact of a corporate merger, are among the novelties of media society which require not merely study but the establishment of a whole new medialexicological subdiscipline.

    Why we needed the word

    >Postmodernism so long without knowing it, why a truly motley crew of strange bedfellows ran to embrace it the moment it appeared, are mysteries that will remain unclarified until we have been able to grasp the philosophical and social function of the concept, something impossible, in its turn, until we are somehow able to grasp the deeper identity between the two. In the present instance it seems clear that a range of competing formulations ("poststructuralism," "postindustrial society," this or that McLuhanite nomenclature) were unsatisfactory insofar as they were too rigidly specified and marked by their area of provenance (philosophy, economics, and the media, respectively); however suggestive, therefore, they could not occupy the mediatory position within the various specialized dimensions of postcontemporary life that was required. "Postmodern," however, seems to have been able to welcome in the appropriate areas of daily life or the quotidian; its cultural resonance, appropriately vaster than the merely aesthetic or artistic, distracts suitably from the economic while allowing newer economic materials and innovations (in marketing and advertising, for example, but also in business organization) to be recatalogued under the new heading. Nor is the matter of recataloguing and transcoding without its own special kind of significance: the active function -- the ethics and the politics -- of such neologisms lies in the new work they propose of rewriting all the familiar things in new terms and thus proposing modifications, new ideal perspectives, a reshuffling of canonical feelings and values; if "Postmodernism" corresponds to what Raymond Williams meant by his fundamental cultural category, a "structure of feeling" (and one that has become "hegemonic" at that, to use another of Williams's crucial categories), then it can only enjoy that status by dint of profound collective self-transformation, a reworking and rewriting of an older system. That ensures novelty and gives intellectuals and ideologues fresh and socially useful tasks: something also marked by the new term, with its vague, ominous or exhilarating promise to get rid of whatever you found confining, unsatisfying, or boring about the modern, modernism, or modernity (however you understand those words): in other words, a very modest or mild apocalypse, the merest sea breeze (that has the additional advantage of having already taken place). But this prodigious rewriting operation -- which can lead to whole new perspectives on subjectivity as well as on the object world -- has the additional result, already touched on above, that everything is grist for its mill and that analyses like the one proposed here are easily reabsorbed into the project as a set of usefully unfamiliar transcoding rubrics. The fundamental ideological task of the new concept, however, must remain that of coordinating new forms of practice and social and mental habits (this is finally what I take Williams to have had in mind by the notion of a "structure of feeling") with the new forms of economic production and organization thrown up by the modification of capitalism -- the new global division of labor -- in recent years. It is a relatively small and local version of what I elsewhere tried to generalize as "cultural revolution" on the scale of the mode of production itself; in the same way the interrelationship of culture and the economic here is not a one-way street but a continuous reciprocal interaction and feedback loop. But just as (for Weber) new inner-directed and more ascetic religious values gradually produced "new people" capable of thriving in the delayed gratification of the emergent "modern" labor process, so also the "postmodern" is to be seen as the production of postmodern people capable of functioning in a very peculiar socioeconomic world indeed, one whose structure and objective features and requirements -- if we had a proper account of them -- would constitute the situation to which "Postmodernism" is a response and would give us something a little more decisive than mere Postmodernism theory. I have not done that here, of course, and it should be added that "culture," in the sense of what cleaves almost too close to the skin of the economic to be stripped off and inspected in its own right, is itself a postmodern development not unlike Magritte's shoe-foot. Unfortunately, therefore, the infrastructural description I seem to be calling for here is necessarily itself already cultural and a version of Postmodernism theory in advance.

43. >As far as I can see, the general use of the term late capitalism originated with the Frankfurt School; it is everywhere in Adorno and Horkheimer, sometimes varied with their own synonyms (for example, "administered society"), which make it clear that a very different conception was involved, of a more Weberian type, which, derived essentially from Grossman and Pollock, stressed two essential features: (1) a tendential web of bureaucratic control (in its more nightmarish forms, a Foucault-like grid avant la lettre), and (2) the interpenetration of government and big business ("state capitalism") such that Nazism and the New Deal are related systems (and some form of socialism, benign or Stalinist, also seems on the agenda).

    >As widely used today, the term late capitalism has very different overtones from these. No one particularly notices the expansion of the state sector and bureaucratization any longer: it seems a simple, "natural" fact of life. What marks the development of the new concept over the older one (which was still roughly consistent with Lenin's notion of a "monopoly stage" of capitalism) is not merely an emphasis on the emergence of new forms of business organization (multinationals, transnationals) beyond the monopoly stage but, above all, the vision of a world capitalist system fundamentally distinct from the older imperialism, which was little more than a rivalry between the various colonial powers. The scholastic, I am tempted to say theological, debates on whether the various notions of "late capitalism" are really consistent with Marx ism itself (despite Marx's own repeated evocation, in the Grundrisse, of the "world market" as the ultimate horizon of capitalism) turn on this matter of internationalization and how it is to be described (and in particular whether the component of "dependency theory" or of Wallerstein's "world system" theory is a production model, based on social classes). In spite of these theoretical uncertainties, it seems fair to say that today we have some rough idea of this new system (called "late capitalism" in order to mark its continuity with what preceded it rather than the break, rupture, and mutation that concepts like "postindustrial society" wished to underscore). Besides the forms of transnational business mentioned above, its features include the new international division of labor, a vertiginous new dynamic in international banking and the stock exchanges (including the enormous Second and Third World debt), new forms of media interrelationship (very much including transportation systems such as containerization), computers and automation, the flight of production to advanced Third World areas, along with all the more familiar social consequences, including the crisis of traditional labor, the emergence of yuppies, and gentrification on a now-global scale.

    [...]

    >[...] there is no "late capitalism in general" but only this or that specific national form of the thing, and non-North American readers will inevitably deplore the Americanocentrism of my own particular account, which is justified only to the degree that it was the brief "American century" ( 1945-73) that constituted the hothouse, or forcing ground, of the new system, while the development of the cultural forms of Postmodernism may be said to be the first specifically North American global style.

    >Meanwhile, it is my sense that both levels in question, infrastructure and superstructures -- the economic system and the cultural "structure of feeling" -- somehow crystallized in the great shock of the crises of 1973 (the oil crisis, the end of the international gold standard, for all intents and purposes the end of the great wave of "wars of national liberation" and the beginning of the end of traditional communism), which, now that the dust clouds have rolled away, disclose the existence, already in place, of a strange new landscape: the landscape the essays in this book try to describe (along with an increasing number of other probes and hypothetical accounts).

    >This matter of periodization is not, however, altogether alien to the signals given off by the expression "late capitalism," which is by now clearly identified as a kind of leftist logo which is ideologically and politically booby-trapped, so that the very act of using it constitutes tacit agreement about a whole range of essentially Marxian social and economic propositions the other side may be far from wanting to endorse. Capitalism was itself always a funny word in this sense: just using the word -- otherwise a neutral enough designation for an economic and social system on whose properties all sides agree -- seemed to position you in a vaguely critical, suspicious, if not outright socialist stance: only committed right-wing ideologues and fullthroated market apologists also use it with the same relish.

    >"Late capitalism" still does some of that, but with a difference: its qualifier in particular rarely means anything so silly as the ultimate senescence, breakdown, and death of the system as such (a temporal vision that would rather seem to belong to modernism than Postmodernism). What "late" generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different, that we have gone through a transformation of the life world which is somehow decisive but incomparable with the older convulsions of modernization and industrialization, less perceptible and dramatic, somehow, but more permanent precisely because more thoroughgoing and all-pervasive.

    >That means that the expression late capitalism carries the other, cultural half of my title within it as well; not only is it something like a literal translation of the other expression, Postmodernism, its temporal index seems already to direct attention to changes in the quotidian and on the cultural level as such. To say that my two terms, the cultural and the economic, thereby collapse back into one another and say the same thing, in an eclipse of the distinction between base and superstructure that has itself often struck people as significantly characteristic of Postmodernism in the first place, is also to suggest that the base, in the third stage of capitalism, generates its superstructures with a new kind of dynamic. And this may also be what (rightly) worries the unconverted about the term; it seems to obligate you in advance to talk about cultural phenomena at least in business terms if not in those of political economy.

44. http://prmarketingcommunication.com/2012/08/14/postmodernity-and-consumer-culture/

    >Postmodernism – after modernism

    >In a literal sense postmodernism has to be understood in relation to modernism. While the former is characterised by playful uncertainty and ambiguous meanings, modernism sought to uncover new truth through questioning and self-conscious experimentation. Though modernism stood in opposition to the subjectivity and tradition of romantic thinking, it invoked an alternative set of meanings that in truth were no less arbitrary than that which preceded it. For example, in visual arts, modernist trends like abstraction and cubism may have reframed the relationship between the medium and that which is depicted (the signifier and the signified), however they still operated within fairly stable conceptions of what art is, and the role of the artist. Postmodernism sought to break down this fourth wall and encourage cultural producers to re-think the relationship between text and audience. In this sense postmodernism could be said to invoke aspects of semiotics that can be traced back to the Nineteenth Century: the arbitrary relationship between the signifier and the signified. And, indeed the term postmodern has been in use since the 1870s. However, there is a distinction between its use as an adjective and a proper noun to define a specific epoch.

    >The use of the term Postmodernity to identify an era in late-capitalism is the basis upon which Baudrillard, Bourdieu and Jameson are writing. Generally speaking that period is seen as beginning after the Second World War in the 1950s and is characterised by the proliferation of consumer lifestyle, credit and technology. Its apex could be said to embody the social changes the occurred in Western society during the 1960s, with the rise of Feminism, decline of the church and the emergence of a more relaxed attitude towards issues of sex, class and race. Laid over this of course has been the shift to a service economy and the proliferation of domestic communication technology blurring the boundaries between what is real and what is simulated. It is, in this sense, difficult to differentiate between that which is postmodern and that which is symptomatic of Postmodernity. Cinema, for example, which was popular long before the Second World War requires the suspension of disbelief and a willingness to accept as true simulated fictional environments: all characteristics of postmodern experience. Moreover, it is a commoditised cultural form utilising communication technology. However, it cannot be viewed as symptomatic of Postmodernity until much later in its history when audiences began to identify themselves as consumers and engage in the reflexive construction of their own personal identity; i.e. by going to see a particular film they are selfconsciously assembling a narrative of the self. And indeed, this is the basis upon which Baudrillard considers the role of the consumer in postmodern culture.

    ||

    The defining medium of postmodernity is the cinema, and the defining medium of the postnormal is social networking.

45. How does one get one’s hands, conceptually speaking, around the cultural concept? It seems so definite—a term referred to again and again in both the anthropological and popular literature. And yet, as one examines the concept, it appears increasingly elusive. Different people perceive it in different ways, and, perhaps, not unexpected given its popularity, the concept often carries—in its different renditions—various political overtones.

    With culture, the devil often appears in the details. Many people embrace the concept in the abstract. But they argue, sometimes heatedly, over what the term actually means. As [Elvin] Hatch writes [in Theories of man and culture]: “Even though the term has been discussed in countless books and articles, there is still a large degree of uncertainty in its use—anthropologists employ the notion in fundamentally different ways”.

    Source: .

46. 9 Nov - 06:27 Can dissent (i.e., diverse initial preferences) help groups to reduce defective decision processes and find the best solution? Is it also possible to improve decision making by informing group members about the defective processes and instructing them to avoid these processes?

    9 Nov - 06:32 two processing biases: a bias in favor of shared information and a bias in favor of members' initial prferences

    9 Nov - 06:35 Hypothesis 1: Decision quality in hidden profile situations is enhanced by systematic processing of information with regard to (a) information exchange in the group and (b) information elaboration of individual members (see Figure 1).

    9 Nov - 06:36 in hidden profile tasks, only the integration of unshared information ensures higher quality decisions by groups compared to individuals. The introduction of shared information is unrelated to decision quality, and members give shared information higher validity because it can be supported by more members.

    9 Nov - 06:39 Hypothesis 2: Decision quality in hidden profile situations is reduced by the sharedness bias with regard to (a) information exchange in the group and (b) information evaluation of individual members (see Figure 1).

    9 Nov - 06:41 If a majority favors a certain alternative before the discussion, the group seldom decides to chose another alternative (Gigone & Hastie, 1997). Thus, frequently, group discussions are superfluous, and groups would be better off using a decision shortcut like an immediate vote or an averaging procedure. This strong effect of initial preferences, even when they are wrong, on the final group decision might be because of three different subprocesses. Two are at the group level: (a) a direct negotiation about members’ preferences and (b) a bias in information exchange favoring initial preferences. The third is (c) a related bias in information evaluation at the individual level.

    9 Nov - 06:43 The preference bias occurs at the individual level as well—subprocess (c): New information that supports an initial preference is rated as more rel- evant and credible than information that undermines an initial preference (Edwards & Smith, 1996; Greitemeyer & Schulz-Hardt, 2003; Lord, Ross, & Lepper, 1979). This evaluation bias mediates the effect of the initial indi- vidual preference on the final individual decision after a group discussion and is sufficient to impair a person’s ability to solve a hidden profile task (Greitemeyer & Schulz-Hardt, 2003).

    9 Nov - 06:44 There is evidence at the group level and at the individual level that dissent—a confrontation with opinions that deviate from one’s own opinion— can have promotional effects on decision making. At the group level, early field studies analyzed the effects of groupthink, a tendency for concurrence seeking that effectively suppresses the expression of dissent (Janis, 1982). They found evidence that groupthink can have detrimental effects on group decisions (Janis, 1982; Peterson et al., 1998; Tetlock, Peterson, McGuire, & Chang, 1992). Correspondingly, laboratory and field experiments demon- strated that encouraging group members to express divergent opinions openly before reaching an agreement promotes information exchange and problem-solving performance (see Johnson & Johnson, 1989). In recent group laboratory experiments with hidden profile tasks, the composition of groups, in terms of its members’ initial preferences, was directly manipu- lated. These experiments showed that dissent (compared to consent) enhances decision-making quality (Brodbeck, Kerschreiter, Mojzisch, Frey, & Schulz-Hardt, 2002), even when no group member favors the correct solution before the discussion (Schulz-Hardt et al., 2006). This effect was mediated predominantly by more systematic processing of information but also by less biased processing of information (Schulz-Hardt et al., 2006). Specifically, dissent led to the introduction and repetition of more information (see also Parks & Nelson, 1999) and to a more balanced discussion of shared and unshared and preference-consistent and inconsistent information. Not analyzed but also possible is an additional mediation of the effect of dissent by reduced preference negotiation. If the group members recognize divergent preferences of other members, they might be less prone to an early direct expression of their own preference than if they agree with the other members.

    9 Nov - 06:46 Usually, divergent opinions are unexpected and therefore cause surprise and mobilize cognitive resources to explain the unexpected event (for exceptions, see David & Turner, 2001). In addition, it has been demonstrated that dissent, especially when articulated by a consistent minority, promotes divergent thinking, a variable related to unbiased processing (see Nemeth & Nemeth- Brown, 2003).

    9 Nov - 06:47 Hypothesis 4: Enhances systematic processing with regard to information exchange in the group and information elaboration of individual members. Hypothesis 5: Reduces the sharedness bias with regard to information exchange in the group and information evaluation of individual members. Hypothesis 6: Reduces the preference bias with regard to preference negotiation and information exchange in the group and information evaluation by individual members. Hypothesis 7: Enhances decision quality in hidden profile situations (see Figure 1).

    9 Nov - 06:49 Decision quality has been successfully enhanced by the following interventions: (a) inducing critical norms by having groups discuss a policy proposal that virtually all participants disapproved (Postmes, Spears, & Cihangir, 2001), (b) priming counterfactual mind-sets (Galinsky & Kray, 2004), (c) implementing a transactive memory system by an explicit expert role assignment (Stasser, Stewart, & Wittenbaum, 1995), and (d) instructing the groups to create a rank order of all decision alternatives (enhanced decision quality in face-to-face groups but not in virtual groups; Hollingshead, 1996).

    9 Nov - 06:51 The mixed results of previous interventions suggest that a mere instruction to participants to prevent defective processes is not always enough to improve quality of group decisions.

    9 Nov - 06:52 It was assumed that the sharedness intervention reduces the sharedness bias (Hypothesis 8) and that the preference intervention reduces the prefer- ence bias (Hypothesis 9), both at group and individual level (see Figure 1). Furthermore, it was assumed that both interventions enhance systematic processing at group and individual level (Hypothesis 10 and Hypothesis 11). All of these favorable effects of the new interventions on decision processes together can be supposed to promote decision quality as well (Hypothesis 12).

    9 Nov - 06:56 When people do not have a strong commitment to their preference, dissent might lead to a more balanced exchange of information because it reduces the confidence in the individual predecision (Schulz-Hardt, Frey, Lüthgens, & Moscovici, 2000). But when people are more convinced of their initial preference, dissent might enhance discussion bias: Group members selectively mention preference-consistent information to convince the other group members that their own predecision is correct (for motivated information sharing; see also Wittenbaum et al., 2004). However, even when each individual member focuses on preference-consistent information and withholds preference-inconsistent information, dissent leads to more balanced information sampling for the group as a whole. Because more decision alternatives have a proponent in the group, it is more likely that the communicated information pro and contra each alternative is representative of the information present in the group. Therefore, each member is also confronted with preference-inconsistent information by the other members. This promotes a more balanced consideration of different information so that the preference bias in individual information evaluation is reduced by dissent in this study.

    9 Nov - 07:00 The preference intervention especially was effective in reducing the preference bias at the group level and at the individual level: Groups focused less on negotiating about their members’ preferences and more on discussing preference- inconsistent information, which was also more highly appreciated individ- ually. The sharedness intervention was also able to reduce the individual motive to confirm other members’ information and be confirmed by other members (sharedness bias). However, it was not able to reduce the actual bias to favor shared information in discussion and individual elaboration. Neither the preference nor the sharedness intervention successfully enhanced the quality of the final decision.

    9 Nov - 07:03 Decision making in the context of complex problems often requires the integration of knowledge from different experts. When decision quality is of high importance, the decision-making team should be composed of members with a diversity of opinions. It is true that the resulting dissent can stimulate members to bias their information exchange on the basis of their initial opinions. However, it leads to a more balanced individual evaluation of information and thereby improves decision quality. Although other stud- ies focused on either group-level or individual-level processes of group decision making, this study analyzed both levels simultaneously. In doing so, the importance of individual-level processes was demonstrated. The individual overvaluing of shared and preference-consistent information is responsible for the failure to identify the correct decision in the group. If no dissent is present, this evaluation bias can also be reduced by two training interventions with a group exercise to demonstrate defective decision processes. However, as no intervention alone was able to enhance group decision quality, a combination of both interventions and a stronger focus on individual-level processes is recommended.

    last updated 8 days ago [edit]

47. The team said in the video: ‘This is our contribution towards the only concept of democracy we deem right: a democracy without secrets.’

    nulpunt #metahaven

48. >The idea was foreshadowed in Facestate, Metahaven's recent graphic design project currently installed on Governor's Island in New York City. Facestate's branded fiction also focuses on the intermingling of social media and politics, but explores a more sinister potential, imagining a world where the two fuse seamlessly into a new form of hybrid totalitarian government powered by virtual currency.

    >It is this perverse dynamic — that of a hypersocial, transparent, and surveilled populace living under increasingly secretive authoritarian power — that Nulpunt's creators hope to extinguish. "Facestate is one scenario for the future," the group explains, "but Nulpunt is strongly in favor of an opposite scenario, where social media are civic media, used to follow and control government rather than deployed as a surveillance dragnet and wholesale replacement for the public sector."

49. Mariko Peters

    mariko-peters

50. a heavy workload has no effect on whether or not employees become depressed. Instead, it is the work environment and the feeling of being treated unfairly by the management that has the greatest effect on an employee’s mood.

51. MakerSwarm app -- #ifttt for hardware

52. There is a consensus, or something that has assumed the tone of a consensus, that we are living, to our disadvantage, in an age of snark—that the problem of our times is a thing called "snark."

    The word, as used now, is a fairly recent addition to the language, and it is not always entirely clear what "snark" may be. But it's an attitude, and a negative attitude—a "hostile, knowing, bitter tone of contempt," is how Heidi Julavits described it in 2003, while formally bestowing the name of "snark" on it, in the inaugural issue of The Believer.

    In her essay, Julavits was grappling with the question of negative book reviewing: Was it fair or necessary? Was the meanness displayed in book reviews a symptom of deeper failings in the culture?

    The decade that followed did little to clear up the trouble; if anything, the identification of "snark" gave people a way to avoid thinking very hard about it. Snark is supposed to be self-evidently and self-explanatorily bad: "nasty," "low," and "snide," to pick a few words from the first page of David Denby's 2009 tract Snark: It's Mean, It's Personal, and It's Ruining Our Conversation. (I bought the Denby book used for six bucks, to cut him out of the loop on any royalties.)

    But why are nastiness and snideness taken to be features of our age? One general point of agreement, in denunciations of snark, is that snark is reactive. It is a kind of response. Yet to what is it responding? Of what is it contemptuous?

    Stand against snark, and you are standing with everything decent. And who doesn't want to be decent? The snarkers don't, it seems. Or at least they (let's be honest: we) don't want to be decent on those terms.

    Over time, it has become clear that anti-negativity is a worldview of its own, a particular mode of thinking and argument, no matter how evasively or vapidly it chooses to express itself. For a guiding principle of 21st century literary criticism, BuzzFeed's Fitzgerald turned to the moral and intellectual teachings of Walt Disney, in the movie Bambi: "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all."

    [...]

    If you listen to the crusaders against negativity—in literature, in journalism, in politics, in commerce—you begin to hear a recurring set of themes and attitudes, amounting to an omnipresent, unnamed cultural force. The words flung outward start to define a sort of unarticulated philosophy, one that has largely avoided being recognized and defined.

    Without identifying and comprehending what they have in common, we have a dangerously incomplete understanding of the conditions we are living under.

    Over the past year or two, on the way to writing this essay, I've accumulated dozens of emails and IM conversations from friends and colleagues. They send links to articles, essays, Tumblr posts, online comments, tweets—the shared attitude transcending any platform or format or subject matter.

    What is this defining feature of our times? What is snark reacting to?

    It is reacting to smarm.

    What is smarm, exactly? Smarm is a kind of performance—an assumption of the forms of seriousness, of virtue, of constructiveness, without the substance. Smarm is concerned with appropriateness and with tone. Smarm disapproves.

    Smarm would rather talk about anything other than smarm. Why, smarm asks, can't everyone just be nicer?

    [...]

    Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely.

    That gesture can almost serve as a source of comfort. The old systems of prestige—the literary inner circles, the top-ranking daily newspapers, the party leadership—are rickety and insecure. Everyone has a publishing platform and no one has a career.

    Smarm offers a quick schema of superiority. The authority that smarm invokes is an ersatz one, but the appearance of authority is usually enough to get by with. Without that protection, to hold an opinion is to feel bare and alone, one voice among a cacophony of millions.

    [...]

    Here is David Denby: Snark is the expression of the alienated, of the ambitious, of the dispossessed.

    [...]

    Snark is often conflated with cynicism, which is a troublesome misreading. Snark may speak in cynical terms about a cynical world, but it is not cynicism itself. It is a theory of cynicism.

    The practice of cynicism is smarm.

    [...]

    What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick flow of opaque smarm.

    [...]

    Romney was responding to the response to the disclosure of his private fundraising remarks dismissing 47 percent of the electorate as unreachable parasites. Romney had been caught in breach of the agreement never to speak divisively—and so he clambered up to a new higher ground, deploring the divisiveness of dwelling on his divisiveness. He had been attacked as a person, the kind of person who would write off 47 percent of the public. How low could the Obama campaign get? What ever happened to changing the tone? #47-percent

    This content-free piety is so deeply expected that when Obama did toss a few barbed lines Romney's way, Gawker took offense, describing his use of "Romnesia" as "too juvenile and jokey to be coming from the president"—even if it "usefully carries an important anti-Romney message." Heaven forbid that substance should come at the expense of tone. A presidency is a serious thing.

    [...]

    The evasion of disputes is a defining tactic of smarm. Smarm, whether political or literary, insists that the audience accept the priors it has been given. Debate begins where the important parts of the debate have ended. #the-evasion-of-disputes

    [...]

    In this, as in so many other parts of contemporary politics, members of the self-identified center are in some important sense unable to accept opposition. Through smarm, they have cut themselves off from the language of actual dispute. An entire political agenda—privatization of government services, aggressive policing, charter schooling, cuts in Social Security—has been packaged as apolitical, a reasonable consensus about necessity. Those who oppose the agenda are "interest groups," whose selfish greed makes them unable to see reason, or "ideologues." Those who promote it are disinterested and nonideological. There is no reason for the latter to even engage the former. In smarm is power. #the-language-of-actual-dispute #apoliticizing-ideology #in-smarm-there-is-power

    [...]

    Smarm, on the other hand, is never a force for good. A civilization that speaks in smarm is a civilization that has lost its ability to talk about purposes at all. It is a civilization that says "Don't Be Evil," rather than making sure it does not do evil.

    [...]

    Adam Mordecai, an editor-at-large for Upworthy, explained to Quora readers what his site's headline-writing philosophy is:

    • Don't depress people so much that they want to give up on humanity. Negative headlines breeds negative shares.
    • Don't curse in your headlines. Moms hate it (and are the biggest sharers on the internet by a significant margin [...]
    • Don't make people take positions they might be uncomfortable with. For example, "I Really Hate All White People" is going to not get shared, whereas, "An Open Letter To Pasty People" is far less hostile and more likely to get shared.
    • Don't use terms that overwhelm, polarize or bore people. I never use Social Security, The Environment, Immigration, Democrats, Republicans, Medicare, Racist, Bigot, etc... You can talk about issues without giving away what they are.

    The result of this approach, the Upworthy house style, is a coy sort of emulation of English, stripped of actual semantic content: This Man Removed the Specific and the Negative, and What Happened Next Will Astonish You. Even Upworthy's fellow participants in the ongoing SEO race to the bottom are horrified. But it works, in the sense that people who do not want to think about actual things or read any information will reliably share Upworthy stories.

    [...]

    When you hear a voice say "Everyone's a critic," listen for the echo: Everyone's a publicist. #everyones-a-critic

    [...]

    Market reasoning is deeply, essentially smarmy. We live, it insists, in a world that is optimized by the invisible hand. The conditions under which we live have been created by rational needs and preferences, producing an economicist Panglossianism: What thrives deserves to thrive, be it Nike or sprawl or the finance industry or Upworthy; what fails deserves to have failed.

    We all live our lives, we're told, on these terms. If people really wanted a better world—what you might foolishly regard as a better world—they would have it already. So what if you signed up to use Facebook as a social network, and Facebook changed the terms of service to reverse your privacy settings and mine your data? So what if you would rather see poor people housed than billionaires' investment apartments blotting out the sun? Some people have gone ahead and made the reality they wanted. Immense fortunes have bloomed in Silicon Valley on the most ephemeral and stupid windborne seeds of concepts, friends funding friends, apps copying apps, and the winners proclaiming themselves the elite of the newest of meritocracies. What's was wrong with you, that you didn't get a piece of it?

    Of course this is tyrannical. Of course this is false. Everyone is aware that market judgments are foolish and unfair. But what can you do about it?

    [...]

53. “Drones,” Bridle said, “are inherently network objects. They allow you to see and act at a distance, while themselves kind of remaining invisible.” One measure of the distance that keeps them out of sight, however, seems to be shrinking. Flying, unmanned vehicles are transitioning from a technology that operates primarily in foreign space—for Americans, at least—to an increasingly familiar, domestic one. A small milestone of sorts was reached this fall when a three-pound quadcopter crash-landed in midtown; it was the first drone wreck in Manhattan to provoke a response from the New York Police Department. Impending commercial applications for drones, like the Amazon Prime Air service, announced earlier this week on “60 Minutes,” which aims, eventually, to use autonomous drones to make deliveries thirty minutes after products are purchased online, guarantee that it will not be the last unplanned landing.

    Bridle recently visited New York for a conference on drones and aerial robotics, hoping to talk about what kinds of decisions could be left to an algorithm, and the problems with jamming every flying machine without a cockpit—whether it’s a warplane or a remote-controlled toy helicopter—into the same category, “drone.” But he left disappointed. “A good proportion of the drone-conference attendees were either owners or retailers of small remote-controlled aircraft, who really didn’t see why we should be discussing foreign policy or Waziristan,” Bridle said. “The discussion, at the moment, is confined to these engineering and very practical legal issues, about how to stop it from falling on someone’s head.”

54. As our locomotive races toward the cliff of ecological collapse, the only thoughts on the minds of our CEOs, capitalist economists, politicians and most labor leaders is how to stoke the locomotive to get us there faster. Corporations aren't necessarily evil. They just can't help themselves. They're doing what they're supposed to do for the benefit of their owners. But this means that, so long as the global economy is based on capitalism and private property and corporate property and competitive production for market, we're doomed to a collective social suicide - and no amount of tinkering with the market can brake the drive to global ecological collapse. We can't shop our way to sustainability, because the problems we face cannot be solved by individual choices in the marketplace. They require collective democratic control over the economy to prioritize the needs of society and the environment. And they require local, reigional, national and international economic planning to reorganize the economy and redeploy labor and resources to these ends. I conclude, therefore, that if humanity is to save itself, we have no choice but to overthrow capitalism and replace it with a democratically planned eco-socialist economy.

    [...]

    For the reality, Hawken said, was that: > Despite all this good work, we still must face a sobering fact. If every company on the planet were to adopt the best environmental practices of the "leading" companies - say, the Body Shop, Patagonia or 3M - the world would still be moving toward sure degradation and collapse. ... Quite simply, our business practices are destroying life on earth. Given current corporate practices, not one wildlife preserve, wilderness or indigenous culture will survive the global market economy. We know that every natural system on the planet is disintegrating. The land, water, air and sea have been functionally transformed from life-supporting systems into repositories for waste. There is no polite way to say that business is destroying the world. (The Ecology of Commerce (New York: Harper, 1993))

55. The “Great Inventions” of the Second Industrial Revolution (IR #2) utterly changed living and working conditions, particularly in urban America, within half a century and their full impact was largely complete during the century following 1870. The inventions can be grouped into five categories: (1) electricity and all its spin-offs; (2) the internal combustion engine and all its subsidiary improvements right up to the interstate highway system; (3) running water, indoor plumbing, and central heating; (4) rearranging molecules, including everything to do with petroleum, chemicals, plastics, and pharmaceuticals; and finally (5) the set of communication and entertainment devices invented within the remarkably short period between 1885 and 1900, including the telephone, the phonograph, popular photography, radio, and motion pictures.

    [...]

    Eventually in the 1930s and 1940s sulfa and antibiotics were invented, but by then life expectancy had turned a decisive corner. Little known is the fact that the annual rate of improvement of life expectancy in the first half of the 20th century was three times as fast as in the last half. Within one century by 1970 life had been utterly changed. The interstate highway system was almost completed. Air conditioning was universal in commerce and widespread in residential homes. Air travel by 1970 had been completely converted to jets with no further increase in speed. Consumer appliances were universal in the United States, with only the microwave oven still waiting to be invented and diffused.

    A common feature of this innovative revolution was that many of the improvements could only happen once. Speed of travel was increased from that of the horse to the jet plane in a century but could not happen again. The interior temperature that in 1870 alternated between freezing cold in the winter and stifling heat in the summer reached a year-round 72 degrees Fahrenheit (22C), and that could not happen again. The U.S. was transformed from 75 percent rural to 80 percent urban, and that could not happen again.

    The growth of productivity (output per hour) slowed markedly after 1970. While puzzling at the time, it seems increasingly clear that the one-time-only benefits of the Great Inventions and their spin-offs had occurred and could not happen again. Diminishing returns set in, and eventually all of the subsidiary and complementary developments following from the Great Inventions of IR #2 had happened. All that remained after 1970 were second-round improvements, such as developing short-haul regional jets, extending the original interstate highway network with suburban ring roads, and converting residential America from window-unit air conditioners to central air conditioning.

    [...]

    The Third Industrial Revolution (IR #3) began with the first commercial uses of computers around 1960 and continued through the development of the Internet, the web, and e- commerce in the 1990s. Initially computers shared with the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, and the electric motor the many-faceted benefits of replacing human effort, making jobs easier, less boring, and less repetitive. It may seem surprising that so many of the computer’s laborsaving impacts occurred so long ago.

    The first industrial robot was introduced by General Motors in 1961. Telephone operators went away in the 1960s. As long ago as 1960 telephone companies began creating telephone bills from stacks of punch cards. Bank statements and insurance policies were soon computer-printed. The first credit card was introduced in the late 1950s and my personal American Express card is still stamped “1968.”

    By the 1970s, even before the personal computer, tedious retyping had been made obsolete by memory typewriters. Airline reservations systems came in the 1970s, and by 1980 bar-code scanners and cash machines were spreading through the retail and banking industries. Old-fashioned mechanical calculators were quickly discarded as electronic calculators, both miniature and desktop, were introduced around 1970.

    The first personal computers arrived in the early 1980s with their word processing, word wrap, and spreadsheets. Word processing furthered the elimination of repetitive typing, while spreadsheets allowed the automation of repetitive calculations. Secretaries began to disappear in economics departments, and professors began to type their own papers. “Moore’s Law” proceeded apace and allowed larger document and spreadsheet files to be handled faster. The multiplying power of computer chips was matched by increasing complexity of software, leading to the light-hearted verdict that “What Intel Giveth, Microsoft Taketh Away.”

    More recent and thus more familiar was the rapid development of the web and e- commerce after 1995, a process largely completed by 2005. Many one-time-only conversions occurred, for instance from card catalogues in wooden cabinets to flat screens in the world’s libraries and the replacement of punch-hole paper catalogues with flat-screen electronic ordering systems in the world’s auto dealers and wholesalers. There was a burst of investment in the late 1990s as every large and small corporation developed its own web site; while many “dot.com” start-ups succumbed to overly optimistic plans, others like Amazon and Google developed business models that rose to dominance in the years after the dot.com stock market bubble peaked in early 2000.

    // this is one place he goes wrong. he doesn't see the rise of the web/mobil/cloud computing as a break with the past -- like 1895-1900 and IR2 was a break with IR1

    There are four classic examples in the past of innovation pessimism that turned out to be wildly wrong. In 1876, an internal memo at Western Union, the telegraph monopolists, said, “The telephone has too many shortcomings to be considered as a serious means of communication.” In 1927, a year before The Jazz Singer, the head of Warner Brothers said, “Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?” In 1943, Thomas Watson, then president of IBM, said, “I think there is a world market for maybe five computers.” And in 1981, in the most famous of hese ill-fated quotes, Bill Gates himself said in defense of the capacity of the first floppy disks, “640 kilobytes ought to be enough for anyone.”

    [...]

    Six headwinds:

    1. Demographic dividend is over -- women joined the workforce
    2. education attainment falling
    3. rising inequality
    4. globalization and modern computing
    5. energy and environoment
    6. household and government debts
56. In “The Rhetoric of Reaction” he wrote that purveyors of “timid ignorance” rely on three types of argument: jeopardy (reforms will cost a lot and endanger previous gains); perversity (reforms will harm the people they are intended to help); and futility (problems are so huge that nothing can be done about them). That certainly describes the current debates about global warming, illegal drugs and countless other topics. #timid-ignorance #perversity #jeopardy #futility
57. The long-running boom in emerging markets came to be identified, if not propped up, by wide acceptance of the term BRICs, shorthand for the fast-growing countries Brazil, Russia, India and China. Recent turmoil in these and similar markets has produced a rival expression: the Fragile Five.

    The new name, as coined by a little-known research analyst at Morgan Stanley last summer, identifies Turkey, Brazil, India, South Africa and Indonesia as economies that have become too dependent on skittish foreign investment to finance their growth ambitions.

    The term has caught on in large degree because it highlights the strains that occur when countries place too much emphasis on stoking fast rates of economic growth. The new catchphrase also raises pressing questions about not just the BRICs but about emerging markets in general.

    The Morgan Stanley report came out in August, when there were reports that the Federal Reserve would soon reduce its bond-buying program. The term that report coined became a quick and easy way for investors to give voice to fears of a broader emerging markets rout, propelled by runs on the Turkish lira, Brazilian real and South African rand.

    http://graphics8.nytimes.com/newsgraphics/2014/01/28/bricsgraphic/e00e7f2321733e11ce4add281c1cbac33e024613/0129-web-BRICS-720.png

58. In the years before the crisis, there was a remarkable bipartisan consensus in Washington in favor of financial deregulation — a consensus justified by neither theory nor history. When crisis struck, there was a rush to rescue the banks. But as soon as that was done, a new consensus emerged, one that involved turning away from job creation and focusing on the alleged threat from budget deficits.

    What do the pre- and postcrisis consensuses have in common? Both were economically destructive: Deregulation helped make the crisis possible, and the premature turn to fiscal austerity has done more than anything else to hobble recovery. Both consensuses, however, corresponded to the interests and prejudices of an economic elite whose political influence had surged along with its wealth.

    This is especially clear if we try to understand why Washington, in the midst of a continuing jobs crisis, somehow became obsessed with the supposed need for cuts in Social Security and Medicare. This obsession never made economic sense: In a depressed economy with record low interest rates, the government should be spending more, not less, and an era of mass unemployment is no time to be focusing on potential fiscal problems decades in the future. Nor did the attack on these programs reflect public demands.

    Surveys of the very wealthy have, however, shown that they — unlike the general public — consider budget deficits a crucial issue and favor big cuts in safety-net programs. And sure enough, those elite priorities took over our policy discourse.

59. Virpi Oinonen's drawings

60. The meritocracy we have is one in which the illusion of merit is used to justify the neglect of those less fortunate. That meritocracy is deployed not in order to give everyone an equal opportunity to achieve, but to defend the preexisting structures of power.

    [...]

61. On April 1, 1992, New Jersey's minimum wage rose from $4.25 to $5.05 per hour.To evaluate the impact of the law we surveyed 410 fast-food restaurants in New Jersey and eastern Pennsylvania before and after the rise. Comparisons of employment growth at stores in New Jersey and Pennsylvania (where the minimum wage was constant)provide simple estimates of the effect of the higher minimum wage. We also compare employment changes at stores in New Jersey that were initially paying high wages (above $5) to the changes at lower-wage stores. We find no indication that the rise in the minimum wage reduced employment. (JEL 530, 523)
62. According to Harvard’s Equality of Opportunity Project, the states with the most upwardly mobile cities include Pennsylvania (with five of the top 12 cities), New York and New Jersey (Albany, Newark, and New York are in the top 30). All three states are seeing net emigration, according to the Atlas map. Five of the 11 worst cities for poor children to move into the top quintile are in Tennessee and North Carolina—two of the few states to see more inbound moves in 2013.

    This doesn't make much sense if you envision American families rushing to the most promising metros. It does make sense if you see American families rushing to the most affordable homes.

    Some of America's most productive cities for medium- and low-income families—Boston, Honolulu, San Jose, New York—are also the most expensive. This is often due to (or at least, exacerbated by) exclusionary zoning and housing regulations that limit the number of available units, which drives up the price of housing, ensuring that low-income families can't afford to live there. The sad irony is that density is a good predictor of upward mobility, but sunbelt cities with affordable housing often sprawl deep into the exurbs, where families aren't anywhere near the best jobs. The very thing that makes those cities attractive places to get to also makes them bad places to get ahead.

63. Of course, as with most changes, there is a downside. I am concerned that there is an adverse impact on jobs. Productivity increasing, say, at 2.4 percent in a given year means either that the same number of people can produce 2.4 percent more output or that we can get the same output with 2.4 percent fewer people. Both of these are happening. We are getting more output for each person in the economy, but overall output, nationally, requires fewer people to produce it. Nowadays, fewer people are required behind the desk of an airline. Much of the work is still physical—someone still has to take your luggage and put it on the belt—but much has vanished into the digital world of sensing, digital communication, and intelligent response.

    Physical jobs are disappearing into the second economy, and I believe this effect is dwarfing the much more publicized effect of jobs disappearing to places like India and China.

    There are parallels with what has happened before. In the early 20th century, farm jobs became mechanized and there was less need for farm labor, and some decades later manufacturing jobs became mechanized and there was less need for factory labor. Now business processes—many in the service sector—are becoming “mechanized” and fewer people are needed, and this is exerting systematic downward pressure on jobs. We don’t have paralegals in the numbers we used to. Or draftsmen, telephone operators, typists, or bookkeeping people. A lot of that work is now done digitally. We do have police and teachers and doctors; where there’s a need for human judgment and human interaction, we still have that. But the primary cause of all of the downsizing we’ve had since the mid-1990s is that a lot of human jobs are disappearing into the second economy. Not to reappear.

    Seeing things this way, it’s not surprising we are still working our way out of the bad 2008–09 recession with a great deal of joblessness.

    There’s a larger lesson to be drawn from this. The second economy will certainly be the engine of growth and the provider of prosperity for the rest of this century and beyond, but it may not provide jobs, so there may be prosperity without full access for many. This suggests to me that the main challenge of the economy is shifting from producingprosperity to distributing prosperity. The second economy will produce wealth no matter what we do; distributing that wealth has become the main problem. For centuries, wealth has traditionally been apportioned in the West through jobs, and jobs have always been forthcoming. When farm jobs disappeared, we still had manufacturing jobs, and when these disappeared we migrated to service jobs. With this digital transformation, this last repository of jobs is shrinking—fewer of us in the future may have white-collar business process jobs—and we face a problem.

    The system will adjust of course, though I can’t yet say exactly how. Perhaps some new part of the economy will come forward and generate a whole new set of jobs. Perhaps we will have short workweeks and long vacations so there will be more jobs to go around. Perhaps we will have to subsidize job creation. Perhaps the very idea of a job and of being productive will change over the next two or three decades. The problem is by no means insoluble. The good news is that if we do solve it we may at last have the freedom to invest our energies in creative acts.

64. Technologies like the Web, artificial intelligence, big data, and improved analytics—all made possible by the ever increasing availability of cheap computing power and storage capacity—are automating many routine tasks. Countless traditional white-collar jobs, such as many in the post office and in customer service, have disappeared. W. Brian Arthur, a visiting researcher at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center’s intelligence systems lab and a former economics professor at Stanford University, calls it the “autonomous economy.” It’s far more subtle than the idea of robots and automation doing human jobs, he says: it involves “digital processes talking to other digital processes and creating new processes,” enabling us to do many things with fewer people and making yet other human jobs obsolete.

    It is this onslaught of digital processes, says Arthur, that primarily explains how productivity has grown without a significant increase in human labor. And, he says, “digital versions of human intelligence” are increasingly replacing even those jobs once thought to require people. “It will change every profession in ways we have barely seen yet,” he warns.

65. In a recent article in the Quarterly Journal of Economics, Loukas Karabarbounis and Brent Neiman from the University of Chicago’s Booth School of Business found that the share of income going to workers has been declining around the world.

    As the cost of capital investments has fallen relative to the cost of labor, businesses have rushed to replace workers with technology.

    “From the mid-1970s onwards, there is evidence that capital and labor are more substitutable” than what standard economic models would suggest, Professor Neiman told me. “This is happening all over the place. It is a major global trend.”

    The implication is potentially dire: The vast disparities in the distribution of income that have been widening inexorably since the 1980s will widen further.

    This is hardly a consensus reading of the record. “It is hard to make a very definite prediction about how the capital-income share will evolve over the next 10 years,” Daron Acemoglu, a colleague of Mr. Solow’s at M.I.T., told me. “Future technology could maybe increase the contribution of labor.”

    Tyler Cowen, a professor of economics at George Mason University, argues that the very definitions of labor and capital are arbitrary. Instead, he looks around the world to find the relatively scarce factors of production and finds two: natural resources, which are dwindling, and good ideas, which can reach larger markets than ever before.

    If you possess one of those, then you will reap most of the rewards of growth. If you don’t, you will not.

    Conventional wisdom in economics has long held that technological change affects income inequality by increasing the rewards to skill — through a dynamic called “skill-biased technical change.” Losers are workers whose job can be replaced by machines (textile workers, for example). Those whose skills are enhanced by machines (think Wall Street traders using ultrafast computers) win.

    It is becoming increasingly apparent, however, that this is not the whole story and that the skills-heavy narrative of inequality is not as straightforward as economists once believed. The persistent decline in the labor share of income suggests another dynamic. Call it “capital-biased technical change” — which encourages replacing decently paid workers with a machine, regardless of their skill.

    For instance, r esearch by the Canadian economists Paul Beaudry, David Green and Benjamin Sand finds that demand for highly skilled workers in the United States peaked around 2000 and then fell, even as their supply continued to grow. This pushed the highly educated down the ladder of skills in search of jobs, pushing less-educated workers further down.

    This dynamic opens a new avenue for inequality to widen: the rise in the rewards to inherited wealth, a topic explored in depth in Thomas Piketty’s expansive new book, “Capital in the Twenty-First Century.”

66. http://www.bloomsburyacademic.com/view/The-Precariat/chapter-ba-9781849664554-chapter-002.xml;jsessionid=AC33A9C21F023CC698F75F398B14782C

    >Commodification has also made the division of labour within enterprises more fluid. If activities can be done more cheaply in one location, they are ‘offshored’ (within firms) or ‘outsourced’ (to partner firms or others). This fragments the labour process; internal job structures and bureaucratic ‘careers’ are disrupted, due to uncertainty over whether jobs people might have expected to do will be offshored or outsourced.

    >The disruption feeds into the way skills are developed. The incentive to invest in skills is determined by the cost of acquiring them, the opportunity cost of doing so and the prospective additional income. If the risk increases of not having an opportunity to practise skills, investment in them will decline, as will the psychological commitment to the company. In short, if firms become more fluid, workers will be discouraged from trying to build careers inside them. This puts them close to being in the precariat.

    >The firm is becoming more portable than employees, in terms of its ability to switch activities. Many employees cannot relocate easily. They may have a partner earning an income, children locked into a school trajectory, elderly relatives to care for. This risks disrupting occupational careers, tending to push more into a precariat existence.

    >For a growing number of workers in the twenty-first century, it would be folly to regard a firm as a place for building a career and gaining income security. There would be nothing wrong with that, if social policy were adapted so that all those working for companies are able to have basic security. At present, that is far from being the case.

    liquid

    [...]

    >Tertiarisation summarises a combination of forms of flexibility, in which divisions of labour are fluid, workplaces blend into home and public places, hours of labour fluctuate and people can combine several work statuses and have several contracts concurrently. It is ushering in a new system of control, focusing on people's use of time. One influential way of looking at it has been the Italian school, drawing on Marxism and Foucault (1977), which depicts the process as creating a ‘social factory’, with society an extension of the workplace (Hardt 2000).

    socialfactory #societyofwork

    [...]

    >This is labour re-commodification, since remuneration is concentrated on money wages. It goes with the more contingent nature of employment and the pursuit of competitiveness. While one could give numerous examples, what has been happening in the United States captures the story. While the salariat have retained enterprise benefits, core workers have been tipped towards the precariat. The share of US-based firms offering health care benefits fell from 69 per cent in 2000 to 60 per cent in 2009. In 2001, employers paid 74 per cent of their employees’ health costs; by 2010, they were paying 64 per cent. In 1980, US employers paid 89 per cent of contributions towards retirement benefits; by 2006, that had fallen to 52 per cent (Dvorak 2009). By 2009, only a fifth of US employees had company-based pensions.

    >The main reason was that American firms were trying to cut costs to adjust to the globalisation crisis. In 2009, US employers still offering health insurance were paying on average US$6,700 per employee a year, twice as much as in 2001. One response has been to offer core employees ‘high-deductible health care plans’, where they must pay the first tranche of medical costs up to a specified amount. Ford dropped its ‘no deductible’ plan in 2008, requiring employees and family members to pay the first US$400 before insurance compensation started and to pay 20 per cent of most medical bills. This was dismantling part of their income.

    >Meanwhile, the promise of a company pension is being taken away from those being pushed into the precariat. Corporations are rushing to cut pension obligations and other ‘legacy costs’, financial commitments to former employees living out their retirement years. The widely used 401(k) retirement plans have usually allowed employers to make variable contributions. In 2009, over a third of US firms cut back or eliminated matching payments to those plans. Even the American Association of Retired Persons (AARP), the non-profit advocacy group for people over 50, did that for its own employees. Some firms, such as the computer company Unisys, raised their contributions when closing or freezing old-style pension schemes so as to defuse resentment, only to suspend them later. Enterprise pensions are in free fall.

    >This has undermined mutual commitment by employer and employee. Ford, for generations the epitome of US capitalism, has frequently suspended contributions; between 2001 and 2009 it contributed for only two-and-a-half years. Salaried employees hired after 2003 have no company pensions at all. Ford claimed it switched to self-managed retirement accounts to give workers portability, claiming that younger workers ‘don't think of a career with one company any more’. In reality, the firm was cutting labour costs and transferring the risks and costs to workers. Their lives were being made more precarious.

67. Some employers do complain that they’re finding it hard to find workers with the skills they need. But show us the money: If employers are really crying out for certain skills, they should be willing to offer higher wages to attract workers with those skills. In reality, however, it’s very hard to find groups of workers getting big wage increases, and the cases you can find don’t fit the conventional wisdom at all. It’s good, for example, that workers who know how to operate a sewing machine are seeing significant raises in wages, but I very much doubt that these are the skills people who make a lot of noise about the alleged gap have in mind.

    And it’s not just the evidence on unemployment and wages that refutes the skills-gap story. Careful surveys of employers — like those recently conducted by researchers at both M.I.T. and the Boston Consulting Group — similarly find, as the consulting group declared, that “worries of a skills gap crisis are overblown.”

    The one piece of evidence you might cite in favor of the skills-gap story is the sharp rise in long-term unemployment, which could be evidence that many workers don’t have what employers want. But it isn’t. At this point, we know a lot about the long-term unemployed, and they’re pretty much indistinguishable in skills from laid-off workers who quickly find new jobs. So what’s their problem? It’s the very fact of being out of work, which makes employers unwilling even to look at their qualifications.

    So how does the myth of a skills shortage not only persist, but remain part of what “everyone knows”? Well, there was a nice illustration of the process last fall, when some news media reported that 92 percent of top executives said that there was, indeed, a skills gap. The basis for this claim? A telephone survey in which executives were asked, “Which of the following do you feel best describes the ‘gap’ in the U.S. workforce skills gap?” followed by a list of alternatives. Given the loaded question, it’s actually amazing that 8 percent of the respondents were willing to declare that there was no gap.

    The point is that influential people move in circles in which repeating the skills-gap story — or, better yet, writing about skill gaps in media outlets like Politico — is a badge of seriousness, an assertion of tribal identity. And the zombie shambles on.

    Unfortunately, the skills myth — like the myth of a looming debt crisis — is having dire effects on real-world policy. Instead of focusing on the way disastrously wrongheaded fiscal policy and inadequate action by the Federal Reserve have crippled the economy and demanding action, important people piously wring their hands about the failings of American workers.

    Moreover, by blaming workers for their own plight, the skills myth shifts attention away from the spectacle of soaring profits and bonuses even as employment and wages stagnate. Of course, that may be another reason corporate executives like the myth so much.

    So we need to kill this zombie, if we can, and stop making excuses for an economy that punishes workers.

68. Exercises are performed for 30 seconds, with 10 seconds of transition time between bouts. Total time for the entire circuit workout is approximately 7 minutes. The circuit can be repeated 2 to 3 times. 1. Jumping jacks Total body 2. Wall sit Lower body 3. Push-up Upper body 4. Abdominal crunch Core 5. Step-up onto chair Total body 6. Squat Lower body 7. Triceps dip on chair Upper body 8. Plank Core 9. High knees/running in place Total body 10. Lunge Lower body 11. Push-up and rotation Upper body 12. Side plank Core
69. I found the design process utterly transformed once I decided to stop trying to be the expert and start trying to encourage a culture of experimentation.

    Battles that would rage, angrily, for months – dying down when the provocateur was busy with other work but rising up as soon as they had a little time on their hands – these battles began to go away. Long frustrating and unproductive sessions of trying to explain, defend, rationalise why the design that I suggested had more merit than the many and varied suggestions (or requirements) coming from stakeholders all but disappeared. People who would usually sneer derisively at the design team became participating members of the design process.

    It’s not perfect, it’s no silver bullet, but for me, it’s been a transformation.

    And it’s pretty simple. To embrace experimentation you just need to stop talking about design in a Socrati...her approaches, you design a test. Find out how to find out which design works best.

    Hypothesis, prototype, test.

    There are loads of tools you can use to test ideas quickly – from some quick in person user research, to some A/B testing (if you’re not set up to do A/B testing, meet your friend Google Content Experiments and get onto this immediately), to an online card sort, to one of the range of tests that places like VerifyApp offer. The methods for testing are limited only by your creativity and are mostly inexpensive.

    Sure, you can’t design from the ground up this way – you will still need a good designer that you trust get you to a good starting point from which you can experiment up, but once you’ve got the framework in place, don’t waste time and goodwill bickering about the details but encourage experimentation throughout the entire organisation. You’ll raise the overall ‘design IQ’ and happiness quotient of your company, your design team and, most probably, even yourself.

70. couple with the pret-a-manger nonsense written up by myerscough https://workflowy.com/#/6ad8c72d-2d27-cb17-7d9d-f87089cadd1f
71. The practiced liberal response is that such statistics reflect an absence of opportunity rather than a lack of gumption. But this leads only to calls for job creation which emphasize the value of “hard work” without reflecting on the nature of that work. The grueling toil of the Amazon warehouse is certainly hard; so too, in a way, are the 80 hour weeks and intense stresses of a Goldman Sachs trader. Yet the former can hardly be said to be healthy or improving for the human spirit, while the latter only creates wealth for the few and economic chaos for the rest of us. Murray’s “industriousness” is the attitude ridiculed by the wayward Marxist Paul Lafargue in his 1883 pamphlet The Right to Be Lazy, “a strange delusion” that afflicts the proletariat with “a furious passion for work.”

    Lafargue is part of a dissident socialist tradition, which insists that a politicsfor the working class must be against work. This is the tradition picked up by political theorist Kathi Weeks in her recent book, The Problem with Work: Feminism, Marxism, Antiwork Politics, and Postwork Imaginaries. Weeks identifies advocates of more work and those who want better work, and finds each lacking. As an alternative, she holds up the straightforward and unapologetic demand for less work. In the process, she powerfully articulates the case for a politics that appeals to pleasure and desire, rather than to sacrifice and asceticism. It is, after all, the ideal of self-restraint and self-denial that ultimately legitimates the glorification of work, and especially the ideology of the work ethic.

    [...]

    What is the politics of getting a life? It is easier to reject the ideology of work in theory than it is to craft a political strategy that advances an anti-work agenda in practice. Neither side of twentieth century socialism’s reform-or-revolution dialectic is particularly helpful in this regard. Social democracy has managed to partially liberate workers from work, by providing public services and income supports that lessen the dependence on wage labor. Yet this de-commodification of labor has been halting and uneasy, due to a preoccupation with maintaining full employment and conserving jobs. The insurrectionary seizure of state power, meanwhile, if it leaves the structure of capitalist labor relations intact, merely puts the workers in charge of their own exploitation—meet the new boss, same as the old.

    Weeks attempts to transcend these limitations by elaborating a concept of the political demand that merges the reformist and revolutionary impulses. The demand is seen here as a call for a specific reform, but also as something more. The demand, and the way it is articulated, can be a tool for ideological demystification and for what Fredric Jameson calls “cognitive mapping,” charting the relationships between various spheres of production and reproduction. A demand can be something to organize around, a way to build collective capacity. Finally, a demand can set the stage for radical struggles and transformations in the future, even if it does not challenge the foundations of the system immediately.

    This concept of the demand is evocative of André Gorz’s idea of the “non-reformist reform,” although Weeks shies away from the implication that a demand could have radical implications while still partaking in the reformist terrain of policy proposals and tactical compromises. In a move that is reminiscent of some of the anxiety about “demands” in the Occupy Wall Street milieu, it seems at times that Weeks wants to preserve her radical credentials by denying that the system could ever really accommodate the demands she puts forward.

    Yet the two specific demands she discusses, though they are ambitious, are within the horizon of reformism: an unconditional basic income and a shortening of the work week. These are common enough proposals among leftists of an anti-work persuasion, but Weeks’ treatment is distinctive because it grounds both demands in the politics of feminism. Basic income is offered as a successor to “wages for housework”, a signature demand of the Marxist feminists who emerged from the Italian workerist scene. The objective, says Weeks, is to highlight “the arbitrariness with which contributions to social production are and are not rewarded with wages,” thus making visible the enormous amount of unwaged reproductive labor performed by women. Against those who reject basic income as an unearned handout, we can respond that it is capitalism which arbitrarily refuses to pay for a huge proportion of the labor that sustains it.

    Shorter hours, too, is inherently a feminist demand. The proletarian of the Left’s romantic imagination has always been implicitly a male figure, the full time worker relying on the reproductive labor of a woman in the home. However, Weeks is careful to reject calls for work time reduction premised on making more time for the family. Such arguments may contest the work ethic, but they do so only by reinforcing an equally pernicious family ethic. Time in the home comes to be portrayed as inherently better or less alienated than time in the workplace, and the need for such time becomes naturalized. This ignores the alienating and oppressive qualities of the family, which led an earlier generation of feminists to seek the relative freedom and autonomy of wage labor. What’s more, the self-denying asceticism of the work ethic has not been overcome but merely displaced, from the workplace to the home. Shorter hours, asserts Weeks, should be offered not as a prop to the traditional family but as “a means of securing the time and space to forge alternatives to the present ideals and conditions of work and family life.”

72. There is also a special problem for some young men, namely those with especially restless temperaments. They aren’t always well-suited to the new class of service jobs, like greeting customers or taking care of the aged, which require much discipline or sometimes even a subordination of will. The law is yet another source of labor market inflexibility: The number of jobs covered by occupational licensing continues to rise and is almost one-third of the work force. We don’t need such laws for, say, barbers or interior designers, although they are commonly on the books.
73. A new era of production has begun. Its principles of organization are as different from those of the industrial era as those of the industrial era were different from the agricultural. The cybernation revolution has been brought about by the combination of the computer and the automated self-regulating machine. This results in a system of almost unlimited productive capacity which requires progressively less human labor. Cybernation is already reorganizing the economic and social system to meet its own needs.
74. In the world that American futurologist Stowe Boyd envisages — say 10 years from now — such executives are destined to be chased by employers like crusaders after the Holy Grail. It is a world in which freelancing will be a hot job. Boyd sees massive realignment of functions that will usher in more flexibility to ensure greater productivity. In that world — like the uber-cool gadgets of today, like those expensive, intelligent home appliances, like those automatic vehicles that are trundling on Western roads and the drones that are dotting the skies — work, too, will get smarter. Much smarter than it is today.
75. Employee happiness is more dependent on co-workers than direct managers. That's a change from the past.
76. Long-term unemployment has remained a persistent problem post-Great Recession – a somewhat new issue for the U.S., as compared to Europe. Despite declining over the last 4 years, the share of the unemployed who have been out of work for more than 6 months still exceeds its previous peak reached in 1981-82, and is well above its average in the last recovery, the authors note. Yet, measures of short-term unemployment are close to their average rates in the last recovery. As a result, overall unemployment remains elevated because of the large number of people who have been unemployed long term.

    The long-term unemployed are spread throughout all corners of the economy, with a majority previously employed in sales and service jobs (36 percent) and blue collar jobs (28 percent), they find. In addition, the authors find that when long-term unemployed workers do return to work, there is a tendency to return to jobs in the same set of industries and occupations from which the workers were displaced.

    The authors present a calibrated model that shows that the collapse in job vacancies, coupled with a decline in labor force withdrawal rates, accounts for the sharp rise in the number of long-term unemployed workers in 2009-13 and the overall rise in the unemployment rate. Furthermore, the authors show that the historically slower rate of reemployment for long-term unemployed workers can account for the apparent shift in the relationship between the unemployment rate and job vacancies. Their model predicts that the unemployment-vacancy relationship will return to its original position as the long-term unemployed continue to exit the labor force.

    [...] the longer version: http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/projects/bpea/spring%202014/2014a_krueger.pdf

    the composition of unemployed workers since the Great Recession suggests that the unprecedented rise in long-term unemployment may have been responsible for dampening the traditional relationship between price inflation and labor market slack.

    [...]

    While high long-term unemployment had been an unusual phenomenon in the United States in the post-World War II era, it has been much more prevalent in Europe. In a prescient empirical study, Llaudes (2005) argued that the rise in long-term joblessness distorted the determination of prices and wages in many European countries. Llaudes employed alternative measures of unemployment that were re-weighted to account for the duration of joblessness, and found that measures that down-weighted the long-term unemployed tended to produce more accurate predictions of changes in prices and wages than the traditional unemployment rate.

    For example, consistent with our findings for the United States since the Great Recession, Llaudes finds that the long-term unemployed had a relatively smaller effect on changes in prices and wages in the United Kingdom from 1973 to 2002 than did those who had shorter durations of joblessness. A modified unemployment rate in which workers who have been unemployed for at least a year are weighted by roughly 20 percent as much as the short-term unemployed does a better job of predicting price changes in the United Kingdom than does the overall aggregate measure in which all unemployed workers are weighted equally. Likewise, an adjusted unemployment rate in which workers who have been unemployed for at least a year are weighted by 17 percent as much as the short-term unemployed does a better job of predicting wage changes in the United Kingdom than does the overall aggregate measure.

    Nevertheless, the degree to which the long-term unemployed affect changes in prices and wages can vary considerably across countries. For instance, in his specification of the price Phillips Curve for Sweden from 1971 to 2002, Llaudes estimates a weight of about 50 percent for workers who have been unemployed for at least a year in his adjusted measure of labor market slack. Similarly, Llaudes calculates a weight of about half for the long-term unemployed in his alternative measure of the unemployment rate when estimating the wage Phillips Curve for Sweden.

77. >By the end of the century, corporations acknowledged that they had downgraded workers in their calculus of concerns. In the 1980s, a Conference Board survey of corporate executives found that 56 percent agreed that “employees who are loyal to the company and further its business goals deserve an assurance of continued employment.” When the Conference Board asked the same question in the 1990s, 6 percent of executives agreed. “Loyalty to a company,” Welch once said, “it’s nonsense.”

    [...]

    German industrial workers’ wages and benefits are about one-third higher than Americans’.

    [...]

    What has vanished over the past 40 years isn’t just Americans’ rising incomes. It’s their sense of control over their lives. The young college graduates working in jobs requiring no more than a high-school degree, the middle-aged unemployed who have permanently opted out of a labor market that has no place for them, the 45- to 60-year-olds who say they will have to delay their retirement because they have insufficient savings—all these and more are leading lives that have diverged from the aspirations that Americans until recently believed they could fulfill. This May, a Pew poll asked respondents if they thought that today’s children would be better or worse off than their parents. Sixty-two percent said worse off, while 33 percent said better. Studies that document the decline of intergenerational mobility suggest that this newfound pessimism is well grounded.

    The extinction of a large and vibrant American middle class isn’t ordained by the laws of either economics or physics. Many of the impediments to creating anew a broadly prosperous America are ultimately political creations that are susceptible to political remedy. Amassing the power to secure those remedies will require an extraordinary, sustained, and heroic political mobilization. Americans will have to transform their anxiety into indignation and direct that indignation to the task of reclaiming their stake in the nation’s future.

    jack-welch #harold-meyerson

78. As Americans head to the polls, they face a disastrous new normal: For the first time, the U.S. economy has shifted in the direction of a part-time, low-wage workforce…America’s narrow unemployment rate is 7.9%, but it is 14.6% when accounting for involuntary part-time workers. The number of Americans working full time has declined by 5.9 million since September 2007, while the number working part time has jumped by 2.6 million. Over the same period, according to the National Employment Law Project, low-wage occupations have grown nearly three times as fast as mid-wage and higher-wage ones. Whereas lower-wage jobs were 21% of losses during the recession, they have accounted for 58% of new jobs since.

    precarity #freelancers #pensions #part-timers

79. Pret workers aren’t supposed to be unhappy. They are recruited precisely for their ‘personality’, in the sense that a talent show host might use the word. Job candidates must show that they have a natural flair for the ‘Pret Behaviours’ (these are listed on the website too). Among the 17 things they ‘Don’t Want to See’ is that someone is ‘moody or bad-tempered’, ‘annoys people’, ‘overcomplicates ideas’ or ‘is just here for the money’. The sorts of thing they ‘Do Want to See’ are that you can ‘work at pace’, ‘create a sense of fun’ and are ‘genuinely friendly’. The ‘Pret Perfect’ worker, a fully evolved species, ‘never gives up’, ‘goes out of their way to be helpful’ and ‘has presence’. After a day’s trial, your fellow workers vote on how well you fit the profile; if your performance lacks sparkle, you’re sent home with a few quid.

    This winnowing process is designed to select for workers who will feed the ‘Pret Buzz’. ‘The first thing I look at is whether the staff are touching each other,’ Clive Schlee, chief executive of Pret since 2003, told the Telegraph in March last year. ‘Are they smiling, reacting to each other, happy, engaged? … I can almost predict sales on body language alone.’ What Pret has understood, and its competitors haven’t (or not yet), is how much money there is to be made from what radical left theorists have been referring to since the 1970s as ‘affective labour’. Work increasingly isn’t, or isn’t only, a matter of producing things, but of supplying your energies, physical and emotional, in the service of others. It isn’t what you make, but how your display of feeling makes others feel. This won’t be news to mothers, nurses and prostitutes, but the massive swelling of the service economy means that emotional availability can no longer be dismissed as women’s work; it must be seen as a dominant commodity form under late capitalism.

    And it has to be real. ‘The authenticity of being happy is important,’ a Pret manager tells the Telegraph, ‘customers pick up on that.’ It isn’t clear which is the more demanding, authenticity or performance, being it or faking it, but in either case it’s difficult to believe that there isn’t something demoralising, for Pret workers perhaps more than most in the high street, not only in having their energies siphoned off by customers, but also in having to sustain the tension between the performance of relentless enthusiasm at work and the experience of straitened material circumstances outside it. ‘Henceforth,’ as Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming put it in their recent jeremiad Dead Man Working (Zero, £9.99), ‘our authenticity is no longer a retreat from the mandatory fakeness’ of the workplace, ‘but the very medium through which work squeezes the life out of us’.

    ---

    my take at #stoweboyd http://stoweboyd.com/post/69484706129/henceforth-our-authenticity-is-no-longer-a

80. The traditional structure of the 20th Century firm—line organizations—doesn’t work any more (Georg Kapsch) We have the “wrong organizational models” (Don Tapscott). “Helicopter parenting” doesn’t work any better in the workplace than it does in the family (Charles Handy) The “fear-based environments” prevalent in today’s large organizations kill innovation; a lack of creative confidence stifles creativity (Tim Brown, CEO of IDEO) Our organizations are failing us. If 80 percent of our organizations disappeared, they would not be missed. Many of them are “zombie organizations” which explains why so few in the workplace are genuinely passionate about their work. (Umair Haque) Our organizations have “run out of gas”; we are at a punctuation point in history; we need “fundamental change”. (Don Tapscott)

    [...]

    Fredmund Malik talked about the substitution of “old world” organizations with “new world” organizations, in an inevitable process of creative destruction. Those organizations that remain in denial of the need to change will become extinct. The result will be a “Great Transformation”.

81. Don Tapscott, described the role of the future leader simply as “curating the conditions for success”. Tammy Erickson agreed when she said that “leadership is about creating and environment for people to succeed” and outlined four things a leader must do in this context: enable collaboration (by wiring the organization and encouraging teams to trust each other), disrupt with diversity (beyond gender – including age, professional backgrounds, personalities, thinking styles and more), ask great questions and convey meaning.

    Roger Martin refers to the same idea when he says that the leader’s role is to design and implement an organization where people can thrive. He highlighted how the way we deal with complexity makes this more and more difficult: we tend to focus on fewer things which leads to increasing specializat...his very nicely when she cautioned: “When numbers, measurements and indicators take over, the faculty of human judgement takes a backseat”. She went on to remind us that the kind of “integrative thinking” demanded by Roger Martin does “not come from computer models – unless we put it into them”. In Harvey Wheaton’s words more humanistic management in this sense simply means “do not make things more complex, treat people as people and know what your purpose, mission and values are”. It will not come as a surprise to those familiar with the work of Charles Handy that he violently agrees: organizations should stop getting bigger and instead try to become better. This requires them to put purpose before means. And for individual leaders this means getting “the three Ps – profit, passion, people” in the right order. It is clear what kind of order he had in mind when he closed by saying “Money obscures the real purpose of your life. When money becomes the point, you have lost the point”.

82. Today’s fastest growing, most profoundly impactful companies are using a completely different operating model. These companies are lean, mean, learning machines. They have an intense bias to action and a tolerance for risk, expressed through frequent experimentation and relentless product iteration. They hack together products and services, test them, and improve them, while their legacy competition edits PowerPoint. They are obsessed with company culture and top tier talent, with an emphasis on employees that can imagine, build, and test their own ideas. They are maniacally focused on customers. They are hypersensitive to friction – in their daily operations and their user experience. They are open, connected, and build with and for their community of users and co-conspirators. They are comfortable with the unknown – business models and customer value are revealed over time. They are driven by a purpose greater than profit; each has its own aspirational “dent in the universe.”

    These organizations may start small (like Medium, Hipchat, Circa, Outbox,and Quirky), but they can get bigger fast (like Airbnb, Dropbox, Evernote,Uber, Tesla, Square, and Jawbone), and ultimately dominate markets (like Amazon, Google, Twitter, Facebook, and Paypal).

83. In their new book, Leading from the Emerging Future – from Ego-system to Eco-system Economies, Otto Scharmer and Katrin Kaufer assert that addressing today’s business, governmental, and societal challenges requires a threefold revolution:

    A revolution of economic thought from ego-system awareness to eco-system awareness. A revolution of relationships among partners and stakeholders from reactive to generative. An institutional revolution from hierarchy and organizing around special interest to co‑creative ecosystems and organizing around commons.

84. 'It’s time to stop fooling ourselves, says a woman who left a position of power: the women who have managed to be both mothers and top professionals are superhuman, rich, or self-employed. If we truly believe in equal opportunity for all women, here’s what has to change.'
85. Sandberg’s approach, as important as it is, is at best half a loaf. Moreover, given her positions first at Google and now at Facebook, it is hard not to notice that her narrative is what corporate America wants to hear. For both the women who have made it and the men who work with them, it is cheaper and more comfortable to believe that what they need to do is simply urge younger women to be more like them, to think differently and negotiate more effectively, rather than make major changes in the way their companies work. Young women might be much more willing to lean in if they saw better models and possibilities of fitting work and life together: ways of slowing down for a while but still staying on a long-term promotion track; of getting work done on their own time rather than according to a fixed schedule; of being affirmed daily in the...change for consultants used to a 24/7 environment, as well as a commitment from management. But the business benefits have proved their financial and psychological worth. Other examples include the adoption of a Results Only Work Environment, which grants employees complete flexibility as to when, where and how they work, as long as they get their work done.

    So is the dearth of women in top jobs due to a lack of ambition or a lack of support? Both, as Sandberg herself grants, proposing that women should “wage battles on both fronts.” Yet she chooses to concentrate only on the “internal obstacles,” the ways in which women hold themselves back. This is unfortunate. As a feminist and a corporate leader, Sandberg seems ideally placed to ask the question that all too often gets lost amid the welter of talk about what women should do, what they should want and how they should behave. When it comes to ensuring that caregivers still have paths to the corner office, how can business lean in?

86. The tech industry — and, more specifically, Silicon Valley — continues to stumble forward in earnest about how few women are represented in its top ranks of management and on its boards. This, despite the enthusiastic embrace of tech products by many women. This is not a new problem, of course, but one that rears its head periodically as it becomes clear that the ground gained by women in this perhaps most important sector of the economy — a sector more amenable than most to more tolerance and diversity, too — is being lost rather than gained. Any gander at the variety of studies, and even a not-very-scientific look at the subject, will show that fewer women are starting companies, are being promoted at companies, are funded, are funders, are on boards, are being rewarded in the same way. At a high-profile party I attended last night, for example, the small handful of women in attendance all seemed to notice and comment on the massive sea of men, though the men appeared blissfully unaware of the imbalance. “They have no idea at all,” one prominent woman said to me, recounting a story about her visit to an advisory meeting of a tech bank board, where she was the single woman in a room full of men. When she brought it up there — not an easy thing for her, since she was the only woman — she was met with a lot of genuine concern when the penny dropped, but few ideas for action.
87. Last month, CIPD CEO Peter Cheese warned against taking the low road of low productivity, low skill and low pay:

    <blockquote>Skills supply and demand lie at the heart of the problems facing the UK. We have a higher proportion of very low-skilled jobs than many other developed economies. This has to change.

    The issue is not simply about increasing the supply of skills – a preoccupation of current and past governments. The solution to the challenges we face lies just as much with improving skills utilisation and demand for higher-level skills through increasing the number of higher skilled roles available. To do this, we need to encourage more employer investment in innovation and growth and the capabilities and skills needed to deliver high- performance workplaces which can better utilise the skills available and to generate opportunities, raise productivity and add value, which are vital to our long-term international competitiveness.

    So investment, innovation, more highly skilled people and, crucially, more higher-skill jobs. He continues:

    Unless we address the demand side of the skills equation, we will fail to improve our poor productivity or to achieve the sustainable increases in real wages that have become such a dominant feature of the current media and political narrative.

    The UK is at a crossroads – one which requires us to think about the fundamental nature and direction of our economy. Are we taking the high road – of higher skills and value-added employment – or the low road – trying to compete primarily on low cost?</blockquote>

88. The world of A.D. 2014 will have few routine jobs that cannot be done better by some machine than by any human being. Mankind will therefore have become largely a race of machine tenders.
89. From Critique to Cultural Recovery

    unread #soon

90. http://www.wired.com/underwire/2012/09/interview-with-william-gibson/

    futures #scifi

    >I think the least important thing about science fiction for me is its predictive capacity.

    >[...]

    >There’s really a lot of that in the futurology game, and everybody who markets any kind of futurological product — be it some kind of corporate advising or a given science fiction writer, has a real vested interest in making their product seem prescient. If I were a total cynical bullshitter, I’d go around trying to make everybody think that I knew what the future was going to be too. But I’ve never really seen the predictive part as being what I really do.

    futures

    >I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and re-examine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in.’

    >Unfortunately, the predictive part is traditionally a large part of how we market science fiction and the people who write it. “Listen to her, she knows the future.” It’s a really ancient kind of carny pitch, but it’s not what I think science fiction really does. I think science fiction gives us a wonderful toolkit to disassemble and reexamine this kind of incomprehensible, constantly changing present that we live in, that we often live in quite uncomfortably. That’s my idea of our product, but it’s not necessarily a smart publicist’s idea of my product.

    scifi

    >One of the things that digital has done for me personally is that it’s made music of my ongoing now completely atemporal. I no longer have any idea or any anxiety about not having any idea about what’s happening now, because that no longer seems very important. Now, last week, 30 years ago? What’s the difference? What does it matter? It’s all there on YouTube. And so I find myself discovering things like a decade late, or I discover things before very many people have found them. It’s atemporal. It’s just all over the long calendar, and that’s going to make things different. But that’s been going on for a long time.

    atemporality

91. http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2012/09/06/trending_upward

    >Signposting the future: The authors of these reports are keenly aware of the human tendency to project the present into the future ("anchoring on the status quo") -- and they fight it. The key analytical weapon against "present-ism" in the Global Trends reports has thus far been scenario planning. Scenarios frequently pop up in Global Trends reports with catchy labels such as "A New Caliphate" and "Cycle of Fear." Each scenario is a plausible extrapolation of what could happen if certain causal drivers take hold.

    >These scenarios are useful, and we are not recommending dropping them. Scenario generation is a great way for imaginative analysts to channel their inner social-science-fiction writers. Organizations that want to retain talent should provide such outlets. But if scenario generation is not eventually subjected to rigorous logical discipline, the net value of the exercise plummets. For instance, research shows that the more scenarios participants generate, the more support they typically find for each one -- and the higher their probability estimates go. What's more, experts rely on the same crude sense of the balance of forces for estimating both the weekly and monthly probabilities, so if they can see a 1/20 chance of the regime falling in a given week, they will see roughly the same probability in a given month, an effect that Kahneman calls scope insensitivity. When we finish unpacking all scenarios and subscenarios, it is not unusual for the probabilities to sum to closer to 2.0 than 1.0, a logical impossibility.

    >Scenarios are more valuable when they come with clear diagnostic signposts that policymakers can use to gauge whether they are moving toward or away from one scenario or another. For instance, Global Trends 2025 outlines a "BRIC's Bust-Up" scenario -- a conflict between China and India over resources. Which signposts or early warning indicators might help policymakers know whether such a future is becoming more or less likely? Falsifiable hypotheses bring high-flying scenario abstractions back to Earth.

    >Similarly, specifying signposts requires breaking 20 years into finer temporal segments. If we are on a historical trajectory leading to the Chinese Civil War of 2023, for example, what should we be observing in 2013, 2014, etc. to justify taking so speculative a scenario seriously? How diagnostic would these signposts have to be? One could imagine such a conflict erupting from tensions between the poor, neo-Maoist countryside and affluent technocratic coastal cities, but imagining is not enough. We need specifiable metrics.

    scenarios #signposting

92. My wife recently said to me, The past is the new future. She is given to remarks of that kind, full of vatic force yet requiring mental application on my part to make them useful. The sense I make of it is that instead of growing clearer as we probe it, the future has grown dimmer, less solid, almost hard to believe in, but the past has continued to expand rather than shrink with distance: the actual things we did do have gained rather than lost complexity and interest, and the past seems rich, its lessons not simple or singular, a big landscape of human possibility, generative, inexhaustible.

    As a guide to present action and long-term planning, the future is anyway relatively new. The shape of things to come was not a constant concern of most people for most of the past. The Romans could imagine future wars and the founding of new cities and dynasties, but these would resemble in most ways the old ones. Christians foresaw an absolute end to time and history located (depending on specific creed and perceived signs of the times) at varying distances from the present, but between now and then it was all to be much the same, only worse. The Founding Fathers announced a New Order of the Ages, but it was a new order explicitly modeled on the classical republics that had existed in Rome or Athens. The idea of a future that will not at all resemble the past really only comes when advancing technology changes the conditions of life and work within a single generation. To that generation it is apparent that, just as the past differs radically from the present, so will the future.

    At that point (it’s not really a locatable point, and not a universal one, but it can be thought of as somewhere in the first half of the nineteenth century, earlier in some places, later in others) a change can also be discerned in the efforts of planners and projectors to determine the future shape of the coming world—“determine” both in the sense of finding out what it would be and in the sense of controlling it. Early utopias from Plato through Thomas More (inventor of the term) and on to Charles Fourier were all about proper social organization, good laws, societies that fit human nature better than the state or society the utopian lived in. After this point utopias are almost all set not on remote islands or mountaintops but in the future, and all must take into account the force of accelerating technology on everything from wealth creation to population expansion to world peace.

    So also must all the dark warnings of decline, disaster, waste, and failure that are the left hand of the predicting impulse.

    [...]

    The one scenario not conceived of as remotely likely by any faction of futurians—the reverse really of all their competing auguries—is the possibility, and then the final achievement, of a generous and benevolent One World government, solving humankind’s problems and adjudicating its disputes through the consent of the governed. The end of capitalism and its plutocrats and bought politicians. An antique among futures, that one, and impossible to envision on any grounds: political, economic, sociological, or simply the ground of basic human nature.

    [...]

    Any prediction about what is in fact to come, when cast as fiction, runs the risk not just of being wrong but of being not about the future at all.

    left-handed-futurism #john-crowley

93. It's 2023 in London. You can make a phone call on your watch and report a traffic jam with a button on your glasses. But how will we really live, work and play? What kinds of constraints and opportunities will future Londoners face?

    This series of imaginary Londoners was produced for a workshop in September 2013 by a collaboration between Arup, Social Life, Re.Work, Commonplace, Tim Maughan and Nesta. They build on the team's knowledge, from urban neighbourhood engagement to smart technologies in the city.

    These profiles can never be perfect or all inclusive. They are a tool for exploring the needs and desires we should consider when designing a smarter London.

    Let us know what you think or tweet using the hashtag #futurelondoners.

    Are they completely wrong? Exaggerated? Do they not go far enough? How should we use technology to make this city a better place for all Londoners in the future?

94. For a workshop on future London, five individuals — Arup, Social Life, Re.Work, Commonplace, Tim Maughan and Nesta—created 10 Future Londoners for the year 2023. This is a short fictional piece describing the working day of 19 year old Nicki, a zero hours retail contractor.
95. wikipedia, steady state economy http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steadystateeconomy

    >The Widow's Cruse - Is the name Keynes' gave to a parable from the bible for a magical cup of oil, using the biblical term "cruse" for "cup". It was first discussed in his Treatise on Money [13] to help explain why at the limits to growth investing for economic expansion becomes unprofitable for all. His way of correcting that to allow economic stability at the limits of growth we would now call a "sustainable design" for capitalism. It was discussed as for some future time when increasing capital investment would naturally meet diminishing returns for the system as a whole. Continuing increases in investment by the wealthy would then cause over-investment and result in "conditions sufficiently miserable" to bring the net savings rate of the economy to zero. He called the solution to the problem "the widow's cruse", after a bible story of Elijah coming to stay with an old widow[14] and making her cup of oil inexhaustible.

    >The Cambridge intellectuals trying to understand Keynes' Treatise on Money misunderstood and called it "the fallacy" instead[15]. Though Keynes described it more clearly in The General Theory [16] a misunderstood idea is what it has remained. As a response to the natural over-investment crisis at the climax of capitalism it would have relied on the good will of the wealthy in spending enough of their own earnings to restore profitability to the rest of the economy. The original misinterpretation was that it was intended to restore growth rather than to allow growth to end without conflict. The misunderstanding has been generally repeated by other economists, except Kenneth Boulding who frequently referred to the eventual necessity to limit investment growth in response to environmental impacts and diminishing returns[17] and later by P.F. Henshaw as a general principle of systems ecology[18]. That it would stabilize the economy as conditions became miserable due to over-investment, but at the expense of ending the automatic concentration of wealth, is likely to have been one of the more confusing features to most economists who tried to understand it.

96. https://www.dropbox.com/s/ptcyu1jdej1fpj6/The%20Moral%20Consequences%20of%20Economic%20Growth.pdf

    Economic growth has become the secular religion of advancing industrial societies. —Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism

    Freidman makes the liberal case for growth, but it's weak sauce, honestly.

    >Businesses too are rarely the singleminded profit maximizers portrayed in economics textbooks.

    >Whether companies regularly launch new initiatives, whether they act with loyalty to their workers and respect toward their communities, even whether they obey the law, also reflects the broader culture of which they are a part. All societies develop moral norms—against violence, favoring family bonds, against theft, in favor of truthfulness—as a partial substitute for what would otherwise be hopelessly pervasive regulation aimed at getting people to behave in ways that may be of little or no direct benefit to themselves but nonetheless make everyone better off. Such norms are no less important in the economic sphere.

    >Indeed, they may be more so. Laws and regulations are typically less effective when the desired behavior requires taking initiative or action, as opposed to refraining from unwanted action. Even in highly developed, well-organized societies, it is far easier to devise laws that discourage murder and theft than laws that encourage helpfulness to one’s neighbors. Especially when it comes to the creative impulse that results in enhanced economic productivity, laws and regulations are particularly useless. As we have learned from many countries’ experiences, regulations limiting how much sulfurous smoke manufacturers can release into the air, or restricting the pollutants we can dump into the water, are often reasonably effective. By contrast, a law requiring businesses to innovate, or otherwise become more productive, would be pointless.

    >It is not surprising, therefore, that many cultures, especially Western societies in the modern era, have developed moral presumptions in favor of precisely those aspects of personal behavior that lead to greater productivity and economic growth. Hard work, diligence, patience, discipline, and a sense of obligation to fulfill our commitments clearly make us more productive economically. Thriftiness fosters saving, which enhances our productivity by making capital investment possible. Education likewise increases our individual capabilities as well as our stock of public knowledge. Such behavior brings benefits that accrue directly to those who conduct themselves in that way, and we value them partly on that ground. But, in each case, our society also regards these qualities, or actions, as morally worthwhile.

97. http://www.voxeu.org/article/us-economic-growth-over >Global growth is slowing – especially in advanced-technology economies. This column argues that regardless of cyclical trends, long-term economic growth may grind to a halt. Two and a half centuries of rising per-capita incomes could well turn out to be a unique episode in human history. >

    Brad Plumer summarizes the controversy here: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/ezra-klein/wp/2012/09/11/have-we-reached-the-end-of-economic-growth

98. https://www.dropbox.com/s/j394is59uruvfu8/spaceship%20earth%20boulding.pdf

    >The closed earth of the future requires economic principles which are somewhat different from those of the open earth of the past. For the sake of picturesqueness, I am tempted to call the open economy the "cowboy economy," the cowboy being symbolic of the illimitable plains and also associated with reckless, exploitative, romantic, and violent behavior, which is characteristic of open societies. The closed economy of the future might similarly be called the "spaceman" economy, in which the earth has become a single spaceship, without unlimited reservoirs of anything, either for extraction or for pollution, and in which, therefore, man must find his place in a cyclical ecological system which is capable of continuous reproduction of material form even though it cannot escape having inputs of energy. The difference between the two types of economy becomes most apparent in the attitude towards consumption. In the cowboy economy, consumption is regarded as a good thing and production likewise; and the success of the economy is measured by the amount of the throughput from the "factors of production," a part of which, at any rate, is extracted from the reservoirs of raw materials and noneconomic objects, and another part of which is output into the reservoirs of pollution. If there are infinite reservoirs from which material can be obtained and into which effluvia can be deposited, then the throughput is at least a plausible measure of the success of the economy. The gross national product is a rough measure of this total throughput. It should be possible, however, to distinguish that part of the GNP which is derived from exhaustible and that which is derived from reproducible resources, as well as that part of consumption which represents effluvia and that which represents input into the productive system again. Nobody, as far as I know, has ever attempted to break down the GNP in this way, although it Would be an interesting and extremely important exercise, which is unfortunately beyond the scope of this paper.

    >By contrast, in the spaceman economy, throughput is by no means a desideratum, and is indeed to be regarded as something to be minimized rather than maximized. The essential measure of the success of the economy is not production and consumption at all, but the nature, extent, quality, and complexity of the total capital stock, including in this the state of the human bodies and minds included in the system. In the spaceman economy, what we are primarily concerned with is stock maintenance, and any technological change which results in the maintenance of a given total stock with a lessened throughput (that is, less production and consumption) is clearly a gain. This idea that both production and consumption are bad things rather than good things is very strange to economists, who have been obsessed with the income-flow concepts to the exclusion, almost, of capital-stock concepts.

    [...]

    >It is always a little hard to find a convincing answer to the man who says, "What has posterity ever done for me?" and the conservationist has always had to fall back on rather vague ethical principles postulating identity of the individual with some human community or society which extends not only back into the past but forward into the future. Unless the individual identifies with some community of this kind, conservation is obviously "irrational." Why should we not maximize the welfare of this generation at the cost of posterity? "Après nous, le déluge" has been the motto of not insignificant numbers of human societies. The only answer to this, as far as I can see, is to point out that the welfare of the individual depends on the extent to which he can identify himself with others, and that the most satisfactory individual identity is that which identifies not only with a community in space but also with a community extending over time from the past into the future. If this kind of identity is recognized as desirable, then posterity has a voice, even if it does not have a vote; and in a sense, if its voice can influence votes, it has votes too. This whole problem is linked tip with the much larger one of the determinants of the morale, legitimacy, and "nerve" of a society, and there is a great deal of historical evidence to suggest that a society which loses its identity with posterity and which loses its positive image of the future loses also its capacity to deal with present problems, and soon falls apart.

    [...]

    >The problems which I have been raising in this paper are of larger scale and perhaps much harder to solve than the more practical and immediate problems of the above paragraph. Our success in dealing with the larger problems, however, is not unrelated to the development of skill in the solution of the more immediate and perhaps less difficult problems. One can hope, therefore, that as a succession of mounting crises, especially in pollution, arouse public opinion and mobilize support for the solution of the immediate problems, a learning process will be set in motion which will eventually lead to an appreciation of and perhaps solutions for the larger ones. My neglect of the immediate problems, therefore, is in no way intended to deny their importance, for unless we at least make a beginning on a process for solving the immediate problems we will not have much chance of solving the larger ones. On the other hand, it may also be true that a long-run vision, as it were, of the deep crisis which faces mankind may predispose people to taking more interest in the immediate problems and to devote more effort for their solution. This may sound like a rather modest optimism, but perhaps a modest optimism is better than no optimism at all

99. Wacom has been pushing into the world of mobile for a while, and its efforts have just culminated in a pretty bold move: A single, cross-platform standard for sharing handwritten notes and sketches between users, regardless of whether they're using a stylus or a finger, an iPhone or a PC, an app or a browser. The tool is called "WILL" -- "Wacom Ink Layer Language" -- and it captures a pen stroke's coordinates, pressure and the identity of its creator (through a unique "Pen ID"), as well as allowing the scribble to be edited by others. Users can also see other people's handwriting being created in real-time, i.e. we're not just talking about static images.

    Beginning next month, Wacom will promote WILL by distributing SDKs for iOS, Android, Mac OS and Windows, as well as for browsers and cloud platforms. These SDKs are meant to make it easier for developers to create apps that accept signatures scrawled on a touchscreen, or DIY smileys, or hand-drawn highlights on a cloud document, or any other sort of handwritten input. Of course, the concern with any such format is that it'll need to be embraced by a large number of companies in order to reach a tipping point and become widely accepted. Wacom doesn't seem to be ready to announce even a single partner just yet, but where there's a will... (Ahem, sorry.)

100. Work can bring happiness by marrying our passions to our skills, empowering us to create value in our lives and in the lives of others. Franklin D. Roosevelt had it right: “Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort.” #FDR

     In other words, the secret to happiness through work is earned success. #earned-success

101. the concept of ‘mindless accumulation'

     Overearning Christopher K. Hsee1 Jiao Zhang2 Cindy F. Cai3 Shirley Zhang1 1Booth School of Business, University of Chicago 2School of Business, University of Miami 3Antai College, Shanghai Jiao Tong University Christopher K. Hsee, Booth School of Business, University of Chicago, 5807 South Woodlawn Ave., Chicago, IL 60637 E-mail: chris.hsee@chicagobooth.edu Abstract

     High productivity and high earning rates brought about by modern technologies make it possible for people to work less and enjoy more, yet many continue to work assiduously to earn more. Do people overearn—forgo leisure to work and earn beyond their needs? This question is understudied, partly because in real life, determining the right amount of earning and defining overearning are difficult. In this research, we introduced a minimalistic paradigm that allows researchers to study overearning in a controlled laboratory setting. Using this paradigm, we found that individuals do overearn, even at the cost of happiness, and that overearning is a result of mindless accumulation—a tendency to work and earn until feeling tired rather than until having enough. Supporting the mindless-accumulation notion, our results show, first, that individuals work about the same amount regardless of earning rates and hence are more likely to overearn when earning rates are high than when they are low, and second, that prompting individuals to consider the consequences of their earnings or denying them excessive earnings can disrupt mindless accumulation and enhance happiness.

102. The simplest and most effective response to the financial crisis of 2008–09 and the unpopular taxpayer bailouts of large banks would have been a law that put a hard cap on the size of financial institutions or else dramatically raised reserve requirements, which would have had much the same effect. If a cap on size existed, banks taking foolish risks could go bankrupt without triggering a systemic crisis and government bailout. Like the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act, such a law could have been written on a few of sheets of paper.

     But this possibility was never considered during the congressional deliberations on financial regulation. What emerged instead was the Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act, or Dodd-Frank, which, while better than no regulation at all, extended to hundreds of pages of legislation and mandated reams of further detailed rules (many still unwritten years after the fact) that will impose huge costs on banks and consumers down the road. Rather than simply capping bank size, it has created a Federal Stability Oversight Council tasked with the enormous (and probably impossible) job of assessing and managing institutions that pose systemic risks, which in the end will still not solve the problem of banks being too big to fail. Though a smoking gun linking bank campaign contributions to the votes of specific Congressmen may elude us, it defies belief that the banking industry’s legions of lobbyists did not have a major impact on how Dodd-Frank turned out, and on how its terms are still being translated into regulations.

     [...]

     There is plenty of good historical and social science analysis to sustain such beliefs. The late Mancur Olson emphasized the malign effects of interest group politics on economic growth and, ultimately, democracy in his 1982 book The Rise and Decline of Nations. Looking particularly at the long-term economic decline of Britain throughout the 20th century, he argued that democracies in times of peace and stability tend to accumulate ever-increasing numbers of interest groups that, instead of pursuing wealth-creating economic activities, make use of the political system to extract benefits, or rents, for themselves. These rents are collectively unproductive and costly to the public as a whole, but a collective action problem prevents those adversely affected from organizing themselves to offset groups like, say, the banking industry or corn producers, who can more readily organize to advance their interests. The result is the steady diversion of energy into rent-seeking activities over time, a process that can only be halted by a large shock like war or revolution. #mancur-olsen #the-rise-and-decline-of-nations #rentiers

     [...]

     The most obvious way is to try to distinguish a “good” civil society organization from a “bad” interest group. The former, to use the late Albert Hirschman’s terminology, is driven by the passions, the latter by the interests. The former might be a non-profit organization seeking to build houses for the poor, or a lobbying organization promoting the public interest by protecting coastal habitats. An interest group might be a lobbyist for sugar producers or large banks, whose only objective is to maximize the profits of the companies supporting them. Additionally, Putnam tried to make a distinction between small associations that invited active participation by their members, and “membership organizations” that simply involved paying a membership fee. #albert-hirschman

     [...]

     The primary argument against interest-group pluralism has to do with distorted representation. E.E. Schattschneider, in his seminal 1960 book The Semisovereign People, argued that the actual practice of democracy in America has nothing to do with its popular image as government “of the people, by the people, for the people.” Political outcomes seldom correspond with popular preferences given the very low level of participation and political awareness; real decisions are made by much smaller groups of organized interests. A similar argument is buried in Olson’s framework, since he notes that not all groups are equally capable of organizing for collective action. The interest groups that contend for the attention of Congress are therefore not collectively representative of the whole American people. They are rather representative of the best organized and (what often amounts to the same thing) most richly endowed parts of American society. This bias is not random and almost invariably works against the interests of the unorganized or unorganizable, who are often poor, poorly educated or otherwise marginalized. #ee-schattschneider #the-semisovereign-people

     [...]

     There is a further problem with interest groups and the pluralist view that sees public interest as nothing more than the aggregation of individual private interests: It undermines the possibility of deliberation and ignores the ways in which individual preferences are shaped by dialogue and communication. In both classical Athenian democracy and the New England town hall meetings celebrated by Tocqueville, citizens spoke directly to one another. It is easy to idealize small-scale democracy or minimize the real differences that exist in large societies. But as any organizer of focus groups can tell you, people’s views on highly emotional subjects will change just thirty minutes into a face-to-face discussion with people of differing views, provided that they are given common information and ground rules to enforce civility. Few single-issue advocates will maintain that his or her cause will trump all other good things if forced to directly confront those alternative needs. One of the problems of pluralist theory, then, is the assumption that interests are fixed, and that the goal of legislators is simply to act as a transmission belt for them, rather than having their own views that can be shaped by deliberation with other politicians and with the public. #public-discourse

     This isn’t just a rhetorical point. It is commonly and accurately observed that no one in the U.S. Congress really deliberates anymore. Congressional “debate” amounts to a series of talking points aimed not at colleagues but at activist audiences, who are perfectly happy to punish a legislator who deviates from their agenda as a result of deliberation or the acquisition of greater knowledge. This leads then to bureaucratic mandates written by interest groups that restrict bureaucratic autonomy.

     In well-functioning governance systems, moreover, a great deal of deliberation occurs not just in legislatures but within bureaucracies. This is not a matter of bureaucrats simply talking to one another, but rather a complex series of consultations between government officials and businesses, outside implementers and service providers, civil society groups, the media and other sources of information about societal interests and opinions. The Congress wisely mandated consultation in the landmark 1946 Administrative Procedures Act, which requires regulatory agencies to publicly post proposed rule changes and to solicit comment about them. But these consultative procedures have become highly routinized and pro forma, with actual decisions being the outcome not of genuine deliberation, but of political confrontations between well organized interest groups.

     [...]

     The underlying sources of political decay—intellectual rigidity and the influence of elite groups—are generic to democracies as a whole. Indeed, they are problems faced by all governments, whether democratic or not. Problems of excessive judicialization and interest groups also exist in other developed democracies. But the impact of interest groups depends heavily on the specific nature of the institutions. There is wide variation in the way that democracies structure the incentives facing political actors that makes them more or less susceptible to these forces. The United States, as the world’s first and most advanced liberal democracy, suffers today from the problem of political decay in a more acute form than other democratic political systems. The longstanding distrust of the state that has always characterized American politics had led to an unbalanced form of government that undermines the prospects of necessary collective action. It has led to vetocracy. #vetocracy

     I mean by vetocracy the process whereby the American system of checks and balances makes collective decision-making based on electoral majorities extremely difficult. To some extent, any system that duplicates authority at multiple levels, giving Federal, state and local authorities jurisdiction over whole domains of public policy, risks creating a situation in which different parts of the government are easily able to block one another. But under conditions of ideological polarization, with the major parties about evenly popular (or unpopular) with voters, the constraints become acute. That is where we now are. The government shutdown and crisis over the debt ceiling that emerged in October 2013 is an example of how a minority position (that of the Tea Party wing of the Republican Party) could threaten the ability of the government as a whole to operate. This is why the American political system early in the 21st century has failed to deal with its yawning budgetary problems, among many others.

     [...]

     A system of checks and balances that gives undue weight to interest groups and fails to aggregate majority interests cannot be fixed with a few simple reforms. For example, the temptation in presidential systems to fix problems of legislative gridlock by piling on new executive powers is one that often creates as many problems as it solves. Getting rid of earmarks and increasing party discipline may actually make it harder under conditions of ideological polarization to achieve broad legislative compromises. Using the courts to implement administrative decisions may be highly inefficient, but in the absence of a stronger and more unified bureaucracy, there may be no alternative. Many of these problems could be solved if the United States moved to a more unified parliamentary system of government, but so radical a change in the country’s institutional structure is barely conceivable. Americans regard their Constitution as a quasi-religious document. Persuading them to rethink its most basic tenets short of an outright system collapse is highly unlikely. So we have a problem.

     //

     In essence, Fukuyama is calling for a #revolution, since that is the only way to break out of the trap imposed by our political system.

103. Zappos is also turning traditional management on its head. They announced at their All Hands meeting in November that they are becoming a Holacracy. Holacratic organizations are organized in circles. Workers are members of several circles depending on what they are working on at the time. Decision authority is distributed throughout the organization, with everyone focused on the core purpose and strategy.
104. Automattic employs 225 people. We’re located all over the world, in 190 different cities. We have a headquarters in San Francisco and it operates similar to a co-working space. For those who live in the Bay Area, they can work from the office, if they’d like. But in general, the majority of our employees work somewhere other than our home base.

     To us, this arrangement makes sense — we work in open source software, which is a decentralized product. Outsiders were dubious. “That works great until you’re at 10 or 15 people, but when you get to 30, it falls apart,” they’d say. Then we passed 30 people, and we started hearing that the magic number was 100 people. Then people said Dunbar’s number — 150 — would be the point at which it didn’t work. But we keep blowing past these thresholds and will hire 120 new people this year. But we probably won’t do it the way most companies do.

     It all starts with the way we think about work.

105. The Home Depot Syndrome

     In a 2011 op-ed article for The Wall Street Journal, Cappelli remarked on a telling statistic from the Silicon Valley tech boom of the 1990s: only 10 percent of the people in IT jobs had IT-related degrees. But a lot of the same people would probably have a hard time landing similar jobs today, because employers have increasingly adopted what Cappelli calls “a Home Depot view of the hiring process, in which filling a job vacancy is seen as akin to replacing a part in a washing machine.

     “We go down to the store to get that part,” he explains, “and once we find it, we put it in place and get the machine going again. Like a replacement part, job requirements have very precise specifications. Job candidates must fit them perfectly or the job won’t be filled and business can’t operate.”

     The problem with this approach, he say... Research in London that investigated how companies “making almost identical products but operating in different countries got their work done.” US firms used more engineers and unskilled workers, for instance, than German firms, which relied more heavily on skilled craftsmen. In other words, there are multiple ways—and multiple kinds of employees a company might rely on—to accomplish a given task. Narrowly drawn job criteria may be a sign that a company is ignoring possibilities for alternative, and perhaps even more effective, operational strategies. To the extent that they slow down the hiring process, a company might stand to benefit from adopting a more flexible approach to hiring.

     There’s a simple lesson there. “When employers have a vacancy to fill,” Cappelli writes, “they have many options for filling it.” That sounds like common sense, but it runs us smack into a new reality of the contemporary hiring process: common sense is exactly what software-based hiring systems lack.

     [...]

     Human Resources in Bad Decline

     “One of the things which is a great puzzle,” Cappelli says, “is that 50 years ago in the US, most big employers were much more sophisticated about hiring than they are now. So they’ve actually gotten worse at this.”

     The body of knowledge about what predicts job performance goes back to World War I, Cappelli says, “and it’s just being systematically ignored.”

     Take the case of high-school GPA. “We know something about this!” he says. It “predicts nothing about your job performance—especially 30 years later. Why are they bothering to ask that? We know it doesn’t work.”

     He has a ready answer to that question: “the gutting of the human-resource function—cutting people out, cutting staff out. The people who were trained in this stuff, and used to know it, are all gone now.”

     This is arguably the product of systemic changes to the US labor market that gained pace in the 1980s. As high unemployment rates from the late 1970s persisted into the following decade, companies increasingly had at their disposal a labor pool that was more experienced than ever before.

     “A generation ago you had to hire out of college and train people,” Cappelli explains, singling out firms like IBM and General Electric, which aimed to retain employees for life. “Nobody hopped jobs. But as companies started to lay people off, and there were lots of skilled people around and lots of white-collar workers, lots of managers, you could sort of hire whoever you wanted. It wasn’t very hard. So you maybe didn’t have to be that sophisticated at recruiting and selection” anymore.

     Some of the pressures that touched off the cycle of layoffs are well known, like increased global competition, and the perceived need for companies to respond more nimbly to changing consumer preferences (which could make replacing employees seem more efficient than taking the time to train them). But there are other salient factors that are underappreciated. Cappelli outlined one in a 1997 volume titled Changes at Work, in a chapter co-written with Wharton’s Michael Useem, now the William and Jacalyn Egan Professor of Management: the growing concentration of stock ownership among large institutional holders, like pension funds.

     Traditionally, such investors expressed dissatisfaction with a company’s performance by simply selling their stock. But with the rise of indexed holdings—in which funds are invested according to preset formulas (for instance, mirroring the composition of the S&P 500)—and the sheer size of share blocks under ownership, it became harder for big institutional investors to shed unwanted stock positions. Consequently, they instead began pressuring companies to change, with a narrow focus on driving up share performance over shorter time periods.

     “Institutional holders were now quicker to insist that the company find new strategies and structures to produce,” Cappelli and Useem noted. “And the formulas they found concentrated on restructuring the companies and slashing jobs. One study of share-price reactions to company layoff announcements from 1979 to 1987 illustrates the thrust of the investors’ message for would-be restructurers. In the days immediately following layoff announcements announced as part of general restructurings, stock prices rose an average 4 percent.”

     Concurrently, the ranks of experienced job-seekers swelled, making decisions to fire still easier to justify, since the labor market was flush with talent. This dynamic persists today—with a perverse twist.

106. According to John Hausknecht, a professor at Cornell’s school of industrial and labor relations, in recent years the economy has witnessed a “huge surge in demand for workforce-analytics roles.” Hausknecht’s own program is rapidly revising its curriculum to keep pace. You can now find dedicated analytics teams in the human-resources departments of not only huge corporations such as Google, HP, Intel, General Motors, and Procter & Gamble, to name just a few, but also companies like McKee Foods, the Tennessee-based maker of Little Debbie snack cakes. Even Billy Beane is getting into the game. Last year he appeared at a large conference for corporate HR executives in Austin, Texas, where he reportedly stole the show with a talk titled “Th...oach to Talent Management.” Ever since, that headline, with minor modifications, has been plastered all over the HR trade press.

     The application of predictive analytics to people’s careers—an emerging field sometimes called “people analytics”—is enormously challenging, not to mention ethically fraught. And it can’t help but feel a little creepy. It requires the creation of a vastly larger box score of human performance than one would ever encounter in the sports pages, or that has ever been dreamed up before. To some degree, the endeavor touches on the deepest of human mysteries: how we grow, whether we flourish, what we become. Most companies are just beginning to explore the possibilities. But make no mistake: during the next five to 10 years, new models will be created, and new experiments run, on a very large scale. Will this be a good development or a bad one—for the economy, for the shapes of our careers, for our spirit and self-worth? Earlier this year, I decided to find out.

     [...]

     most American workers don’t believe attractive people in their firms are hired or promoted more frequently than unattractive people, but the evidence shows that they are, overwhelmingly so.

     [...]

     Teri Morse, the vice president for recruiting at Xerox Services, oversees hiring for the company’s 150 U.S. call and customer-care centers, which employ about 45,000 workers. When I spoke with her in July, she told me that as recently as 2010, Xerox had filled these positions through interviews and a few basic assessments conducted in the office—a typing test, for instance. Hiring managers would typically look for work experience in a similar role, but otherwise would just use their best judgment in evaluating candidates. In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention. Distance between home and work, on the other hand, is strongly associated with employee engagement and retention.)

     When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”—they just want to hire the people with the highest scores.

     The online test that Xerox uses was developed by a small but rapidly growing company based in San Francisco called Evolv. I spoke with Jim Meyerle, one of the company’s co‑founders, and David Ostberg, its vice president of workforce science, who described how modern techniques of gathering and analyzing data offer companies a sharp edge over basic human intuition when it comes to hiring. Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

     Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building). And the company can continually tweak its questions, or add new variables to its model, to seek out ever stronger correlates of success in any given job. For instance, the browser that applicants use to take the online test turns out to matter, especially for technical roles: some browsers are more functional than others, but it takes a measure of savvy and initiative to download them.

     There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people. The distance an employee lives from work, for instance, is never factored into the score given each applicant, although it is reported to some clients. That’s because different neighborhoods and towns can have different racial profiles, which means that scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.” Citing client confidentiality, he wouldn’t say more.

     MIT’s Sandy Pentland has pioneered the use of electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees as they go about their days.

     Meyerle told me that what most excites him are the possibilities that arise from monitoring the entire life cycle of a worker at any given company. This is a task that Evolv now performs for Transcom, a company that provides outsourced customer-support, sales, and debt-collection services, and that employs some 29,000 workers globally. About two years ago, Transcom began working with Evolv to improve the quality and retention of its English-speaking workforce, and three-month attrition quickly fell by about 30 percent. Now the two companies are working together to marry pre-hire assessments to an increasing array of post-hire data: about not only performance and duration of service but also who trained the employees; who has managed them; whether they were promoted to a supervisory role, and how quickly; how they performed in that role; and why they eventually left.

     The potential power of this data-rich approach is obvious. What begins with an online screening test for entry-level workers ends with the transformation of nearly every aspect of hiring, performance assessment, and management. In theory, this approach enables companies to fast-track workers for promotion based on their statistical profiles; to assess managers more scientifically; even to match workers and supervisors who are likely to perform well together, based on the mix of their competencies and personalities. Transcom plans to do all these things, as its data set grows ever richer. This is the real promise—or perhaps the hubris—of the new people analytics. Making better hires turns out to be not an end but just a beginning. Once all the data are in place, new vistas open up.

     [...]

     For a sense of what the future of people analytics may bring, I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.

     Pentland’s initial goal was to shed light on what differentiated successful teams from unsuccessful ones. As he described last year in the Harvard Business Review, he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk. In a development that will surprise few readers, Pentland and his fellow researchers created a company, Sociometric Solutions, in 2010, to commercialize his badge technology.

     Pentland told me that no business he knew of was yet using this sort of technology on a permanent basis. His own clients were using the badges as part of consulting projects designed to last only a few weeks. But he doesn’t see why longer-term use couldn’t be in the cards for the future, particularly as the technology gets cheaper. His group is developing apps to allow team members to view their own metrics more or less in real time, so that they can see, relative to the benchmarks of highly successful employees, whether they’re getting out of their offices enough, or listening enough, or spending enough time with people outside their own team.

     [...]

     In a small conference room, we were shown a digital map of Northwest Washington, D.C., home to The Atlantic. Little red pins identified all the coders in the area who were proficient in the skills that an Atlantic Media job announcement listed as essential. Next to each pin was a number that ranked the quality of each coder on a scale of one to 100, based on the mix of skills Atlantic Media was looking for. (No one with a score above 75, we were told, had ever failed a coding test by a Gild client.) If we’d wished, we could have zoomed in to see how The Atlantic’s own coders scored.

     The way Gild arrives at these scores is not simple. The company’s algorithms begin by scouring the Web for any and all open-source code, and for the coders who wrote it. They evaluate the code for its simplicity, elegance, documentation, and several other factors, including the frequency with which it’s been adopted by other programmers. For code that was written for paid projects, they look at completion times and other measures of productivity. Then they look at questions and answers on social forums such as Stack Overflow, a popular destination for programmers seeking advice on challenging projects. They consider how popular a given coder’s advice is, and how widely that advice ranges.

     The algorithms go further still. They assess the way coders use language on social networks from LinkedIn to Twitter; the company has determined that certain phrases and words used in association with one another can distinguish expert programmers from less skilled ones. Gild knows these phrases and words are associated with good coding because it can correlate them with its evaluation of open-source code, and with the language and online behavior of programmers in good positions at prestigious companies.

     Here’s the part that’s most interesting: having made those correlations, Gild can then score programmers who haven’t written open-source code at all, by analyzing the host of clues embedded in their online histories. They’re not all obvious, or easy to explain. Vivienne Ming, Gild’s chief scientist, told me that one solid predictor of strong coding is an affinity for a particular Japanese manga site.

107. The Stanford Project on Emerging Companies, a longitudinal study of 200 Silicon Valley start-ups during the first dot-com boom, found that tech entrepreneurs gave little thought to human resources. Nearly half of the companies left it up to employees to shape the culture and perform traditional human resource tasks. Only 6.6 percent had the type of formal personnel management seen at typical companies.

108. While most companies are aware of the cost of hiring the wrong employee, it is much more difficult to quantify the cost of not hiring an employee you should have.  Facebook, however, recently found out.  The founders of WhatsApp, the company Facebook acquired for a reported  $19 billion, had applied for jobs at Facebook just five years before and had been rejected.

109. With no information about the job “applicants” other than their appearance, the managers (of both sexes) were twice as likely to hire a man over a woman.

     The professors, Ernesto Reuben of Columbia Business School, Paola Sapienza of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern and Luigi Zingales of the Booth School of Business at the University of Chicago, tried another version of the experiment, which they labeled “Cheap Talk.” In this version, the job candidates were allowed to predict their own performance. Men tended to exaggerate their acumen, while women downplayed theirs. But the managers failed to compensate for that difference, and were again twice as likely to choose a man.

     The bias persisted even when managers were given hard data about the applicants’ ability to perform the tasks in question. Managers were still one-and-a-half times more likely to hire a man. When they knowingly chose the lower-performing candidate, two-thirds of the time they were choosing the male applicant.

     The managers were also given an “implicit association test,” or I.A.T., to measure their gender bias when it comes to math and science. “The very people who are biased against women about math, they’re also less likely to believe that men boast,” Mr. Zingales said. “So they’re picking up a negative stereotype of women, but not a negative stereotype of men.”

110. Emily Pronin and Katherine Hansen of Princeton University People Claim Objectivity After Knowingly Using Biased Strategies

     Nevertheless, the results were identical to the first experiment. Indeed, in spite of the warning, those who saw the painters’ names “became yet more convinced of their objectivity.”

     The results add to the evidence that “people have difficulty recognizing their own biases,” the researchers conclude. “It shows that even when people acknowledge that what they are about to do is biased, they still are inclined to see their resulting decisions as objective.”

     This false sense of fairness and impartiality can lead all to sorts of problems. To cite just one, the researchers note that a juror who is certain he or she won’t take into account testimony ruled inadmissible may, in fact, be swayed by it.

     So what’s the answer here? Pronin and her colleagues argue that the best strategy is presenting information in such a way that prevents bias. They point to the tradition of orchestras having potential members audition from behind a screen, so that they are judged solely on their talent, as opposed to their race, gender, age, or any other extraneous factors.

     The researchers note that such strategies are effective, but we’re reluctant to use them because we have such strong confidence in our own objectivity. Their work provides new evidence that such faith is, sadly, unwarranted.

111. In August, the product will include analytics features that allow companies to spot what people on the outside are good candidates for the job, and how high a chance there is that those people would take it. Companies will also be able to scan their own ranks and spot which people are likely risks of leaving, and whether offering a new job or more money might help retain them.

     “Finding a person should be like finding a flight online,” said Leighanne Levensaler, vice president in charge of the product. “You want a human resource system that works like online shopping – it looks at what you bought before, or what people like you tend to buy.”

     The new software, she said, was built based on looking at eBay and Kayak.

112. Wrzesniewski and Dutton's research on job crafting for work reengagement
113. I write about Wrzesniewski and Dutton's research on job crafting https://workflowy.com/shared/db18baa3-29d9-3e43-380e-30aaa60b04bc/
114. Adam Bryant: Tell me more about how you encourage dissent.

     Bob Pittman: Nobody’s in an ivory tower, and let’s figure this out together. Often in meetings, I will ask people when we’re discussing an idea, “What did the dissenter say?” The first time you do that, somebody might say, “Well, everybody’s on board.” Then I’ll say, “Well, you guys aren’t listening very well, because there’s always another point of view somewhere and you need to go back and find out what the dissenting point of view is.” I don’t want to hear someone say after we do something, “Oh, we should have done this.”

     I want us to listen to these dissenters because they may intend to tell you why we can’t do something, but if you listen hard, what they’re really telling you is what you must do to get something done. It gets you out of your framework of the conventions of what you can and can’t do.

     dissent #bob-pittman

     gigaom:

115. People are rejecting leaders who rule by the formal authority of their position and command by hierarchical power. They are craving genuine leadership — leaders who lead by their moral authority to inspire, to elevate others and to enlist us in a shared journey. - Dov Seidman
116. A lot of ink has been spilled on people’s opinions of what makes for a great leader. As a scientist, I like to turn to the data. In 2009, James Zenger published a fascinating survey of 60,000 employees to identify how different characteristics of a leader combine to affect employee perceptions of whether the boss is a “great” leader or not. Two of the characteristics that Zenger examined were results focus and social skills. Results focus combines strong analytical skills with an intense motivation to move forward and solve problems. But if a leader was seen as being very strong on results focus, the chance of that leader being seen as a great leader was only 14%. Social skills combine attributes like communication and empathy. If a leader was strong on social skills, he or she was seen as a great leader even less of ...people who may lack the social skills to make the most of their teams and not giving them the training they need to thrive once promoted.

     How can we do better? For one, we should give greater weight to social skills in the hiring and promotion process. Second, we need to create a culture that rewards using both sides of the neural seesaw. We may not be able to easily use them in tandem, but knowing that there is another angle to problem solving and productivity will create better balance in our leaders.

     Finally, it may be possible to train our social thinking so that it becomes stronger over time. Social psychologists are just at the beginning stages of examining whether this kind of training will bear fruit. One exciting prospect, one that would make the training fun, is the recent finding that reading fiction seems to temporarily strengthen these mental muscles. Wouldn’t that be great — if reading Catcher in the Rye or the latest Grisham novel were the key to larger profits?

117. Joel Gascoigne’s salary is $118,000 a year and he doesn’t care who knows it. The co-founder of Buffer, a 10-person startup that allows users to schedule social media updates, Gascoigne is the proponent of a radical new way of doing business where there is no cloak and dagger, where every employee knows everything that is happening in the business.
118. The lean method has three key principles:

     First, rather than engaging in months of planning and research, entrepreneurs accept that all they have on day one is a series of untested hypotheses—basically, good guesses. So instead of writing an intricate business plan, founders summarize their hypotheses in a framework called a business model canvas. Essentially, this is a diagram of how a company creates value for itself and its customers. (See the exhibit “Sketch Out Your Hypotheses.”)

     Sketch Out Your Hypotheses Second, lean start-ups use a “get out of the building” approach called customer development to test their hypotheses. They go out and ask potential users, purchasers, and partners for feedback on all elements of the business model, including product features, pricing, distribution channels, and affordable customer acquisition strategies. The emphasis is on nimbleness and speed: New ventures rapidly assemble minimum viable products and immediately elicit customer feedback. Then, using customers’ input to revise their assumptions, they start the cycle over again, testing redesigned offerings and making further small adjustments (iterations) or more substantive ones (pivots) to ideas that aren’t working. (See the exhibit “Listen to Customers.”)

     Listen to Customers Third, lean start-ups practice something called agile development, which originated in the software industry. Agile development works hand-in-hand with customer development. Unlike typical yearlong product development cycles that presuppose knowledge of customers’ problems and product needs, agile development eliminates wasted time and resources by developing the product iteratively and incrementally. It’s the process by which start-ups create the minimum viable products they test. (See the exhibit “Quick, Responsive Development.”)

119. Libraries haven't been just about books in a long time. They've developed into research spaces, safe places for kids, and casual meeting spots, but the current design of most libraries doesn't make this kind of interaction easy. Washington DC is one city hoping to change this: it just announced the winning proposal to renovate the Martin Luther King, Jr. Memorial Library — and it's an ambitious one. The design is a a joint pitch from Dutch firm Mecanoo Architecten and DC's own Martinez+Johnson Architecture and it wants to modernize the library's classic Mies van der Rohe style while turning it into a multifunctional environment.
120. None of the 62 elements have substitutes that perform equally well, and 12 out of the 62 have no substitutes at all (or if there are substitutes, they are inadequate). These 12 elements are rhenium, rhodium, lanthanum, europium, dysprosium, thulium, ytterbium, yttrium, strontium, thallium, magnesium, and manganese.

     Economists have long assumed that a shortage of anything will promptly lead to the development of suitable substitutes, an attitude fostered in part because there have been successful substitutions in the past, such as in the cobalt and rhenium examples. But metals are special, Graedel said: “We have shown that metal substitution is very problematic. Substitution would need to mimic these special properties—a real challenge in many applications.”

121. 'I can't even' because internet
122. 11 Nations of North America
123. >Last year, three young Viennese architects — Theresia Kohlmayr, Jonathan Lutter, and Christian Knapp — decided to take the concept of "boutique hotels" literally when they seized on the idea of turning empty storefronts in the city's 4th District into standalone guestrooms.

     >They've dubbed the project "Urbanauts," they say because the geography of the "hotel" encourages visitors to get out and explore the neighborhood. "Our 'breakfast room' is a traditional cafe around the corner, our 'spa' is the Moroccan hammam two streets away," says Kholmayr. "We've taken the hotel concept and made it horizontal, so the whole infrastructure of a four-star hotel is spread over the surrounding area."

124. For Mr. Libin, one of the most obvious problems is the prevalence of presentation software like PowerPoint. As the information design scholar Edward Tufte has argued, because slide presentations are designed to be seen across a room, each slide can't contain much information. As a result, PowerPoint reduces complex thoughts to simple-sounding bullets. This makes it well suited to making pitches to large audiences, but "most meetings shouldn't be pitches," Libin says. Instead they ought to be thoughtful, collaborative affairs, in which people are encouraged to discuss issues at length.

     At Evernote, meetings begin with an agenda that has been written out using complete sentences, not on PowerPoint slides. This makes for a clearer, more thoughtful place to start a discussion. The agenda is stored in the company's cloud-based note-taking software, maki...itself.

     Does this approach actually improve the effectiveness of meetings? That is difficult to measure in any empirical way, but Mr. Libin says he's noticed a change in the culture at Evernote. In the past meetings often began with the bit of time-suck known, euphemistically, as "bringing people up to speed." Like an unusually dry version of one of those "previously on..." montages prepended to TV dramas, there was a synopsis of what happened at the last meeting, followed by a desultory recitation of what had happened since (usually nothing). Now, because everyone's notes from each meeting are being logged and disseminated, there is no need for the recap, and each meeting builds on top of the last one.

     There is a cognitive shift, too. "A bullet list appears to be convincing without conveying information," Mr. Libin says. By replacing slide decks with written-out agendas, and by encouraging discussions around that agenda, the meeting becomes a discussion instead of a pitch meeting.

125. “The winner-take-all dynamic is obliterated on mobile,” argues Benedict Evans, an analyst and investor with Andreessen Horowitz. It’s not just that these apps can access our address books, reducing the frictional barriers to joining. The mobile experience makes it trivial to pick different apps for different uses with the mere tap of a thumb. And this shift, in turn, accelerates the process of building com­panies around such apps. “You don’t have to raise $50 million,” Evans says. “You don’t have to have 500 employees. You can have 20 to 40 guys who have never raised any money from venture capitalists reach 500 million users.”
126. My 16 favorites, in alphabetical order: ‘American Hustle’ (David O. Russell), ‘Before Midnight’ (Richard Linklater), ‘Behind the Candelabra’ (Steven Soderbergh), ‘Captain Phillips’ (Paul Greengrass), ‘The Counselor’ (Ridley Scott), ‘The Grandmaster’ (Wong Kar-wai), ‘The Great Beauty’ (Paolo Sorrentino), ‘Her’ (Spike Jonze), ‘Inside Llewyn Davis’ (Joel and Ethan Coen), ‘Manakamana’ (Stephanie Spray and Pacho Velez), ‘Redemption’ (Miguel Gomes), ‘Rush’ (Ron Howard), ‘Spring Breakers’ (Harmony Korine), ‘The Square’ (Jehane Noujaim), ‘A Touch of Sin’ (Jia Zhang-ke), ‘12 Years a Slave’ (Steve McQueen).

     And my honor roll: “All Is Lost,” “Bastards,” “Blue Caprice,” “Blue Jasmine,” “Computer Chess,” “Crystal Fairy,” “Enough Said,” “Faust,” “Gimme the Loot,” “In the Fog,” “The Invisible Woman,” “Kill Your Darlings,” “Mother of George,” “Nebraska,” “Our Children,” “Post Tenebras Lux,” “Reality,” “Room 237,” “Something in the Air,” “Stories We Tell,” “This Is the End,” “This Is Martin Bonner,” “Viola.”

127. http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/03/building-structure-of-new-society.html
128. http://tmblr.co/Z_iwbyPkllsP

     >The core problem is the moral sclerosis of post-modern capitalism, the beggar-thy-neighbor, everyman-for-himself, exclusionary and avaricious capitalism of the globalist megacorporations, unrepentent Wall Street scam artists, and the profits-at-all-costs energy cartel.

     >If we have any hope to turn the corner, and avert what is looking more like a certain cliff for our world society, we need to quickly construct a post-normal economic regime, one that breaks with Hutton’s bad capitalism. We need an economic system that rejects and dismantles the power structures responsible for the precariousness of our age. We need a post-normal humanism, and soon. And one of its cornerstones must be the eradication of inopportunity.

     inopportunity #postnormal-humanism

129. Pollack interviews Dr. Jonathan Gruber, who is the Ford Professor of Economics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and director of the health care program at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

     Jon: I think, Harold, the single thing we probably need to keep the most focus on is the tragedy of the lack of Medicaid expansions. I know you’ve written about this. You know about this, but I think we cannot talk enough about the absolute tragedy that’s taken place. Really, a life-costing tragedy has taken place in America as a result of that Supreme Court decision. You know, half the states in America are denying their poorest citizens health insurance paid for by the federal government.

     So to my mind, I’m offended on two levels here. I’m offended because I believe we can help poor people get health insurance, but I’m almost more offended there’s a principle of political economy that basically, if you’d told me, when the Supreme Court decision came down, I said, “It’s not a big deal. What state would turn down free money from the federal government t...e states, not to cover people under Medicaid, even if it’s financially very advantageous to do so. I think there’s a really important principle to defeat this politically, not just because Medicaid is important for people, but because it’s such a toxic political perspective that has to be … It has to be shown that that approach to politics doesn’t work because otherwise, we will really be stuck with some very unjust policies that will be pursued with complete impunity in some of these places.

     Jon: That’s a great way to put it. There’s larger principles at stake here. When these states are turning – not just turning down covering the poor people – but turning down the federal stimulus that would come with that.

     Harold: Yeah.

     Jon: So the price they are willing … They are not just not interested in covering poor people, they are willing to sacrifice billions of dollars of injections into their economy in order to punish poor people. It really is just almost awesome in its evilness.

130. Goldman Sachs estimates that offshoring has accounted for roughly half a million layoffs in the past three years. Looking forward, perhaps the best-known projection is by Forrester, an information technology consulting firm, which expects the number of outsourced U.S. jobs to grow from about 400,000 in 2004 to 3.3 million by 2015. If this estimate turns out to be accurate, then offshoring could result in roughly 250,000 layoffs a year.

     [...]

     Economic theory points to two conclusions about the likely economic impact of services offshoring. Overall, offshoring will offer economic gains. However, some American workers, companies, and possibly communities will lose out in the process.

     Offshoring is closely related to technological advance: both are driven by competitive pressures to reduce costs and result in displacement of existing jobs. Since the nation’s inception, the U.S. economy has experienced productivity gains and the displacement of jobs due to technological progress. Manufacturing productivity has increased roughly 3.5 percent a year over the last two decades, which helps explain why the share of U.S. workers engaged in producing “things” has declined significantly, although the pace has been very uneven.

     International trade works much like technological change. Economists such as Catherine Mann of the Institute for International Economics, who point to offshoring’s overall benefits to the U.S. economy, typically argue that it helps lower costs and prices.6 A recent study by the consulting firm McKinsey and Co. estimates that the net cost sav- ings of moving some jobs offshore is about 50 percent.7 This is far lower than the sometimes 80 to 90 percent wage differential between U.S. and foreign workers (because of costs incurred for coordination and telecom- munications), but still sizable. In turn, lower inflation and higher productivity allow the Federal Reserve to run a more accommodative monetary policy, meaning the economy can grow faster, creating the conditions for higher employment. Mann estimates that economic growth would have been lower by 0.3 percent a year between 1995 and 2002 without foreign outsourcing in information technology.8

     [...]

     But if fewer people are needed in ex- isting jobs and occupations, then won’t total employment fall over time? His- torically, the number of jobs has closely followed the growth of the labor force, despite major increases in foreign trade and the advent of a host of new job-dis- placing technologies, such as voicemail, word processors, and optical scanners. Indeed, despite a surge in openness, the U.S. economy since 1985 has added 30 million workers to its payrolls, even tak- ing into account the recent recession and jobless recovery. At the same time, medi- an family income has jumped 20 percent. Structural changes, including trade and technology, influence where the jobs are, not the total number of jobs.

     The policy challenge arises from the second sure bet from economic theory and practice. Offshoring, like trade and technology, is a process of creative destruc- tion whereby workers in af- fected industries face the very real possibility of losing not only their jobs but also their healthcare. Even worse, some workers fall down the economic ladder when they have no choice but to take new jobs at lower pay and thus face the prospect of lower lifetime earnings.

     This concern is particularly acute because it comes at a moment when anxieties about jobs and wages are at fever pitch.9 Against the backdrop of a breathtaking acceleration in manufacturing job losses over the past few years, the jobs picture remained bleak much longer into the recent recovery than in any previous postwar recovery. [Looking back to the 2001 recession.]

     [...]

     This plays into a broader set of dis- tributive trends that have been quite negative for American workers since the end of the 2001 recession. As Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan noted in April 2004, “virtually all of the gains in productivity have ended up in rising profit margins and hence in a decline in the proportion of that national income going to compensation of employees.”10 Two years into the current recovery, the profit share of income grew 33 percent (on a pretax basis) compared with only 3 percent during the recovery of 1992–93; worker compensation, meanwhile, remained down 4 percent—a steeper decline than during any previous recovery in the last four decades. At the same time, the administration’s tax policies have exacerbated rather than offset these trends by shifting the tax burden away from wealth and towards earned income.

     [...]

     Now that college-educated, white-collar American workers will increasingly be in competition with highly qualified workers in the developing world, won’t they be subject to the same pressures?

     In his new book, BusinessWeek’s chief economist Michael Mandel worries that that the answer to this question is “yes,” and he may well be right.11 If Mandel’s assumption is correct, the “skills premium” that educated workers earned in the past may be pushed down in the future, thus reversing a decades-long trend.

     [...]

131. The idea of culture as shared beliefs or values goes back at least to Burns and Stalker (1961) who, in their seminal discussion of ‘organic’ versus ‘mechanistic’ organizations, define culture as “a dependable constant system of shared beliefs.” Other early contributions were the work of Baker (1980) and Schwartz and Davis (1981) who defined culture respectively as “some interrelated set of beliefs, shared by most of their members” and “a pattern of beliefs and expectations that is shared by the organization’s members.”

132. Target a few behaviors that will immediately energize the elements of your culture that are critical to moving your business forward. It is surprising how rapidly you can revitalize existing cultural traits if you concentrate on the right behaviors. Though it takes a bit of time and patience, viral spreading among informal leaders is a lot faster than programmatic spreading through redesign.

     1. Find a theme. Summarize, at a very high level, what you’re trying to accomplish. This is important because the critical behaviors manifest themselves differently, and you need coherence across groups and levels in the organization. In our example, the unifying theme for behavioral change was customer-centricity and responsiveness.
     2. Don’t claim victory too soon. Because culture is always slowly evolving to fit strategic and operating priorities, it’s not an endpoint. Rather, what you’re ultimately aiming for is better business performance. And existing cultural forces can fuel the behaviors you’re trying to adopt in your organization. For example, legacy pride, engineering excellence, and design elegance helped energize and sustain newly identified key behaviors in the case of the industrial manufacturer. In other words, your organization’s culture is a fundamental source of energy that will help secure an emotional commitment from your employees, which is essential to making behavioral changes take root.
     3. Enlist the help of informal leaders. Seek out the “influencers” in your organization, and ask them how they persuade, inspire, and mobilize their colleagues. They can tell you what works—and what doesn’t. They’ve learned through experience how to work with, not against, the underlying culture to garner support and make things happen. Business unit heads and HR can help you identify these informal leaders, but they aren’t very hard to spot. You’re looking for people who get things done in the organization. Learn from them; they know a lot more about the existing culture than you do, and more than any survey could uncover. Note that they aren’t necessarily your high potentials. They are authentic informal leaders who connect with people emotionally as well as rationally. In our example, what began as a smaller band of informal leaders became several groups of pride builders at the company. By treating these influencers as cultural advisers and tapping them for guidance, senior managers found ways to get more people across the company in direct contact with customers. As a result, customer satisfaction and sales numbers have improved.
     4. Remember that cultural forces don’t go away. You can rekindle elements of a previous culture that produce feelings of pride, commitment, and collaboration, but you can’t kill an existing culture. And you shouldn’t try to. Just about every culture contains some elements you don’t want to lose. Instead, work with your influencers to think about which behaviors you need, to articulate them, and to persuade people to embrace them.
     5. Start now. Leaders often say they have other things to do first—then they’ll get to culture. Or they want to wait for new leadership, or a new governance structure. Do not wait. The time to understand your cultural situation is now. It will influence everything else you’re doing.

133. A company’s culture is the collection of self-sustaining patterns of behaving, feeling, thinking, and believing, the patterns that determine “the way we do things around here.” At its best, an organization’s culture is an immense source of value. It enables, energizes, and enhances its employees and thus fosters ongoing high performance. At its worst, the culture can be a drag on productivity and emotional commitment, undermining long-term success. Most companies are so large and complex that the culture acts in both ways at once. Indeed, the culture of a large company is typically made up of several interwoven subcultures, all affecting and responding to one another.

     If you are the chief executive of a company that is sailing with the wind and leading in its competitive race, that’s a sign that your culture is in sync with your strategy. This makes your company much more likely to deliver consistent and attractive profitability and growth results. You can tell you have such a culture because people are confident and energized. They can justifiably take pride in the results of their work. As CEO, your role is to keep the ship on course and ahead of the competition. This requires generating regular behavioral reminders about the values, aspirations, and engagements that underlie your company’s success and reinforce its strategy.

     However, if your company is heading into stormy waters, facing the kinds of disruptive competition or unexpected market changes that affect every industry sooner or later, then a program of normal reinforcing leadership won’t cut it. A culture that no longer aligns with your strategic and performance priorities needs a lot more attention—from you and other senior leaders.

     Many CEOs understand in principle that cultures are multidimensional, slow to change, and troublesome to control—and thus that influencing them requires care and thoughtful engagement. This is particularly true for global companies led by people of diverse backgrounds. When confronted with a cultural challenge in real life, however, chief executives tend to forget this principle. Instead, they revert to conventional managerial tactics, but with more rigor. They turn up the volume on the inspirational messages. They raise the bar and set stretch goals with new statements of the vision, mission, values, and purpose of the company. They bear down on costs and castigate people for complacency. They may also see culture change as primarily a functional responsibility, to be delegated to experts, either inside or outside the company. More often than not, these approaches leave the deeply embedded cultural behaviors largely unchanged. Only an enlightened CEO can break through that kind of cultural inertia.

     ---

     As a CEO or senior executive, the greatest thing you can do is to marshal an authentic sense of urgency, but not one built solely on the logical reasons that change is necessary. Rather, build an emotional sense of urgency, focusing on the values that the company cares about collectively: its way of serving customers, its desire for growth and success, its positive impact on social and community issues, and the attraction and welcome that people felt when they first arrived.

     Every sustainable company culture is based, in part, on this intrinsic attraction to the work—including the way it challenges people. At some point, your employees chose to be part of the enterprise. For the most part, they liked (or loved) their profession, they felt they could excel, and they wanted to gain the personal benefits of accomplishment. As CEO, you need to capitalize on those feelings, give them voice, and encourage people to spread them virally throughout the company. This may mean discarding some businesses that don’t fit your strategy, your capabilities, or your culture. But it will also mean helping people expand (or recapture) the pride they have felt, all along, in their collective strength.

     ---

     First, it is essential to emulate at least some of these emerging key behaviors yourself—to be a living model of the culture you aspire to lead. People pay rapt attention to what the CEO does, not just what the CEO says. You can’t rely on communications, no matter how inspiring. You, and ideally a few other senior leaders, have to step out by behaving in new ways that both capitalize on elements in the current culture and demonstrate a key shift in cultural alignment.

     No two senior leaders are alike; what works for one doesn’t necessarily work for another. So do not seek to revamp your leadership philosophy, style, or personality to fit anyone else’s idea of what a leader should be.

     ---

     You do not need very many senior leaders to start a few critical behaviors rolling through the company. Get several well-known executives to step away from the norms of the past with you. People throughout the workforce will rapidly take notice and do the same, creating an atmosphere of approval and support. In short, by seeking out other early adopters of these behaviors, and working with them directly to sharpen their influence and deploy it more effectively, you will gain far more leverage as a cultural leader.

     For example, when Lucio Noto created those new, informal “skip level” staff development opportunities at Mobil, the rumor mill took notice. People all through the company began to do the same. These career appraisals became common practice at multiple levels across the globe. Similarly, when Michael Sabia was CEO of Bell Canada, he started attending small-group working sessions of “master motivators” at the front line, and other executives followed suit. They wanted to see for themselves what he was learning.

     ---

     For most business leaders, a rationally compelling argument is usually much easier to develop than an emotionally compelling one. Executives are used to quantitative analysis and logical reasoning. They understand how to send arguments through well-established formal channels and programs, and they know how to delegate assignments within that system. But emotional energy gets its strength from one’s own intuitive insight and the social support of colleagues. This energy flows through informal networks and cross-organizational interactions outside formal channels. The CEO’s role is to ensure integration of the formal and informal dimensions, so that the emotional energy generated for change is reinforced by a consistent formal accountability for performance and a willingness to pay attention to the metrics that indicate results.

     Douglas Conant calls this being “tough-minded on standards but tender-hearted with people.” Early on in his turnaround challenge at Campbell’s, he realized that he would have to replace more than 300 of the top 350 people in the company because they lacked the necessary skills. In discussions and informal conversations, he held firm to this decision, but also openly acknowledged that those who were being replaced were the friends, colleagues, and teammates of those who were staying. Those leaving were treated with respect and given as much help as the company could afford. “Even through that horrible period,” he later recalled, “our employee engagement scores went up.”

134. Company culture is a term that refers to the impact that the company has on the individuals concerned. I have increasingly come to doubt whether there is such a thing as company culture. You may not be convinced yet and I will return to this theme in future posts. Perhaps I am just concerned about the idea that corporate culture is something (i.e. is a physical "thing" or something with properties similar to a physical thing)  that can be managed in the service of the most powerful managers.

     If culture is a phenomenon that emerges from myriad interactions amongst organisational members, then it cannot be managed from outside as a whole. Instead, the top managers can only influence culture from within their own participation in interactions with others. Senior managers cannot design the culture that they want, nor can they engage other specialists to design the desired culture. They can only influence culture through their interactions with others.

     No wonder leaders say that communication is so important.

135. General Motors Co. Chief Executive Mary Barra is using the crisis over the auto maker's flawed handling of a deadly vehicle defect to accelerate a broader overhaul of its troubled management culture.

     Ms. Barra, a 33-year GM veteran, is chopping at the bureaucracy that survived GM's federally-funded 2009 trip through bankruptcy restructuring. Getting its engineering, marketing and other departments to make decisions faster and more cooperatively is a task that has stymied Ms. Barra's predecessors since the 1980s, when then-CEO Roger Smith complained about the company's "frozen middle."

     She plans more changes to her executive team. "I see this as an opportunity to accelerate our culture change," Ms. Barra said last week. "We continue to face down every issue we have…and more aggressively pursue every opportunity in a way we haven't always done.

     The company is now considering new appointments that could lead to the departures of more executives, said a person familiar with the car maker. Ms. Barra may go outside GM for corporate strategy, human resources and legal posts, that person said.

     Ms. Barra has turned to another longtime GM veteran, product development chief Mark Reuss, to execute an overhaul of the company's engineering operations into two new groups—one focused on developing components and technology, and the other focused on safety, called "product integrity," that crosses its legal, engineering and design groups. The split last month resulted in the retirement of its top engineering executive.

     The test for Ms. Barra is whether she can succeed in tearing down the barriers that prevented divisions within GM from sharing vital information, as they did with ignition-switch defects, and other important issues. The willingness to face issues head on represents a change at the top of GM—a company that for years minimized the depth of its troubles. In 2008, then-CEO Rick Wagoner repeatedly said a bankruptcy wouldn't happen, up until he was ousted and GM was ushered into a restructuring by the federal government.

     In bankruptcy, GM shed four of its eight automotive brands, but the overhaul never got to break up the fiefs that now have resurfaced and identified as part of the recall failures.

     "The bankruptcy didn't fix the silo problem that existed at GM, it didn't go far enough and it didn't go low enough to attack that compartmentalize thinking," said Thomas Stallkamp, principal of Detroit-based Collaborative Management LLC. "This [recall] may have had a perverse effect in that she has had to make changes on a faster timetable."

136. Last month, Mary T. Barra, the new chief executive of General Motors, told a panel of stern and dubious House members that she first became aware of a serious safety issue with the Chevrolet Cobalt in December, two months before the company announced a recall that would eventually cover 2.6 million cars.

     But an email contained among 700 pages of internal G.M. documents released on Friday by the same House committee raises questions of whether she knew more about safety problems with the Cobalt.

     The correspondence shows that as a G.M. vice president in 2011, Ms. Barra was alerted to widening problems with power steering in the Cobalt and other models, an indication that she was made aware of safety problems in those cars earlier than she had suggested.

     ---

     The email to Ms. Barra focused on a different issue from the ignition switch — a power-steering problem that led to an earlier recall, in 2010, for the Cobalt and the Pontiac G5. But it suggests that she was at least partly involved in a continuing conversation about problems with the small cars.

137. In the first major shake-up of General Motors’ senior management since the company announced a wide-ranging recall in February, its chief spokesman and head Washington adviser, and its top human resources executive have left the company.

     Selim Bingol, G.M.’s senior vice president for global communications and public policy, was part of the inner circle of Mary T. Barra, the automaker’s chief executive, handling strategy and the public response to the recall of nearly 2.6 million cars. The company announced his departure on Monday, along with that of Melissa Howell, senior vice president for global human resources. It did not say whether Mr. Bingol or Ms. Howell had resigned or if they were dismissed.

     The departures are the first major executive changes under Ms. Barra, who took over in January.

138. Our Culture is Simple: Our Customers and Their Safety Come First

     GM CEO Mary Barra discusses employee accountability for ensuring customer safety

     We are, at heart, the sum of our employees – their creativity, their dedication, and their commitment to excellence. GM employees have always been encouraged to raise safety concerns, whether openly or anonymously, and are empowered to be persistent. With the creation of the Speak Up for Safety program, we will have the opportunity to publicly thank and recognize them for their courage and openness. And importantly, we also promise accountability from our senior leadership back to these employees that we will take action or close each issue in a timely fashion.

139. General Motors’ chief executive, Mary T. Barra, reiterated her vow on Tuesday to root out the cause of the long delay in its recall of defective cars and to make sure that safety defects are never again buried in the automaker’s bureaucracy.

     In her first public appearance since enduring withering criticism at congressional hearings two weeks ago, Ms. Barra told an audience of auto executives and dealers that G.M. was delivering parts and starting to fix the 2.6 million small cars it has recalled for faulty ignition switches that it has linked to 13 deaths.

     “I am confident the team will learn from this recall, and G.M. will become a better company because of it,” Ms. Barra said.

140. Prior to its 2009 bankruptcy and bailout, GM was bleeding cash and producing substandard vehicles. Managers knew that the company's existence and their jobs were at stake. GM's internal problems created a culture that could justify saving a few cents on a critical repair. The company's CEO, Mary Barra, admitted that in her recent congressional testimony.

     Barra contrasted the old GM, whose culture weighed costs against improved safety, with the new GM that has a customer-centric culture.

     Business leaders need to learn from GM's mistakes. The reality is that no one is immune from adversity in business, but the best protection always has been fostering a vibrant culture that detects and attacks problems early on.

141. in creating a “Speak Up for Safety “ program for all GM employees, Barra is expanding the responsibility for safety across the company. It’s not a department, it’s a mission. “We need to make sure we break down the organizational silos and work across,” she said in an employee town meeting recently. The program is formatted to recognize employees who contribute ideas, or those who raise questions about safety issues before they become bigger problems. Call it an internal whistleblower program. “We need to drive cultural change to make sure people are going to go that extra mile in this area,” she said.

     Just the usual corporate blather? Her critics, including Connecticut Senator Richard Blumenthal, aren’t buying the new act yet. Blumenthal said that if Barra is truly dedicated to safety she’d pull the recalled cars off the road until replacement ignition parts arrive at dealers. Barra has said she’d still let her own son drive one of the recalled Cobalts. “How can you let your own son behind the wheel of a car that the recall notice says is unsafe to drive,” he asked on Bloomberg television.

     But even before the Cobalt crisis, Barra had begun to change GM’s corporate culture, particularly in the product development area. Her focus has been on a leaner, more responsive management organization.

142. via Don Peck, They're Watching You At Work http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/12/theyre-watching-you-at-work/354681/ >Near the turn of the 20th century, one manufacturer in Philadelphia made hiring decisions by having its foremen stand in front of the factory and toss apples into the surrounding scrum of job-seekers. Those quick enough to catch the apples and strong enough to keep them were put to work.

     [...] #knack #games

     Without ever seeing the ideas, without meeting or interviewing the people who’d proposed them, without knowing their title or background or academic pedigree, Knack’s algorithm had identified the people whose ideas had panned out. The top 10 percent of the idea generators as predicted by Knack were in fact those who’d gone furthest in the process. Knack identified six broad factors as especially characteristic of those whose ideas would succeed at Shell: “mind wandering” (or the tendency to follow interesting, unexpected offshoots of the main task at hand, to see where they lead), social intelligence, “goal-orientation fluency,” implicit learning, task-switching ability, and conscientiousness. Haringa told me that this profile dovetails with his impression of a successful innovator. “You need to be disciplined,” he said, but “at all times you must have your mind open to see the other possibilities and opportunities.”

     What Knack is doing, Haringa told me, “is almost like a paradigm shift.” It offers a way for his GameChanger unit to avoid wasting time on the 80 people out of 100—nearly all of whom look smart, well-trained, and plausible on paper—whose ideas just aren’t likely to work out. If he and his colleagues were no longer mired in evaluating “the hopeless folks,” as he put it to me, they could solicit ideas even more widely than they do today and devote much more careful attention to the 20 people out of 100 whose ideas have the most merit.

     Haringa is now trying to persuade his colleagues in the GameChanger unit to use Knack’s games as an assessment tool. But he’s also thinking well beyond just his own little part of Shell. He has encouraged the company’s HR executives to think about applying the games to the recruitment and evaluation of all professional workers. Shell goes to extremes to try to make itself the world’s most innovative energy company, he told me, so shouldn’t it apply that spirit to developing its own “human dimension”?

143. From Organizational Culture [cites Joanne Martin, Organizational Culture: Mapping the terrain (2002), who introduces three perspectives that researcher apply to analysis of organization culture: the integration, the differentiation, and the fragmentation perspective. "Most of this research has used only one, or at most two, of theses perspectives in a single study. Historically, advocates of these three cultural theories have either been antagonistic or ignored each other's work."]

     Martin (2002) reviews a sampling of the cultural research literature of the last three decades, defining three theoretical views of culture in organizations. These include the integration, the differentiation, and the fragmentation perspective.

     The integration perspective “focuses on those manifestations of a culture that have mutually consistent interpretations” (p. 94). Words like “shared values” pervade these types of research studies. Culture is that which is clear and unambiguous. Martin uses a metaphor to sum up this perspective: “Culture is like a solid monolith that is seen the same way by most people, no matter from which angle they view it” (p. 94). Practically speaking, it often focuses on management, endorsing the interpretation of those in power over competing stories. Edgar Schein, (1985) a prolific writer on the subject of organizational culture and leadership notes that “only what is shared is, by definition, cultural” (p. 247). Deviations within this model are seen as shortcomings or problems that need fixing.

     The differentiation perspective focuses on cultural manifestations that have inconsistent interpretations. Consensus exists, but only within subcultures. “Subcultures may exist independently, in harmony or in conflict with each other” (Martin, 2002, p. 94). This model views differences and inconsistencies as inescapable and desirable. According to Martin (2002), some differentiation studies emphasize harmonious relationships between subcultures whereas others stress the inconsistencies and conflicts between these cultures at various organizational levels.

     The fragmentation perspective places ambiguity, rather than coherence or clarity, at the core of culture. In this view consensus is possible, but it is expected to be fleeting and issue specific, rather than organization wide and everlasting. This view studies and attempts to understand organizational tensions and polemic behavior. It explores paradoxes and contradictions and attempts to make sense of these. Many of these studies assume the existence of multiple organizational realities and focus on a multiplicity of interpretations. Both organizations and individuals are seen to have fluctuating identities (Eisenberg & Riley, 2001).

144. This article argues that a great deal of both ‘talk’ and ‘text’ in organisational settings is, ultimately, bullshit. By ‘bullshit’ I mean the type of organisational speech and text that is produced with scant regard for the truth and is used to willfully mislead and to pursue the interests of the bullshitter. Bullshit is particularly prevalent in immaterial roles that lack a clear sense of social purpose. In these contexts, employees try to occupy themselves by engaging in bullshit. They do this by circulating discourses which are strategically ambiguous, over-packed with information and deliberately fleeting in nature. In order to construct these discourses, they frequently turn to examples set by the management fashion industry. When bullshit begins to take hold of an organisation, it can have surprisingly positive effects. It can create a positive image for the company and can help to increase self-confidence and build legitimacy. However, this often comes with some distinctly darker consequences: primary tasks are crowded out, valued occupational identities are compromised and stakeholder trust is undermined. Ultimately, bullshit leaves us with organisations that may be appealing on the surface but are distinctly brittle.
145. >Microaggressions are the “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities” that help perform and maintain power dynamics, inequities and stereotypes. Microaggressions often humiliate, surveil, insult, police and silence their targets.
146. only 11 percent have all three attributes that make up worker passion

     john-hagel #deloitte #passion #explorer #questing #connection #domain-impact #peformance

147. We have known for about 150 years that people who enjoy their work are more productive. That is to say high satisfaction is correlated with high performance. And yet many organizations seem to go out of their way to make work alienating, frustrating, and unpleasant. This is evidenced in the depressingly low rates of employee engagement around the world. According to a recent AON Hewitt survey, four in 10 workers on average report being disengaged worldwide (three out of 10 in Latin America, four in ten in the U.S., and five in 10 Europe).

     This finding resonates with our latest research. For more than four years now, we have been asking people what an “authentic” organization would be like – that is, one in which they could be their best selves. While individual answers vary, of course, we consistently find that they fall into six broad imperatives, which describe what we call “The organization of your DREAMS,” a handy mnemonic, whose components are:

     Difference – “I want to work in a place where I can be myself.” Radical honesty – “I want to know what’s really going on.” Extra value – “I want to work in an organization that makes me more valuable.” Authenticity – “I want to work in an organization that truly stands for something.” Meaning – “I want my day-to-day work to be meaningful.” Simple rules – “I do not want to be hindered by stupid rules.”

148. Established institutions have been reorganizing as long as they've been organized. As circumstances change, the shape and makeup of the workforce must be adapted accordingly. Today’s most disruptive organizations however, are beginning to organize around a new pattern: the ability to evolve in real time.
149. Peter Fleming, Professor of Business and Society at Cass Business School, City University, London, UK, weighs the evidence for this shift in work culture in "When 'life itself' goes to work: Reviewing shifts in organizational life through the lens of biopower" in the current issue of the journal Human Relations, published by SAGE. Last century, it was very clear where work stopped and play started -- managers at offices and factories encouraged a formal environment. Personal lives were left at the door as employees clocked in. Today, jobs increasingly allow us to work flexible hours, yet we are expected to be responsive around the clock. Dubbed Liberation Management, the latest trend encourages us all to 'be ourselves' at work, dropping the formal, professional attitudes of the past. And workers looking for ideas or opinions free of charge can crowd-source them from the Internet. Businesses ... from employees by encouraging their everyday selves on the job. Largely seen in Western economies, this trend is linked to a decline in jobs focused on concrete or industrial tasks. Life skills, communication and organization skills, and emotional intelligence are now key. If the onset of flu is coupled with relief that you can finally take a day for yourself, and you feel that your work is your life, blame biocracy. The widely reported death of banking intern Moritz Erhadt following three days of non-stop work is perhaps an extreme example of what biocracy can do to us: When work and life become blended to such an extent, even rest and sleep are considered a 'waste of time'. "The Birth of Biopolitics lectures are astoundingly prescient in the way they concentrate on the then nascent neoliberal project as a sign of things to come," says Fleming. "Our jobs are no longer defined as something we do among other things, but what we are… Ominously, we are now permanently poised for work."
150. >For a sense of what the future of people analytics may bring, I turned to Sandy Pentland, the director of the Human Dynamics Laboratory at MIT. In recent years, Pentland has pioneered the use of specialized electronic “badges” that transmit data about employees’ interactions as they go about their days. The badges capture all sorts of information about formal and informal conversations: their length; the tone of voice and gestures of the people involved; how much those people talk, listen, and interrupt; the degree to which they demonstrate empathy and extroversion; and more. Each badge generates about 100 data points a minute.

     >Pentland’s initial goal was to shed light on what differentiated successful teams from unsuccessful ones. As he described last year in the Harvard Business Review, he tried the badges out on about 2,500 people, in 21 different organizations, and learned a number of interesting lessons. About a third of team performance, he discovered, can usually be predicted merely by the number of face-to-face exchanges among team members. (Too many is as much of a problem as too few.) Using data gathered by the badges, he was able to predict which teams would win a business-plan contest, and which workers would (rightly) say they’d had a “productive” or “creative” day. Not only that, but he claimed that his researchers had discovered the “data signature” of natural leaders, whom he called “charismatic connectors” and all of whom, he reported, circulate actively, give their time democratically to others, engage in brief but energetic conversations, and listen at least as much as they talk. In a development that will surprise few readers, Pentland and his fellow researchers created a company, Sociometric Solutions, in 2010, to commercialize his badge technology.

     [...]

     >Torrents of data are routinely collected by American companies and now sit on corporate servers, or in the cloud, awaiting analysis. Bloomberg reportedly logs every keystroke of every employee, along with their comings and goings in the office. The Las Vegas casino Harrah’s tracks the smiles of the card dealers and waitstaff on the floor (its analytics team has quantified the impact of smiling on customer satisfaction). E‑mail, of course, presents an especially rich vein to be mined for insights about our productivity, our treatment of co-workers, our willingness to collaborate or lend a hand, our patterns of written language, and what those patterns reveal about our intelligence, social skills, and behavior. As technologies that analyze language become better and cheaper, companies will be able to run programs that automatically trawl through the e-mail traffic of their workforce, looking for phrases or communication patterns that can be statistically associated with various measures of success or failure in particular roles.

151. In an experiment the results of which were published last month in the journal PLoS One, we studied both possibilities. We found that receiving and observing generosity can both significantly increase your likelihood of being generous toward a stranger, but that if you observe a high enough level of generosity, your willingness to help suffers — you become a “bystander” who feels that help is no longer needed.
152. Results revealed the negative relationship between negative feedback and PA satisfaction was stronger for those higher in performance-prove (PPGO), performance-avoid, and learning goal orientation. Additionally, the relationship between positive feedback and PA satisfaction was stronger for individuals low on PPGO and weaker for individuals high on PPGO. Implications for enhancing PA reactions are discussed.
153. Ten years ago, 78% of an employee’s impact on functional or business unit performance came from their individual task performance and only 22% came from network performance. Today, the breakdown is 51% task performance, 49% network performance. A pretty even split.
154. Samsung has said its research found that people liked bigger-screen phones because they wanted a device that was good for handwriting, drawing and sharing notes. Asian-language speakers found it easier to write characters on a device using a pen rather than typing.

     Now Samsung and other phone makers believe they will find a more receptive audience outside Asia, too, including in the United States and Europe.

     “The cultural difference is not much,” said Lee Young-hee, head of marketing for Samsung’s mobile division. “Most people like the bigger display — it’s more and more welcomed by people around the world.”

     Demand for big-screen phones is clearly strong. IDC, the research firm, estimates that at least 20 percent of all smartphones shipped last year in China, the largest smartphone market in the world, were five inches or larger. It predicts that number will balloon to 50 percent by 2017.

     IDC also recently predicted that the growth of tablet sales would slow this year, partly because many people are gravitating toward larger phones and shifting away from smaller tablets.

     “In some markets consumers are already making the choice to buy a large smartphone rather than buying a small tablet,” said Tom Mainelli, an IDC research director who follows tablets.

     The most extreme example of a big phone announced this week came from Huawei, which introduced the MediaPad X1, a smartphone with a seven-inch screen, usually a size used in tablets. Because the device has a phone connection, Huawei calls it a phablet.

155. "The Tea Party was supposed to be dead and the GOP on the way to moderate repositioning after Obama’s victory and Democratic congressional gains in November 2012," Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist and political scientist, reminds us. "Yet less than a year after post-election GOP soul-searching supposedly occurred, radical forces pulled almost all GOP House and Senate members into" a government shutdown. "The Tea Party’s hold on the GOP persists beyond each burial ceremony," Skocpol argues. "Here is the key point: Even though there is no one center of Tea Party authority — indeed, in some ways because there is no one organized center — the entire gaggle of grassroots and elite organizations amounts to a pincer operation that wields money and primary votes to exert powerful pressure on Republican officeholders and candidates." It could take years to "root out radical obstructionism on the right," Skocpol argues.
156. Mr. Naím, an economist who has been Venezuela's trade and industry minister as well as editor in chief of Foreign Policy magazine, is a courageous writer who seeks to dissect big subjects in new ways. At a time when critics of overreaching governments, big banks, media moguls and concentrated wealth decry the power of the "1%," Mr. Naím argues that leaders of all types—political, corporate, military, religious, union—face bigger, more complex problems with weaker hands than in the past.

     This "decay" of power extends beyond the shift of influence from developed to developing countries, or among regions of the world. Mr. Naím points to three broad revolutions: "more" of everyone and everything that overwhelms the means of control; "mobility" of people and ideas that has ended captive audiences; and "mentality"—a transformation of aspirations, expectations and values such that individuals "take nothing for granted anymore." Together, the "3 M's" have made power easier to get, harder to use and easier to lose.

     Fast-rising factions and insurgent political movements, Mr. Naím notes—such as the Tea Party, the Pirate Parties in Europe and, most recently, Italy's Five Star Movement—are easier to organize and more potent. In business, Mr. Naím observes, companies in sectors as diverse as energy, media, banking, transportation and IT face a greater range of competitors, including from developing countries. Meanwhile, armies face off against ever more irregular enemies, such as insurgents, terrorists and militarized gangs like Mexico's Zetas.

     Mr. Naím is not forecasting the end of states, conventional militaries, big business or established churches; instead, he describes in detail how their exercise of power is more constrained and their positions are less secure. As a result, the big, seemingly powerful actors in societies have a harder time getting things done. Power has a social function, Mr. Naím reminds us, so his concern is not principally for those who are supposedly in charge but for the societal breakdowns that occur when power fails.

157. Nate Fulmer, from South Carolina, was fired because his boss disapproved of his comments about organized religion on his podcast. Cameron Barrett, from Michigan, lost his job over kinky short stories he posted. Stacey Snyder, from Pennsylvania, was denied a credit for her teaching degree because she posted a photograph of herself drinking beer. You don’t even have to be the one doing what your boss disapproves of. Daniel Lakewas suspended for “conduct unbecoming a police officer” because his wife posted nude pictures of herself.

     Sadly, almost all of this employer-driven abuse is legal. It’s illegal for your boss to penalize you because of your race or religion, but there’s no law protecting your right to live the way you choose. The only exceptions are the four states that have enacted such laws (California, Colorado, New York and North Dakota).

158. 1. Note everyone’s initial ideas. A fundamental strength of teams is that each person brings their own unique knowledge and perspective to the table. This is the crux of the classic “wisdom of crowds” effect first documented early in the last century – that is, the judgment of a group of people will usually be superior to the judgment of any individual in that group.

     In a creative setting, this could apply to problems like estimating product sales or predicting project timelines. But crucially, this group wisdom effect only applies when each person’s input is kept independent and free of outside influence. A team of Swiss and Hungarian researchers showed this in 2011 – group wisdom was undermined when team members were given the chance to modify their initial answers based on feedback about what others had said.

     Too much early interaction can also compromise idea generation in a group setting. Vocal, overconfident team members have a disproportionate influence while shy contributors lose faith in their own proposals. Whether seeking predictions or brainstorming ideas, you can largely overcome these problems by making sure team members write down and share their initial thoughts and ideas before group discussion begins. With everyone’s ideas or predictions on the table, only then start the interactive group work.

     1. Conduct a pre-mortem.

     After a failed product or expansion plan, it’s a familiar experience to read that the relevant company is conducting in-depth inquiries to find out how their experts could have made such misguided, unrealistic judgments. A common cause is that the companies’ project group grew so isolated and inward-looking, they forgot to factor in the effects of other competing companies making their own ambitious plans.

     Newly formed teams that often generate more and better ideas. To help safeguard against the unrealistic optimism that often bedevils creative teams, decision-making expert Gary Klein recommends a technique called the pre-mortem – a form of “ritualized dissent”. Team members (working on their own initially) are asked to assume that their project has already met with disaster and to come up with reasons why. This fosters an atmosphere that values the input of those who have doubts and reservations. Most importantly, the technique highlights ways to strengthen the project plan before lift-off.

     dissent #premortem #teams

159. Research conducted in 1989 by Deborah J. Mitchell, of the Wharton School; Jay Russo, of Cornell; and Nancy Pennington, of the University of Colorado, found that prospective hindsight—imagining that an event has already occurred—increases the ability to correctly identify reasons for future outcomes by 30%. We have used prospective hindsight to devise a method called a premortem, which helps project teams identify risks at the outset.

     A premortem is the hypothetical opposite of a postmortem. A postmortem in a medical setting allows health professionals and the family to learn what caused a patient’s death. Everyone benefits except, of course, the patient. A premortem in a business setting comes at the beginning of a project rather than the end, so that the project can be improved rather than autopsied. Unlike a typical critiquing session, in which project team members are asked what might go wrong, the premortem operates on the assumption that the “patient” has died, and so asks what did go wrong. The team members’ task is to generate plausible reasons for the project’s failure.

     A typical premortem begins after the team has been briefed on the plan. The leader starts the exercise by informing everyone that the project has failed spectacularly. Over the next few minutes those in the room independently write down every reason they can think of for the failure—especially the kinds of things they ordinarily wouldn’t mention as potential problems, for fear of being impolitic. For example, in a session held at one Fortune 50–size company, an executive suggested that a billion-dollar environmental sustainability project had “failed” because interest waned when the CEO retired. Another pinned the failure on a dilution of the business case after a government agency revised its policies.

     Next the leader asks each team member, starting with the project manager, to read one reason from his or her list; everyone states a different reason until all have been recorded. After the session is over, the project manager reviews the list, looking for ways to strengthen the plan.

     premortem #gary-klein #deborah-mitchell #prospective-hindsight #dissent

160. Kahan calls this theory Identity-Protective Cognition: "As a way of avoiding dissonance and estrangement from valued groups, individuals subconsciously resist factual information that threatens their defining values." Elsewhere, he puts it even more pithily: "What we believe about the facts," he writes, "tells us who we are." And the most important psychological imperative most of us have in a given day is protecting our idea of who we are, and our relationships with the people we trust and love.
161. In a world of increasing interconnectedness and rapid change, there is a growing need to improve the way people work together. understanding the true drivers of human social behavior is becoming ever more urgent in this environment.

     SCARF = status, certainty, autonomy, relatedness, fairness

162. Silvia Bellezza, a doctoral candidate at Harvard Business School, and Francesca Gino and Anat Keinan, two professors there, first studied the link between accomplishment and informality. They found that scholars who dressed down at an academic conference, eschewing blazers for T-shirts, had stronger research records, even controlling for age and gender. Then, they explored why and when this sartorial tactic for announcing status—if that’s what it is—succeeds.

     Bellezza went to Milan and asked some clerks at luxury boutiques (Armani, Valentino, etc.) to imagine a woman entering the store wearing either gym clothes or a fur coat. Others were to imagine a woman in flip-flops and a Swatch, or in high heels and a Rolex. Clerks then judged her likely financial and celebrity status. Of the hypothetical shoppers, the casually attired were judged wealthier and more important. One clerk said, “Wealthy people sometimes dress very badly to demonstrate superiority,” and that “if you dare enter these boutiques so underdressed, you are definitely going to buy something.” But when Bellezza ran the same questions by local pedestrians, they assumed a done-up client to be wealthier. Picking up on status cues, the researchers determined, seems to require familiarity with the environment in which those cues are used.

     Next, the researchers asked students at American universities to imagine a professor who is clean-shaven and wears a tie, or one who is bearded and wears T-shirts. Students were slightly more inclined to judge the dapper professor as a better teacher and researcher. But some students were given another piece of information: that the professor works at a top-tier school, where the dress code is presumably more formal. For them, the slouchy scholar earned more points. Deviance can signal status, but only when there are clear norms from which to deviate.

     What if you stand out not for informality but for originality? In another experiment, a hypothetical man wearing a red bow tie at a black-tie party hosted by his golf club was viewed as higher in status—and better at golf—than a peer who stuck with the black-tie dress code. But if subjects were told the man broke the dress code unintentionally, he gained no benefit. When it’s not clear that a person is breaking a norm deliberately, he might be seen merely as missing the memo, or not having the wherewithal to follow it.

     The next study looked for clues about why we see nonconformity as a sign of status. Subjects evaluated a hypothetical M.I.T. student presenting a business plan in a competition. He used the M.I.T. PowerPoint template others were using, or he used his own. As predicted, participants saw the one who abandoned the standard template as having a better business idea, and as being more respected by his friends. They also rated him as more autonomous—someone who “can afford to do what he wants.” Further, people perceived the nonconformist as having high status and competence, because he seemed to act autonomously.

     The red-sneaker effect fits in with a wider body of research on the idea that certain observable traits or behaviors signal hidden qualities by virtue of their “costliness.” For instance, a peacock’s colorful tail feathers make it easy prey for predators, but they tell a peahen that he’s fit enough to sustain the risk. The more one has of the trait to be touted (fitness, say), the less costly the signal (feathers), making the display of the signal a reliable proxy for the trait. This is how conspicuous consumption works: jewelry is costly, unless you’re rich and won’t miss the cash. Similarly, deliberate nonconformity shows that you can handle some ridicule because you’ve got social capital to burn.

163. Seeing Like a State (public library) by James C. Scott (1998) The Mind in the Cave: Consciousness and the Origins of Art (public library) by David Lewis-Williams (2002) Crowds and Power (public library) by Elias Canetti (1962) The Wheels of Commerce (public library) by Fernand Braudel (1982) Keeping Together in Time (public library) by William McNeill (1995) Dancing in the Streets (public library) by Barbara Ehrenreich (2007) Roll Jordan Roll (public library) by Eugene Genovese (1974) A Pattern Language (public library) by Christopher Alexander et al (1977) The Face of Battle (public library) by John Keegan (1976) A History of the World in 100 Objects (public library) by Neil MacGregor (2010) Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (public library) by Richard Rorty (1989) The Notebooks (public library) by Leonardo da Vinci (1952 ed.) The Confidence Trap (public library) by David Runciman (2013) The Discoverers by Daniel Boorstein (1983) Mother Nature: A History of Mothers, Infants, and Natural Selection (public library) by Sarah Hrdy (1999) War and Peace (public library) by Leo Tolstoy (1869) The Cambridge World History of Food (2-Volume Set) (public library) by Kenneth F. Kiple and Kriemhild Coneè Ornelas (2000) The Illustrated Flora of Britain and Northern Europe (public library) by Marjorie Blamey and Christopher Grey Wilson (1989) Printing and the Mind of Man (public library) by John Carter and Percy Muir (1983) Peter the Great: His Life and World (public library) by Richard Massie (1980)
164. Since a woman named Martine Postma established the first repair café in Amsterdam in 2009, the concept of free events at which volunteers with repair skills assist participants with broken furniture, appliances, bicycles, clothing and toys, has spread far and wide.

     More than 50 cafes operate throughout the Netherlands, France, Germany and the United Kingdom, and, in the U.S., people have begun convening regularly at coffee shops and event spaces in New York, Chicago, Palo Alto, Los Angeles, Seattle and—as of earlier this year—my hometown of Portland, Oregon, to fix busted items.

165. The machines are not inexpensive, costing up to $250,000 (not including barn improvements) for a unit that includes a mechanical arm, teat-cleaning equipment, computerized displays, a milking apparatus and sensors to detect the position of the teats. Pioneered in Europe in the 1990s, they have only recently taken hold in Pennsylvania, Wisconsin and New York, which is a leader in the production of Greek yogurt and the third-largest milk producer in the country.

     Kathy Barrett, a senior extension associate at the College of Agriculture and Life Sciences at Cornell University, credited a recent surge in milk prices with motivating dairy owners to seek new ways to improve their farms — and farm life.

     “It’s really the flexibility of not stopping doing hay because at 3 o’clock you have to go milk,” Ms. Barrett said.

     Ms. Barrett said about 30 farms in New York had installed more than 100 robotic milkers. Two European manufacturers, Lely and DeLaval, said they had installed hundreds more across the country. California, the nation’s leading dairy producer, has been a curious holdout, in part because there were problems at some farms that adopted the technology in its early years.

166. This week, the company launched the ability to sell subscriptions, rather than individual one-off payments, as a way to tailor the service even further to how customers were using it.

     He said the company saw that users were selling tens of thousands of dollars of content through what was essentially a subscription, even if Gumroad didn’t formally support it. So he figured it was time to add this to the service: ”We were solely about helping people sell these atomic things,” he said.

     With subscriptions, Gumroad will let creators sign up subscribers, set a monthly or yearly price (it can be $0 if they prefer), and then send their subscribers any kind of content, from book chapters to film episodes to songs or any kind of digital content. The customers can then download the content directly from an email.

     “We want to make it as easy to sell something as it is to share something,” he said.

167. TURKLE CLAIM #3: SELFIES CHANGE THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE We don’t experience interruptions as disruptions anymore. But they make it hard to settle into serious conversations with ourselves and with other people because emotionally, we keep ourselves available to be taken away from everything. I talk to young people about etiquette when they go out to dinner, and they explain to me that when in a group of, say, seven, they make sure that at least three people are “heads up” in the “talking” conversation at any one time. … All of this has become the new normal. It’s true, some kids can be rude. But they’re also rabid communicators. Turkle’s right: We’re witnessing a new normal. Here are some other grumpy seniors that stared down a new norm... wholesome recreation is eliminated.”

     In 1925, Princeton University Dean Howard McClenahan tied the car to a moral crisis: “The automobile gave increased opportunities on Sunday and thus lessened the chances of church attendance. The general effect of the automobile was to make the present generation look lightly at the moral code, and to decrease the value of the home.”

     History is full of Turkles, and naturally so. Hers is such a terrifying idea, and yet such an appealing one: If we are at the vanguard of social change, then we--that is, we the elders, roughly ages 30 and up, who can remember a time before the latest disruption--are the precious and special last bearers of humanity.

     It’s flattering, but it’s untrue. We aren’t special. We just grew up doing things the way we learned to do them. Now we see the next generation acting differently, and we cannot imagine it working. We forget that this is how it’s always been. We forget that we experimented as well. We turned out okay.

168. A group of researchers from Stanford has been working on deep learning models that can make sense of whole sentences at a time, and has recently trained its models on a large collection of online movie reviews.
169. IBM is teaming with MIT, Carnegie Mellon University, New York University and the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute to advance the state of the art in building smarter computer systems. Their research ranges from automatically classifying text and images to human-computer interaction.
170. Thomson Reuters is now incorporating sentiment analysis gained from Twitter for its Eikon market analysis and trading platform. The commercial terms of the deal are not being disclosed but to be clear it is not a deal directly with Twitter: a spokesperson confirms that it will be “combining a number of third-party and proprietary Twitter feeds for this service.”

     You can think of this as an expansion of the kind of Twitter mining first tried out by Bloomberg last year, in which the company (a rival to Thomson Reuters) incorporated Tweets related to specific companies in a wider data stream.

     Here, the Thomson Reuters implementation goes one step further by then creating visualizations and charts based on this kind of data — one of these is illustrated above. Looking at the graphics, traders and ...e volumes needed to make patterns meaningful,” the spokesperson tells me.

     While Thomson Reuters doesn’t disclose what third parties may be involved in its rollout, the types of companies that are sitting in between Twitter and customer-facing enterprises like Thomson Reuters include the likes of Datasift, which mines and helps structure data from social networks like Twitter through the use of metatags.

     For now, the sentiment analysis uses only Twitter, but Thomson Reuters is working on adding more content sources, including blogs, in the future.

     Thomson Reuters believes it is the first mainstream financial platform to provide twitter sentiment in this way “on a broad scale.” Eikon has some 120,000 people using the service on desktop, “and that grows exponentially every week.” That’s a turn of events from a few years ago, when Thomson Reuters was still sweating out the billion-dollar investment it had made into the development of Eikon as a way to better compete against Bloomberg.

171. I shared my friend’s observation with Helen Fisher, a senior research fellow at the Kinsey Institute who studies sexual attraction. She noted that even people who are satisfied with their sex lives often crave more nowadays. She told me about a study she conducted that asked participants who had had affairs why they did so. Fifty-six percent of her male subjects and 34 percent of her female subjects said they were “happy” or “very happy” in their partnerships but cheated anyway.

     While past research has shown that men have higher rates of infidelity than women, those rates are becoming increasingly similar, particularly in younger people in developed countries, where recent studies have found no gender differences in extramarital sex among men and women under 40. This may be because younger women are more likely to be in... make female infidelity more probable than in traditional ones. A large national study in the late 1990s found that women who were more educated than their husbands were more likely to engage in sexual infidelity than if they were less educated than their husbands. Studies also find that people who work outside the home and whose partners remain in the home cheat more — and the traditional gender roles in this situation are now frequently reversed. As women increasingly work in professions that are not female-dominated, they have more sexual opportunities with peers than ever.

     Helen Fisher told me that women’s expectations for sexual fulfillment are changing so much that when she conducted a survey last year asking, “Would you make a long-term commitment to someone who had everything you were looking for but to whom you did not feel sexually attracted?” the least likely group to say yes was women over 60. At any age, companionship, it seems, is no longer enough of a draw on its own.

172. Indeed over the past decade the Valley itself has grown almost entirely in ways that have benefited the affluent, largely white and Asian professional population. Large tech firms are notoriously skittish about revealing their diversity data, but one recent report found the share of Hispanics and African-Americans, already far below their percentage in the population, declined in the last decade; Hispanics, roughly one quarter of the local workforce, held 5.2% of the jobs at 10 of the Valley’s largest companies in 2008, down from 6.8% in 1999, according to the San Jose Mercury News. The share of women in management also has declined, despite the headlines generated by the rise of high-profile figures like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg. The mostly male white and Asian top geeks in Palo Al...ng the tax code to shelter profits offshore. Twitter’s founders creatively exploited various arcane loopholes to avoid paying taxes on some of the proceeds of their IPO that they set aside for heirs.

     The set of differing rules for oligarchs and everyone else extends even to the most personal issues. Yahoo’s Mayer, a former Google executive, banned telecommuting for employees — particularly critical for those unable to house their families anywhere close to ultra-pricey Palo Alto. Yet Mayer, herself pregnant at the time, saw no contradiction in building a nursery in her own office.

     This model of economic development seems it would be more appealing to those who believe in “the survival of the fittest” than people with more traditional liberal values. The alliance with tech may well be a critical boon to the progressive cause and its champions for the time being, but at some time even the most deluded progressives will begin to realize with whom they have chosen to share their bed.

173. Silicon Valley tends to vote Democrat but act Republican
174. This week I came across the details of Avon's problematic SAP rollout, which caused large numbers of sales folk to quit rather than use software that either didn't let them log in, or didn't take their order even when they could log in. Avon, like Tupperware, relies on a lot of part-time salespeople who work from home, use their own devices. and believe they could sell a lot more perfume if they could tap the order in on their iPad in the middle of the sales party. That should be the recipe for a BYOD success story.

     Instead the combination of the SAP back-end and IBM WebSphere front-end cost around $125 million (or at least that’s what Avon is writing off for the failed project) and took four years to roll out in Canada.

     It's not the only big business system that's caused the company problems. Back in 2011, Avon had similar problems with a new ERP system it created for its Brazilian operations using Oracle ERP; poor sales in Brazil and other markets later led to the chief executive stepping down.

     Whether they're fraught by technical problems or they expose divisions inside a company, these big business systems are a huge opportunity to get things wrong. They're the reason shadow IT and guerrilla cloud adoption of services like Salesforce and BYOD happen in the first place, and it's disappointing that businesses are still creating them. And using enterprise social networking to work around them is addressing the wrong problem.

175. In a 2011 paper published in the Journal of Computational Science, researchers reported improving prediction models of Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJIA) closing values by adding a public mood variable that was calculated using content from Twitter feeds. They found that certain changes in the public mood correlate with shifts in the DJIA values that occur three to four days later. Adding this social data into the model improved model accuracy from 46.7 percent (using only historical DJIA values) to 86.7 percent. While these findings have generated some controversy, it is clear that social big data analyses have implications for tracking sentiment and conducting market research. Most “self-reported subjective well-being” surveys are expensive and time-consuming. But public mood analysis using microblog feeds can provide automatic, fast, free, and large-scale information to complement sentiment measurement tools.
176. Law firms have recognized the value of social data in litigation support. Information from social platforms is helping attorneys discredit witnesses and fine-tune jury selection, for example. In the past, the party that could spend more on professional trial consultants (such as social scientists or psychologists) to evaluate members of the jury pool had significant advantages. The Internet and social media allow attorneys to gather immense amounts of information about prospective jurors (e.g., arrest records, political affiliations) and to track their activities on social networks (e.g., blog posts, comments, group affiliations). Trial lawyers also use social media to understand and manage public perceptions of a case. In some cases, they have even started using social media to find trial evidence.113
177. UK-based alternative lending start-up Wonga developed an algorithmic, big-data approach to underwriting microcredit loans that combines data from social platforms with other customer information. Underwriting payday loans—emergency loans issued to borrowers who often have no other sources of credit—traditionally has not been very sophisticated (lenders charge high fees and accept high risk). Wonga’s algorithm allows it to take a different approach, by allowing it to more clearly differentiate between good and bad credit risks among the types of consumers who rely on payday lending. Customers who apply for a loan on Wonga’s Web site are guided through a series of questions. The answers build a record of 30 pieces of simple information about the potential borrower for Wonga. Based on that information and social platforms, Wonga has found it can access a further 6,000 to 8,000 online data points that relate to the applicant. By refining the algorithm and using machine learning from past loans, Wonga was able to reduce its default rate from 50 percent in the first few weeks of the operation to single-digit percentages in the most high-risk loan market.1
178. No bank branch, no paper, and no plastic

     The founders of Movenbank want to create the next generation of banking: If it succeeds, Movenbank—currently in its alpha testing—will be the first branchless, paperless, and even plastic-less bank. Movenbank will use social and mobile technologies across its operations: customers will sign in using Facebook, and bank “members” will be encouraged to participate in a behavioral, social, viral, gamified engagement system called CRED.

     As depositors pay their bills, shift money between accounts, socialize, and play games, CRED gathers information. The bank will market CRED as a friend and colleague who helps customers with day-to-day financial decision making. Movenbank, meanwhile, will use CRED data instead of traditional credit scores. Social media intelligence, such as behavioral data and influencing skills (number of recommendations) are important factors in its ratings. Using only word of mouth on social media, Movenbank has pre-registered 5,000 users, who are testing its feature in the alpha version. According to Movenbank management, it plans to enlist 50,000 customers in its first year, at a $200 lower acquisition cost per customer than banks usually pay.

179. Matthew D. Lieberman, director of UCLA’s Social Cognitive Neuroscience lab
180. Despite widespread interest in the link between social and sexual networks, little research has focused on how social networks influence the progression of intimate relationships. I argue that social networks not only affect exposure to potential partners, they also shape access to information about others’ expectations regarding the progression of intimate acts within a relationship. Using data from Add Health, I conduct an optimal matching comparison of adolescents’ purported ideal versus actual relationship sequences – which are comprised of events such as holding hands and having sex. Low discrepancy scores indicate that intimate acts in one’s relationship were sequenced close to what one would have hoped, and vice versa. Results demonstrate how students were situated within their schools’ broader friendship networks affected their experiences with intimacy. More central individuals compromised their ideals to a lesser extent than less central individuals. In addition, the degree of sex segregation within the network is associated with greater compromise.
181. http://www.kurzweilai.net/bacteria-are-social-microorganisms-mit-researchers

     unread #social #bacteria

     >The researchers found that ecologically delineated bacterial populations act as socially cohesive units. “In these populations, a few individuals produced antibiotics to which closely related individuals in the population were resistant, whereas individuals in other populations were sensitive,” said Cordero.

     >“Those individuals that don’t produce antibiotics can benefit from association with the producers, because they are resistant,” added Cordero. “In other words, antibiotics have a social effect, because they can benefit the population as a whole.”

182. In recent years, social media has become ubiquitous and important for social networking and content sharing. And yet, the content that is generated from these websites remains largely untapped. In this paper, we demonstrate how social media content can be used to predict real-world outcomes. In particular, we use the chatter from Twitter.com to forecast box-office revenues for movies. We show that a simple model built from the rate at which tweets are created about particular topics can outperform market-based predictors. We further demonstrate how sentiments extracted from Twitter can be utilized to improve the forecasting power of social media.

     Published in: Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT), 2010 IEEE/WIC/ACM International Conference on (Volume:1 )

183. Snippets of information, often hidden in social-media streams, offer companies a valuable new tool for staying ahead.
184. cites Steven Sinofsky's #continuousproductivity concept, and Coase
185. >The idea is simple to explain, and distinct from a naïve determinism. Different technologies make different kinds of human action and interaction easier or harder to perform. All other things being equal, things that are easier to do are more likely to be done, and things that are harder to do are less likely to be done. All other things are never equal. That is why technological determinism in the strict sense - if you have technology “t,” you should expect social structure or relation “s” to emerge - is false.

     >Ocean navigation had a different adoption and use when introduced in states whose land empire ambitions were effectively countered by strong neighbors - like Spain and Portugal - than in nations that were focused on building a vast inland empire, like China.

     >Print had different effects on literacy in countries where religion encouraged individual reading - like Prussia, Scotland, England, and New England - than where religion discouraged individual, unmediated interaction with texts, like France and Spain.

     >This form of understanding the role of technology is adopted here. Neither deterministic nor wholly malleable, technology sets some parameters of individual and social action. It can make some actions, relationships, organizations, and institutions easier to pursue, and others harder.

     >In a challenging environment - be the challenges natural or human - it can make some behaviors obsolete by increasing the efficacy of directly competitive strategies. However, within the realm of the feasible - uses not rendered impossible by the adoption or rejection of a technology - different patterns of adoption and use can result in very different social relations that emerge around a technology. Unless these patterns are in competition, or unless even in competition they are not catastrophically less effective at meeting the challenges, different societies can persist with different patterns of use over long periods.

     >It is the feasibility of long-term sustainability of different patterns of use that makes this book relevant to policy, not purely to theory. The same technologies of networked computers can be adopted in very different patterns.There is no guarantee that networked information technology will lead to the improvements in innovation, freedom, and justice that I suggest are possible.

     >That is a choice we face as a society.

     socialtools

186. WHAT is the chance that you could get someone to lie for you? What about vandalizing public property at your suggestion?

     Most of us assume that others would go along with such schemes only if, on some level, they felt comfortable doing so. If not, they’d simply say “no,” right?

     Yet research suggests that saying “no” can be more difficult than we believe — and that we have more power over others’ decisions than we think.

187. If you were looking for teams to rig for success, a call center would be a good place to start. The skills required for call center work are easy to identify and hire for. The tasks involved are clear-cut and easy to monitor. Just about every aspect of team performance is easy to measure: number of issues resolved, customer satisfaction, average handling time (AHT, the golden standard of call center efficiency). And the list goes on.

     Why, then, did the manager at a major bank’s call center have such trouble figuring out why some of his teams got excellent results, while other, seemingly similar, teams struggled? Indeed, none of the metrics that poured in hinted at the reason for the performance gaps. This mystery reinforced his assumption that team building was an art, not a science.

     The truth is quite the opposite. At MIT’s Human Dynamics Laboratory, we h...we found that the best predictors of productivity were a team’s energy and engagement outside formal meetings. Together those two factors explained one-third of the variations in dollar productivity among groups.

     Drawing on that insight, we advised the center’s manager to revise the employees’ coffee break schedule so that everyone on a team took a break at the same time. That would allow people more time to socialize with their teammates, away from their workstations. Though the suggestion flew in the face of standard efficiency practices, the manager was baffled and desperate, so he tried it. And it worked: AHT fell by more than 20% among lower-performing teams and decreased by 8% overall at the call center. Now the manager is changing the break schedule at all 10 of the bank’s call centers (which employ a total of 25,000 people) and is forecasting $15 million a year in productivity increases. He has also seen employee satisfaction at call centers rise, sometimes by more than 10%.

188. http://www.saffo.com/02008/07/26/strong-opinions-weakly-held/

     Saffo argues for abduction:

     "Try as one might, when one looks into the future, there is no such thing as “complete” information, much less a “complete” forecast. As a consequence, I have found that the fastest way to an effective forecast is often through a sequence of lousy forecasts."

     forecasts #futures #abduction

189. http://brickstarter.org/brickstarter-prototype-sketches-questions/#comment-292

     >This latter aspect actually reveals that the point of Brickstarter is not really in making a website at all, necessarily, but rather in developing a sketch of “a 21st century social contract”. Or at least aspects of that. It’s not making a statement about what that should be, but using prototyping to explore what that might be.

190. http://cogprints.org/671/1/FAbductive.html

     abduction

191. http://paulgraham.com/swan.html

     >the best startup ideas seem at first like bad ideas. I've written about this before: if a good idea were obviously good, someone else would already have done it. So the most successful founders tend to work on ideas that few beside them realize are good.

192. In March 2013, The Economist’s Intelligence Unit, sponsored by The Project Management Institute, initiated a survey of 587 senior executives globally and then undertook a series of in-depth interviews with additional executives and academics.

     The result was a current and objective (non-commercial) touch-point on what executives believe. As noted on the PMI website:

     “Key findings include:

     61% of survey respondents acknowledge that their firms struggle to bridge the gap between strategy formulation and day-to-day implementation 44% of strategic initiatives did not succeed in the last three years 51% percent of survey respondents say the leading reason for the success of strategic initiatives is leadership buy-in and support Rather than micro-managing, C-suite executives should identify and focus on the key initiatives that are strategically relevant”

     So there it is. These executives believe the failure rate on “strategic initiatives” is 44%.

     So while that’s a fair distance from 70%, it is still a very high risk.

193. Abstract

     Despite the popularity of organizational change management, the question arises whether its prescriptions are based on solid and convergent evidence.To answer this question, a systematic review was conducted of organizational change management research published in scholarly journals during the past 30 years. The databases ABI/INFORM, Business Source Premier, ERIC, and PsycINFO were searched for relevant studies.A total of 563 studies met the review’s criteria. Assessment shows a predominance of one-shot studies with a low internal validity. Replication studies are rare. Findings suggest that scholars and practitioners should be sceptical regarding the body of research results in the field of organizational change management published to date. Prescriptions are offered for researchers, editors, and educators to develop a more solid body of evidence on organizational change management.

     ---

     Conclusions

     We draw three conclusions from this review’s results. First, the number of OCM stud- ies has dramatically grown in the past 30 years. At the same time, the field’s method- ological repertoire remains limited. For example, the case control design seems to be relatively unknown in OCM: a total of only 14 studies (2%) featured this design. The same applies to time series (1%) and cohort/panel study designs (3%). Relatively few controlled studies are conducted in the field: Only 13% used a control group. In sharp contrast is the number of cross-sectional and case studies: More than 77% of studies made use of these designs.

     Second, the internal validity of studies in the field of OCM tends to be low: of the 563 studies included, only 10 studies qualified as Level A (2%) and only 54 as Level B (10%). The remaining 88% are studies with a moderate to weak internal validity. Even more disturbing is the fact that the relative proportion of controlled studies into the effectiveness of interventions and/ or moderators within the field has decreased dramatically over the past 30 years, from more than 30% in the early 1980s to just less than 5% in the past decade.

     Third, studies of OCM are quite heterogeneous in terms of content. Downsizing, Performance Management, and Organizational Development are the most researched subject areas in the field of OCM. Satisfaction, Commitment, Well-being, and Emotional Response are the most frequently measured attitudinal outcomes and Absenteeism, Performance, and Productivity are the most frequently measured “hard” outcome vari- ables. However, taken together, the limited number of studies with similar keywords, the wide range of variables within subcategories, and large number of unique scales used to measure the outcome all suggest there is little to no replication in OCM.

     Implications

     If one accepts McGrath’s (1981) fundamental premise that the success of the research enterprise is to be judged in terms of how well researchers seek convergence of sub- stance among complementary research methods, then the outcome of this systematic review leaves us with a sense of limited success regarding OCM’s capacity to answer fundamental questions about what works (and what does not). This review indicates that the field’s research is limited by the dominance of one-shot studies and seldom addresses the same intervention more than once. As this may be appropriate for a field where theory is nascent and topics have attracted little research, it is unacceptable for a mature field with a research tradition of 50+ years. The field’s lack of replication is particularly disturbing. OCM stands in contrast to fields such as medicine where research is often repeated and under different conditions in order to obtain the highest level of both internal and external validity. Research activities in OCM seem to be isolated, unrelated, and fail to build on previous studies. Instead, the pursuit of novelty in research, the development of new conceptual frameworks, and the pursuit of new-fangled constructs appear to drive the research agenda. As a result, we know increasingly less about more. This, of course, makes Noel Tichy’s (1983) critical comment from 30 years ago more relevant than ever: “This leads to an unfortunate state of affairs where the waxing and waning of organizational improvement remedies are associated with limited understanding about what works and what does not and why” (p. 363). Given these outcome findings, practitioners should be sceptical about relying uncritically on research findings relevant to OCM as a basis for important decisions.

     It must be noted that this review does not answer the question how this dismal state of affairs regarding the low quality of OCM’s body of evidence came about. What larger forces are driving us to such poor scientific practice? The fully answer to this question is beyond the scope of this review. However, we will briefly address two explanations.

     First, it has been argued that the dynamic nature of OCM makes it difficult if not impossible to use randomization (Bullock & Svyantek, 1987) or control groups. However, as this review clearly demonstrates, good examples of randomized and controlled designs, though scarce, can be found in OCM. Moreover, most of the barriers toward the use of randomization or control groups are not unique to OCM. In fact, research fields including medicine, economics, and psychology faces similar barriers. These fields use other research designs, such as cohort, case control, and time-series designs. Such research designs too can lead to robust empirical foundations, particularly when repeated frequently and under varying conditions (Petticrew & Roberts, 2003). However, as we demonstrated in our review, these designs are relatively under-used in OCM. Second, it is suggested that organizations are dynamic systems that do not lend themselves to “normal” science methods (Daft & Lewin, 1990; Dooley & Johnson, 1995). However, as Thomas Kuhn (1962) emphasized, “an extraordinary science must not simply be critical of the established normal science paradigm; it must also present an alternative”.

     Put differently, alternative research models that overcome the dual hurdles of internal and external validity must be available first before a postnormal science approach can be regarded as viable. Since our review clearly demonstrates that in OCM the “normal” science approach is not used to its full potential, extending its methodological repertoire with the above-mentioned controlled designs remains the best available option.

194. A 70 per cent failure rate is frequently attributed to organizational-change initiatives, raising questions about the origins and supporting evidence for this very specific statistic. This article critically reviews five separate published instances identifying a 70 per cent organizational-change failure rate. In each instance, the review highlights the absence of valid and reliable empirical evidence in support of the espoused 70 per cent failure rate. Organizational-change research and scholarship now exists which enables us to question the belief in inherent organizational-change failure rates. Inherent failure rates are critically questioned in terms of the ambiguities of change, the context-dependent nature of change, competing perceptions, temporal aspects and measurability. In conclusion, whilst the existence of a popular narrative of 70 per cent organizational-change failure is acknowledged, there is no valid and reliable empirical evidence to support such a narrative.

195. 1. Strategy formation should be a controlled, conscious process of thought
     2. Responsibility for that control and consciousness must rest with the chief executive officer: that person is THE strategist Selznick "It is the function of the leader-statesman -- whether of a nation or a private association -- to define the end of group existence, to design an enterprise adapted to those ends, and to see that that design becomes a living reality" The "rational architect" model
     3. The model of strategy formation must be kept simple and formal so it can be performed by one mind -- an atheoretical and anti-theory premise. This is why, for example, so little of what we know about how people influence each other as social beings has found its way into business. 4. Strategies should be unique: the best ones result from a process of creative design
     4. Strategies emerge from this design process fully formulated Not a Darwinian model, but a Biblical one.
     5. These strategies should be explicit and, if possible, articulated, which also favors their being kept simple
     6. Finally, only after these unique, full-blown, explicit, and simple strategies are fully formulated can they then be implemented

     Critique:
     1. "Our critique of the design school revolves around one central theme: its promotion of thought independent of action, strategy formulation above all as a process of conception rather than as one of learning. We see this most clearly in the fundamental step of the formulation process, the assessment of strengths and weaknesses. How does an organization know its strengths and weaknesses?" Compared to the company's past? Other specific companies? An idealized firm?
     2. Structure follows strategy... as the left foot follows the right
     3. Making strategy explicit: promoting inflexibility The argument is "that only by making strategy explicit can it serve its prime function of knitting people together to 'provide coherence to organizational action'." And rally the troops, and to be able to discuss it at all. "Explicit strategies, as implied by the reasons for wanting them, are blinders designed to focus direction and so to block out peripheral vision." "There is evidence from cognitive psychology that the explication of a strategy -- when having someone articulate what he or she is about to do anyway -- locks it in, breeding resistance to later change."
     3. Separation of formulation from implementation: detaching thinking from acting

     "Behind the premise of the formulation-implementation dichotomy lies a set of very ambitious assumptions: that environments can always be known, currently and for a period well into the future, in one central place, at least by capable strategist there. To state this more formally, by distinguishing formulation from implementation, the design school draws itself into two questionable assumptions in particular: first, that the formulator can be fully, or at least sufficiently, informed to formulate viable strategies, and second that the environment is sufficiently stable, or at least predictable, to ensure that the strategies formulated will remain viable after implementation. Under some conditions at least, one or the other of these assumptions proves false."

196. Minzberg -- Of Strategies deliberate and emergent

     

     

     

     

     "Now we begin to relax the condition of tight control (whether bureaucratic, personal or ideological) over the mass of actors in the organization and, in some cases, the condition of tight control over the environment as well. Leaders who have only partial control over other actors in an organization may design what can be called umbrella strategies. They set general guidelines for behaviour-define the boundaries-and then let other actors manoeuvre within them. In effect, these leaders establish kinds of umbrellas under which organizational actions are expected to fall-for example that all products should be designed for the high-priced end of the market (no matter what those products might be).

     When an environment is complex, and perhaps somewhat uncontrollable and unpredictable as well, a variety of actors in the organization must be able to respond to it. In other words, the patterns in organizational actions cannot be set deliberately in one central place, although the boundaries may be established there to constrain them. From the perspective of the leadership (if not, perhaps, the individual actors), therefore, strategies are allowed to emerge, at least within these boundaries. In fact, we can label the umbrella strategy not only deliberate and emergent (intended at the centre in its broad outlines but not in its specific details), but also 'deliberately emergent' (in the sense that the central leadership intentionally creates the conditions under which strategies can emerge)."

     

     

     "unconnected strategies tend to proliferate in organizations of experts, reflecting the complexity of the environments that they face and the resulting need for considerable control by the experts over their own work, providing freedom not only from administrators but sometimes from their own peers as well. Thus, many hospitals and universities appear to be little more than collections of personal strategies, with hardly any discernible central vision or umbrella, let alone plan, linking them together. Each expert pursues his or her own strategies-method of patient care, subject of research, style of teaching. On the other hand, in organizations that do pursue central, rather deliberate strategies, even planned ones, unconnected strategies can sometimes be found in remote enclaves, either tolerated by the system or lost within it.

     As indicated in the previous diagram, unconnected strategies may be deliberate or emergent for the actors involved (although always emergent from the perspective of the organization at large). Also, although they are shown within an umbrella strategy, clearly they can fall outside of these, too. Indeed, some unconnected strategies directly contradict umbrella ones (or even more centrally imposed planned or entrepreneurial ones), in effect developing on a clandestine basis. Allison (1971), for example, describes how President Kennedy's directive to defuse the missile bases in Turkey during the Cuban Missile Crisis was deliberately ignored by the military leaders. We show such clandestine strategies in the figure below as a sequence of arrows breaking out of an umbrella strategy. These arrows signify that even though the strategy is likely to be deliberate from the point of view of its proponents, it cannot be articulated as such: they cannot reveal their intentions. To minimize their risk of exposure, they seek to realize intentions subtly, action by action, as if the strategy was emergent. Of course, that increases the chances that the intentions will get deflected along the way. If they do not, there is still the risk that the leadership will realize what is happening-will recognize the pattern in the stream of actions-and stop the strategy. The leadership can, however, play the game too, waiting to see what happens, knowing it too can learn from clandestine behaviour. If the strategy should prove successful, it can always be accepted and broadened-internalized in the system as a (henceforth) deliberate strategy. Our suspicion is that much strategic adaptation results from unconnected strategies (whether or not clandestine) that succeed and so pervade the organization." my swift trust diagrams are better.

     

     "In no strategy so far discussed have we totally dropped the condition of prior intention. The next type is rather more clearly emergent. Here many different actors naturally converge on the same theme, or pattern, so that it becomes pervasive in the organization, without the need for any central direction or control. We call it the consensus strategy. Unlike the ideological strategy, in which a consensus forms around a system of beliefs (thus reflecting intentions widely accepted in the organization), the consensus strategy grows out of the mutual adjustment among different actors, as they learn from each other and from their various responses to the environment and thereby find a common, and probably unexpected, pattern that works for them. In other words, the convergence is not driven by any intentions of a central management, nor even by prior intentions widely shared among the other actors. It just evolves through the results of a host of individual actions. Of course, certain actors may actively promote the consensus, perhaps even negotiate with their colleagues to attain it (as in the congressional form of government). But the point is that it derives more from collective action than from collective intention."

     

     "At a more general level, the whole question of how managers learn from the experiences of their own organizations seems to be fertile ground for research. In our view, the fundamental difference between deliberate and emergent strategy is that whereas the former focuses on direction and control-getting desired things done-the latter opens up this notion of 'strategic learning'. Defining strategy as intended and conceiving it as deliberate, as has traditionally been done, effectively precludes the notion of strategic learning. Once the intentions have been set, attention is riveted on realizing them, not on adapting them. Messages from the environment tend to get blocked out. Adding the concept of emergent strategy, based on the definition of strategy as realized, opens the process of strategy making up to the notion of learning. Emergent strategy itself implies learning what works-taking one action at a time in search for that viable pattern or consistency. It is important to remember that emergent strategy means, not chaos, but, in essence, unintended order. It is also frequently the means by which deliberate strategies change. As shown in Figure 2, in the feedback loop added to our basic diagram, it is often through the identification of emergent strategies-its patterns never intended-that managers and others in the organization come to change their intentions. This is another way of saying that not a few deliberate strategies are simply emergent ones that have been uncovered and subsequently formalized. Of course, unrealized strategies are also a source of learning, as managers find out which of their intentions do not work, rejected either by their organizations themselves or else by environments that are less than acquiescent.

     We wish to emphasize that emergent strategy does not have to mean that management is out of control, only-in some cases at least-that it is open, flexible and responsive, in other words, willing to learn. Such behaviour is especially important when an environment is too unstable or complex to comprehend, or too imposing to defy. Openness to such emergent strategy enables management to act before everything is fully understood: to respond to an evolving reality rather than having to focus on a stable fantasy."

     Karl Moore

     Example of planned/directed strategy

     "We need to know more about the responding side of this directing/responding dialectic. More specifically, we would like to know more about how managers track the realized strategies of their own organizations. A major component of that elusive concept called 'strategic control' may be in managers doing what we do as researchers: searching for patterns in streams of organizational actions. Pattern recognition is likely to prove a crucial ability of effective managers and crucial to effective organizations may be the facilitation of self-awareness on the part of all its members of the patterns of its own actions and their consequences over time. Strategic choice requires that kind of awareness, a high degree of it is likely to characterize effective managers and effective organizations."

197. A sergeant in the L.A. County Sheriff's Department compared the experiment to Big Brother, even though he went ahead with it willingly. Is your city next?
198. http://googlemobileads.blogspot.co.uk/2012/08/navigating-new-multi-screen-world.html

     >We found that nine out of ten people use multiple screens sequentially and that smartphones are by far the most common starting point for sequential activity. So completing a task like booking a flight online or managing personal finances doesn’t just happen in one sitting on one device. In fact, 98% of sequential screeners move between devices in the same day to complete a task.

     >With simultaneous usage, we found that TV no longer commands our undivided attention, with 77% of viewers watching TV with another device in hand. In many cases people search on their devices, inspired by what they see on TV.

199. Hans Monderman is a traffic engineer who hates traffic signs. Oh, he can put up with the well-placed speed limit placard or a dangerous curve warning on a major highway, but Monderman considers most signs to be not only annoying but downright dangerous. To him, they are an admission of failure, a sign - literally - that a road designer somewhere hasn't done his job. "The trouble with traffic engineers is that when there's a problem with a road, they always try to add something," Monderman says. "To my mind, it's much better to remove things."
200. European traffic planners are dreaming of streets free of rules and directives. They want drivers and pedestrians to interact in a free and humane way, as brethren -- by means of friendly gestures, nods of the head and eye contact, without the harassment of prohibitions, restrictions and warning signs. A project implemented by the European Union is currently seeing seven cities and regions clear-cutting their forest of traffic signs. Ejby, in Denmark, is participating in the experiment, as are Ipswich in England and the Belgian town of Ostende.

     The utopia has already become a reality in Makkinga, in the Dutch province of Western Frisia. A sign by the entrance to the small town (population 1,000) reads "Verkeersbordvrij" -- "free of traffic signs." Cars bumble unhurriedly over precision-trimmed granite cobblestones. Stop signs and direction signs are nowhere to be seen. There are neither parking meters nor stopping restrictions. There aren't even any lines painted on the streets.

     "The many rules strip us of the most important thing: the ability to be considerate. We're losing our capacity for socially responsible behavior," says Dutch traffic guru Hans Monderman, one of the project's co-founders. "The greater the number of prescriptions, the more people's sense of personal responsibility dwindles."

201. For Joerg Klisch, hiring the first 60 workers to build heavy engines at his company’s new factory in South Carolina was easy. Finding the next 60 was not so simple.

     BMW’s plant in Greer, S.C., is its only one in the United States. The company offers a program called BMW Scholars that allows young workers to study at technical colleges and work. “It seemed like we had sucked up everybody who knew about diesel engines,” said Mr. Klisch, vice president for North American operations of Tognum America. “It wasn’t working as we had planned.”

     So Mr. Klisch did what he would have done back home in Germany: He set out to train them himself. Working with five local high schools and a career center in Aiken County, S.C. — and a curriculum nearly identical to the one at the company’s headquarters in Friedrichshafen — Tognum now has nine juniors and seniors enrolled in its apprenticeship program.

     Inspired by a partnership between schools and industry that is seen as a key to Germany’s advanced industrial capability and relatively low unemployment rate, projects like the one at Tognum are practically unheard-of in the United States.

     But experts in government and academia, along with those inside companies like BMW, which has its only American factory in South Carolina, say apprenticeships are a desperately needed option for younger workers who want decent-paying jobs, or increasingly, any job at all. And without more programs like the one at Tognum, they maintain, the nascent recovery in American manufacturing will run out of steam for lack of qualified workers.

     “South Carolina offers a fantastic model for what we can do nationally,” said Ben Olinsky, co-author of a forthcoming report by the Center for American Progress, a liberal Washington research organization, recommending a vast expansion in apprenticeships.

     Despite South Carolina’s progress and the public support for apprenticeships from President Obama, who cited the German model in his last State of the Union address, these positions are becoming harder to find in other states. Since 2008, the number of apprentices has fallen by nearly 40 percent, according to the Center for American Progress study.

     “As a nation, over the course of the last couple of decades, we have regrettably and mistakenly devalued apprenticeships and training,” said Thomas E. Perez, the secretary of labor. “We need to change that, and you will hear the president talk a lot about it in the weeks and months ahead.”

     In November, the White House announced a new $100 million grant program aimed at advancing technical training in high schools. But veteran apprenticeship advocates say the Obama administration has been slow to act.

     “The results have not matched the rhetoric in terms of direct funding for apprenticeships so far,” said Robert Lerman, a professor of economics at American University in Washington. “I’m hoping for a new push.”

202. Here’s a little-known fact: Berkshire Hathaway, the fifth-largest company in the United States, with some $162.5 billion in revenue and 300,000 employees worldwide, has no general counsel that oversees the holding company’s dozens of units. There is no human resources department, either.

     If that sounds like a corporate utopia, that’s probably because it is. To some people in this day and age — given the daily onslaught of headlines about scandal and fraud in corporate America — that also may sound almost like corporate negligence.

     Mr. Munger’s thought experiment about trust is being studied at the Rock Center for Corporate Governance at Stanford University. A professor wrote a paper last month about his contention, examining its suitability to corporate structures.

     As Pollyannaish as Mr. Munger may sound, his view has a profound counterintuitive truth to it: Behavioral scientists and psychologists have long contended that “trust” is, to some degree, one of the most powerful forces within organizations.

     Mr. Munger and Mr. Buffett argue that with the right basic controls, finding trustworthy managers and giving them an enormous amount of leeway creates more value than if they are forced to constantly look over their shoulders at human resources departments and lawyers monitoring their every move.

203. 

     Only 30% of those that do not feel valued at work are satisfied with their jobs.

     

     24% don't trust their employer, 32% say employer is not always honest and truthful

204. It’s not hard to imagine how the future behaviour of crowds might be embedded in the Twitter stream. People often signal their intent to meet in advance and even coordinate their behaviour using social media. So this social media activity is a leading indicator of future crowd behaviour.

     That makes it seem clear that predicting future crowd behaviour is simply a matter of picking this leading indicator out of the noise.

     Kallus says this is possible by mining tweets for any mention of future events and then analysing trends associated with them. “The gathering of crowds into a single action can often be seen through trends appearing in this data far in advance,” he says.

     It turns out that exactly this kind of analysis is available from a company called Recorded Future based in Cambridge, which scans 300,000 different web sources in seven different languages from all over the world. It then extracts mentions of future events for later analysis.

     It’s this data that Kallus has analysed to predict significant protests. “We find that the mass of publicly available information online has the power to unveil the future actions of crowds,” he says.

     First, Kallus defines a significant protest as one that receives much more mainstream media coverage than usual.

     He then analyses the mainstream coverage to see when significant protests actually occur and looks for activity in the Twitter feed that precedes the protests. If these are the predictive indicators, then it is possible to look for similar types of activity and assume that this is predictive too.

     Kallus tests this idea by studying the tweets associated with the 2013 coup d’état in Egypt, which was centered around the anniversary of President Morsi’s rule, triggering significant protests during which he was removed from power by the Egyptian army.

     Kallus says that evidence of the protests was clearly visible in the Twitter feed well in advance, as were the advanced protests that occurred before the anniversary. What’s more, the social media content predicted that the protests would go on for weeks beyond the anniversary.

     Kallus’s conclusion that tweets can accurately predict significant protests in advance is an interesting one. There’s no question that the evidence is there to be found in the social media in retrospect. There is no shortage of people who make these kinds of predictions about historical events using historical data.

     The bigger question is whether it’s possible to pick out this evidence in advance. In other words, is possible to make predictions before the events actually occur?

205. For some time now, researchers have attempted to extract useful information from this firehose. One idea is that the stream of thought is representative of the mental state of humankind at any instant. Various groups have devised algorithms to analyse this datastream hoping to use it to take the temperature of various human states.

     One algorithm, called the Google-Profile of Mood States (GPOMS), records the level of six states: happiness, kindness, alertness, sureness, vitality and calmness.

     The question that Bollen and co ask is whether any of these states correlates with stock market prices. After all, they say, it is not entirely beyond credence that the rise and fall of stock market prices is influenced by the public mood.

     So these guys took 9.7 million tweets posted by 2.7 million tweeters between March and December 2008 and looked for correlations between the GPOMS indices and whether Dow Jones Industrial Average rose of fell each day.

     Their extraordinary conclusion is that there really is a correlation between the Dow Jones Industrial Average and one of the GPOMS indices–calmness.

     In fact, the calmness index appears to be a good predictor of whether the Dow Jones Industrial Average goes up or down between 2 and 6 days later. “We find an accuracy of 87.6% in predicting the daily up and down changes in the closing values of the Dow Jones Industrial Average,” say Bollen and co

206. Over the last decade or so, two Israeli researchers, Avi Assor and Guy Roth, and their colleagues in the United States and Belgium, have conducted a series of experiments whose consistent finding is that when children feel their parents’ affection varies depending on the extent to which they are well behaved, self-controlled or impressive at school or sports, this promotes “the development of a fragile, contingent and unstable sense of self.”

     Other researchers, meanwhile, have shown that high self-esteem is beneficial, but that even more desirable is unconditional self-esteem: a solid core of belief in yourself, an abiding sense that you’re competent and worthwhile — even when you screw up or fall short. In other words, the very unconditionality that seems to fuel attacks on participation trophies and the whole “self-esteem movement” turns out to be a defining feature of psychological health. It’s precisely what we should be helping our children to acquire.

207. There seems to be something about big cities that makes murder more likely but suicide less so
208. Between 1977 and 2009 the total number of annual bike trips more than tripled, while the bike’s share of all trips rose from 0.6% to 1%.
209. http://www.theatlanticcities.com/neighborhoods/2012/06/hotel-neighborhood/2284/ They've dubbed the project "Urbanauts," they say because the geography of the "hotel" encourages visitors to get out and explore the neighborhood. "Our 'breakfast room' is a traditional cafe around the corner, our 'spa' is the Moroccan hammam two streets away," says Kholmayr. "We've taken the hotel concept and made it horizontal, so the whole infrastructure of a four-star hotel is spread over the surrounding area."
210. >Sellers and his colleagues analyze the political characteristics of cities and suburbs across many advanced nations. Sellers's own chapter covers the U.S., and it includes some eye-opening insights. While most previous research has looked mainly at states and counties, Sellers has developed a detailed data set on the municipalities that make up America's metro regions. He tracks the political geography of the 1996, 2000 and 2004 elections across twelve U.S. metros with populations of at least 450,000: New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle, Cincinnati, Fresno, Birmingham, Syracuse, Wichita, and Kalamazoo.

     >Democrats have a "decisive" advantage in dense, urban localities and poorer, majority-minority suburbs. In the affluent suburbs, Sellers explains, "Republicans enjoy an analogous, if less dramatic" advantage. He notes that "a pervasive divide separates the Republican low density areas of metropolitan peripheries from the Democratic urban centres and minority suburbs." At the broad metropolitan level, votes follow the same red/blue, rich/poor pattern identified by Larry Bartels and Andrew Gelman at the state level. Sellers found that municipalities with educated and affluent voters tended to vote with their state's winners – they voted more Republican in red states and more Democratic in blue states.

     >With these bases locked down, the key political footballs – the new "swing states," so to speak – are the swelling ranks of economically distressed suburbs, where poverty has been growing and where the economic crisis hit especially hard. There are now more poor people living in America's suburbs than its center cities, and as a recent Brookings Institution report found, both Republican and Democratic districts have been affected by this reality.

     swinging #suburbs has a whole new meaning

     this relates to the exurban decline and the disappearing demographics of GOP voters: The Death Of The Fringe Suburb https://workflowy.com/#/06e5d05c-5f90-7f0f-bd45-9599fc9df9c0

211. >In the late 1990s, high-end outer suburbs contained most of the expensive housing in the United States, as measured by price per square foot, according to data I analyzed from the Zillow real estate database. Today, the most expensive housing is in the high-density, pedestrian-friendly neighborhoods of the center city and inner suburbs. Some of the most expensive neighborhoods in their metropolitan areas are Capitol Hill in Seattle; Virginia Highland in Atlanta; German Village in Columbus, Ohio, and Logan Circle in Washington. Considered slums as recently as 30 years ago, they have been transformed by gentrification.

     >Simply put, there has been a profound structural shift — a reversal of what took place in the 1950s, when drivable suburbs boomed and flourished as center cities emptied and withered.

     >The shift is durable and lasting because of a major demographic event: the convergence of the two largest generations in American history, the baby boomers (born between 1946 and 1964) and the millennials (born between 1979 and 1996), which today represent half of the total population.

     >Many boomers are now empty nesters and approaching retirement. Generally this means that they will downsize their housing in the near future. Boomers want to live in a walkable urban downtown, a suburban town center or a small town, according to a recent survey by the National Association of Realtors.

     >The millennials are just now beginning to emerge from the nest — at least those who can afford to live on their own. This coming-of-age cohort also favors urban downtowns and suburban town centers — for lifestyle reasons and the convenience of not having to own cars.

     >Over all, only 12 percent of future homebuyers want the drivable suburban-fringe houses that are in such oversupply, according to the Realtors survey. This lack of demand all but guarantees continued price declines. Boomers selling their fringe housing will only add to the glut. Nothing the federal government can do will reverse this.

     Only 12% of future homebuyers want to live in exurbia

212. Through the lens of democratising urban planning, we see examples like “Sub-Plan” in the UK and “Tallinna Planeeringute Juhend” in Tallinn: simple, user-centred guidebooks explaining how to exploit loopholes in urban planning legislation to more creatively and proactively rework your city. We can see movements like Friends of Arnold Circus in London, where the community has brokered a deal with its cash-strapped municipal government such that local maintenance is a shared responsibility. The outcome is that what used to be a dilapidated, syringe-strewn, rusty Victorian bandstand is now an active and well-tended community garden. Similarly, in Berlin, we see the residents of Schöneberg creating and maintaining their own planter boxes outside their apartment blocks, sometimes asking the city government for pe...d reindeer from the Finns. To locals, it must feel like a new Helsinki emerging from within the hardened shell of the old.

     But interestingly, while such events are a kind of slow-release capsule in changing the culture of the city, changing the stories that the city tells about itself, such pop-ups do not strategically create systemic change, just as Occupy, Arab Spring and UK Riots have not projected any kind of suggestion for a new, resilient decision-making culture. Though it has spread throughout Finland and worldwide—a major marketing success the municipality can barely mention, as Ravintolapäivä still hovers in Helsinki’s legal grey areas—Restaurant Day is largely a phenomenon enjoyed by urban hipsters, and is here today, gone tomorrow. The only problem with Restaurant Day is the Day After Restaurant Day. There, the city snaps back to its previous shape, with no diverse food offering, little creative use of the street, and the hardening chrysalis of the old city visible again.

213. The fundamental problem with dallas’ approach to road building over the course of the past 70 years (and really, American cities in general), is that road construction increases capacity in order to make moving through and out of a city more efficient, thus enabling the economic development of the suburbs and diluting the connectivity (and therefore vibrancy) of the center core. City officials still believe that enabling traffic to move through and out of dallas is good for dallas’ growth and development. Do projects like parking lots and highways create some economic development in dallas? Yes, but they spur on relatively small and isolated investments, while discouraging density and enabling an overall transportation ecology that makes it more economically efficient to live outside of an urban area and yet utilize that area’s cultural and recreational amenities. - Peter Simek
214. It turns out that people like hanging out in public more than they used to, and those who most like hanging out are people using their phones. On the steps of the Met, “loiterers” — those present in at least two consecutive film samples, inhabiting the same area for 15 seconds or more — constituted 7 percent of the total (that is to say, the other 93 percent were just passing through). That was a 57 percent increase from 30 years earlier. And those using mobile phones there were five times as likely to “loiter” as other people. In other words, not that many people are talking, or reading, texting or playing Candy Crush on the phone, but those who do stick around longer. (In the case of Bryant Park, it doesn’t hurt that the area is no longer an open-air drug market — a major problem that P.P.S. was trying to root out in t...t uptick could be explained in part by an increase in the number of women on the street, many of them alone.

     In fact, this was Hampton’s most surprising finding: Today there are just a lot more women in public, proportional to men. It’s not just on Chestnut Street in Philadelphia. On the steps of the Met, the proportion of women increased by 33 percent, and in Bryant Park by 18 percent. The only place women decreased proportionally was in Boston’s Downtown Crossing — a major shopping area. “The decline of women within this setting could be interpreted as a shift in gender roles,” Hampton writes. Men seem to be “taking on an activity that was traditionally regarded as feminine.”

     Across the board, Hampton found that the story of public spaces in the last 30 years has not been aloneness, or digital distraction, but gender equity. “I mean, who would’ve thought that, in America, 30 years ago, women were not in public the same way they are now?” Hampton said. “We don’t think about that.”

215. So the scientists turned to the Hadza, who still live much as humans did millennia ago. They outfitted 44 of the tribespeople with GPS watches and asked them to hunt and gather for several days while wearing the units.

     The resulting data showed that the tribespeople frequently employed the Levy walk, moving briefly in one direction, then shifting and covering nearby ground, until that area was exhausted of potential food, at which point they’d set off on a longer-distance hike to new ground and there begin the short explorations again.

     This finding has surprising relevance, even for those of us whose food is arrayed in grocery aisles, said David Raichlen, an associate professor of anthropology at the University of Arizona who led the study. The GPS readings reinforce the likelihood that Levy-style walking patterns are hard-wired into the human brain and predict how we behave. Even before this study was published, he said, planners in some cities had used the theory that people Levy-walk — spending much of their time exploring one area, with occasional “long steps” or forays into another part of a city — to determine where to place cellphone towers. At a more individual level, he said, the discovery may help to explain why, after spending hours in a small, familiar office, many of us feel an itch to wander the halls in search of new geography.

     But the most resonant implication of the study, Dr. Raichlen said, is that Levy walking patterns bind modern, urban humans to the natural world. “This pattern” of movement “emerges so often in so many different species and human societies,” he said. “It links us” to the flight of the albatross and to an ancient part of ourselves, even when we’re strolling toward Disney’s Tomorrowland.

216. > In more specific computer science terms, a social graph consists of people (the nodes); information about the people (metadata on the nodes); the relationships between the people (the edges between the nodes); and content shared across them (information flowing along the edges). A work graph consists of the units of work (tasks, ideas, clients, goals, agenda items); information about that work (relevant conversations, files, status, metadata); how it all fits together; and then the people involved with the work (who’s responsible for what? which people need to be kept in the loop?).

217. Four of the companies in the Winter 2014 Y Combinator class, launching at YC Demo Day today, are also in Layer’s beta program. They've chosen Layer to help power rich communications in their apps and products, which span a broad spectrum from messaging apps to hardware devices, from events to healthcare, and are in both B2B and B2C markets.

218. Share responsibility for repeating, day-to-day tasks Task management for modern, self-organising teams Manage less. Achieve more. Build better teams. Automatic, smart and fair assignment reduces stress, increases happiness, and frees up more of your time.

219. The open office was originally conceived by a team from Hamburg, Germany, in the nineteen-fifties, to facilitate communication and idea flow. But a growing body of evidence suggests that the open office undermines the very things that it was designed to achieve. In June, 1997, a large oil and gas company in western Canada asked a group of psychologists at the University of Calgary to monitor workers as they transitioned from a traditional office arrangement to an open one. The psychologists assessed the employees’ satisfaction with their surroundings, as well as their stress level, job performance, and interpersonal relationships before the transition, four weeks after the transition, and, finally, six months afterward. The employees suffered according to every measure: the new space was disruptive, stressful, and cumbersome, and, instead of feeling closer, coworkers felt distant, dissatisfied, and resentful. Productivity fell.

     In 2011, the organizational psychologist Matthew Davis reviewed more than a hundred studies about office environments. He found that, though open offices often fostered a symbolic sense of organizational mission, making employees feel like part of a more laid-back, innovative enterprise, they were damaging to the workers’ attention spans, productivity, creative thinking, and satisfaction. Compared with standard offices, employees experienced more uncontrolled interactions, higher levels of stress, and lower levels of concentration and motivation. When David Craig surveyed some thirty-eight thousand workers, he found that interruptions by colleagues were detrimental to productivity, and that the more senior the employee, the worse she fared.

     Psychologically, the repercussions of open offices are relatively straightforward. Physical barriers have been closely linked to psychological privacy, and a sense of privacy boosts job performance. Open offices also remove an element of control, which can lead to feelings of helplessness. In a 2005 study that looked at organizations ranging from a Midwest auto supplier to a Southwest telecom firm, researchers found that the ability to control the environment had a significant effect on team cohesion and satisfaction. When workers couldn’t change the way that things looked, adjust the lighting and temperature, or choose how to conduct meetings, spirits plummeted.

     An open environment may even have a negative impact on our health. In a recent study of more than twenty-four hundred employees in Denmark, Jan Pejtersen and his colleagues found that as the number of people working in a single room went up, the number of employees who took sick leave increased apace. Workers in two-person offices took an average of fifty per cent more sick leave than those in single offices, while those who worked in fully open offices were out an average of sixty-two per cent more.

     But the most problematic aspect of the open office may be physical rather than psychological: simple noise. In laboratory settings, noise has been repeatedly tied to reduced cognitive performance. The psychologist Nick

     Perham, who studies the effect of sound on how we think, has found that office commotion impairs workers’ ability to recall information, and even to do basic arithmetic. Listening to music to block out the office intrusion doesn’t help: even that, Perham found, impairs our mental acuity. Exposure to noise in an office may also take a toll on the health of employees. In a study by the Cornell University psychologists Gary Evans and Dana Johnson, clerical workers who were exposed to open-office noise for three hours had increased levels of epinephrine—a hormone that we often call adrenaline, associated with the so-called fight-or-flight response. What’s more, Evans and Johnson discovered that people in noisy environments made fewer ergonomic adjustments than they would in private, causing increased physical strain. The subjects subsequently attempted to solve fewer puzzles than they had after working in a quiet environment; in other words, they became less motivated and less creative.

220. <blockquote>In 2010, to find out how work nomads were handling work at home and peek behind the curtain, Coalesse did something unusual: it followed people into their homes. Emily Ulrich, Coalesse’s senior researcher at that time, conducted observational research in the homes, offices, and other places the New York City and San Francisco Bay area study participants worked.

     What Ulrich confirmed and reported in a Coalesse report titled “Untethered” [see 360 Magazine, Issue 62] was that mobile technologies have indeed untethered work from desks and offices. Time-pressed knowledge workers are working anywhere they choose. And because availability and responsiveness are so important in business, a back-and-forth toggling between life and work happens constantly for many people.

     Naturally, toggling comes with stresses. The people Ulrich studied are experiencing this radical change in a lonely way, unsupported ergonomically or emotionally, working long hours on mobile devices at dining tables, on couches, and, in more than a few cases, in bed late at night. According to International Data Corporation (IDC) there are now 1.2 billion mobile workers worldwide. In the United States, says IDC, almost 120 million workers are mobile, representing 75.5% of the total workforce. (Japan is next with almost 50 million mobile workers; 74.5% of its workforce).

     Since 2010, things have only become more intense for mobile workers as technology has continued to advance and designing spaces that support mobile workers has become more complex. Most people are connected throughout the day to multiple clouds through smartphones, tablets, and laptops. And because networking and social media options have expanded so dramatically, so too has the time commitment to manage them.

     Yet two stark contradictions remain. Mobile work outside the office is still not a mainstream consideration. And research is scarce on connecting the habits and needs of mobile workers with the technology trends that are driving changes in the workplace.

     According to Primo Orpilla, a principal of Studio O+A, a San Francisco-based alternative officing’ firm that has designed spaces for Facebook and Evernote among many others, “There’s a real need to grasp the needs of the ‘other workplace’—the transitory spaces, the hallways, the break areas, the landscape outside the building, the coffee shop down the street. People can work anywhere these days so there are many opportunities to capture that work or to create that interesting space. But not enough people are thinking about it.”

     Coalesse has been giving it a lot of thought. Bob Arko, the company’s creative director, says there is a vacuum to fill. “Architects and designers are not typically commissioned to do this kind of research and they rely on the major manufacturers for a more comprehensive perspective on workplace trends. At Coalesse, we are extending our own research focus beyond the traditional work environment and attempting to understand work behaviors in the context of people’s broader lives, including most recently the increasingly nomadic nature of work.”

     [...]

     After the digital dust settled, [Shujan] Bertrand distilled her interviews and blogging streams into a map of patterns. She produced a comprehensive report titled, “Nomadic Work Landscape Design Research” that spans 111 pages in a detailed slide deck.

     [...]

     Three formal product-development approaches have emerged from the Coalesse research: Inspiring Destinations, Optimizing Mobility and Cultivating the Senses.</blockquote>

     steelcase #nomadic-workers #coalesse

221. “This has legs,” says Rick Miller, who has experience changing the fabric of American society. Back in the early ’90s, when he was doing public relations work for Levi’s, he and his team championed a wacky idea called Casual Friday. They distributed a guide that suggested polished looks with khakis and jeans, and a new sort of office style was born.

     One secret to their success? Loosening up the dress code was a no-cost benefit to offer employees.

     The timing is even better now, Miller adds. Companies are once again pinching pennies, and they’re more concerned than ever about rising health-care costs. Plus, social media could help spread the trend faster than you can say “selfie.”