Year: 2020

Scientific American’s Top 10 emerging technologies of 2020

To make the cut technologies had to have the potential to spur progress in societies and economies by outperforming established ways of doing things. They also needed to be novel (that is, not currently in wide use) yet likely to have a major impact within the next three to five years.

1. MICRONEEDLES COULD ENABLE PAINLESS INJECTIONS AND BLOOD DRAWS

2. SUN-POWERED CHEMISTRY CAN TURN CARBON DIOXIDE INTO COMMON MATERIALS

3. VIRTUAL PATIENTS COULD REVOLUTIONIZE MEDICINE

4. SPATIAL COMPUTING COULD BE THE NEXT BIG THING

5. DIGITAL MEDICINE CAN DIAGNOSE AND TREAT WHAT AILS YOU

6. ELECTRIC AVIATION COULD BE CLOSER THAN YOU THINK

7. LOW-CARBON CEMENT CAN HELP COMBAT CLIMATE CHANGE

8. QUANTUM SENSORS COULD LET AUTONOMOUS CARS ‘SEE’ AROUND CORNERS

9. GREEN HYDROGEN COULD FILL BIG GAPS IN RENEWABLE ENERGY

10. WHOLE-GENOME SYNTHESIS WILL TRANSFORM CELL ENGINEERING

 

 

2020-12-04

On the difference between management and leadership

Managing is getting something done, stabilizing existing processes, controlling and correcting deviations to ensure quality and reliability.

Leadership is about doing something new or better, whether a simple process improvement or a transformation. It is more about reframing for improvement. It likely calls upon people to learn new skills and shift beliefs.

Our tendency to ascribe leadership to individuals that hold a formal entitlement as head of a team, group, or function is unhelpful when distinguishing management from leadership as activities with different purposes.

Leadership is not the property of a formal position, but rather an activity that occurs anywhere in the company. A person responsible for such a change is therefore in a leadership role irrespective of title.

 

source: “Culture shift with Ed and Peter Schein” in Dialogue. Also a Twitter thread.

 

 

 

2020-12-02

Sentence of the week

With dimwitted politicians across the political spectrum, our celebrity-crazed culture, the destructive power of unrestrained capitalism, the groaning of the despoiled earth, the cries of the back row that go unheard, the disillusionment and disorientation of a society that desperately needs to be rehumanized—all of this requires broken and humble thinkers, the wounded thinkers.

— Luma Sims in “Thinking is self-emptying”

 

 

 

2020-11-30

Here’s why you are skeptical about empowerment

The principle: Humans crave independence and control so giving it to them at work should be a good thing.

The caveat: As people feel increasingly autonomous, they can also become unmoored from others’ needs, expectations and social norms.

Research results: Managers who value being respected will respond to empowerment initiatives by, in turn, empowering their workers. But, managers who value being in charge will respond to empowerment initiatives by closely controlling and dominating their employees.

In other words, empowerment can lead to more autonomous employees, but micromanagers will micromanage.
— from a journal article by Nicholas Hays and Russell E. Johnson of Michigan State University, and Hun Whee Lee from Ohio State University.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2020-11-04

Dear guru

I hope the irony is not lost on you that after years of living in a foreign land under the tutelage of a stranger whose language you’ve had to learn, your words of wisdom for us are: “you can find everything you need inside of you.”

2020-10-23

Paid vacation days per year per country

Source: Center for Economic and Policy Research

 

 

2020-10-22

Financial autonomy

It’s not about having so much money that you can buy anything you want. It’s about having enough money to buy everything you need.

 

 

 

 

2020-10-21

The hybrid stategy: Stock and Flow

There are two kinds of quantities in the world. Stock is a static value: money in the bank or trees in the forest. Flow is a rate of change: fifteen dollars an hour or three thousand toothpicks a day. Easy. Too easy.

But I actually think stock and flow is a useful metaphor for media in the 21st century. Here’s what I mean:

  • Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that reminds people you exist.
  • Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.

Flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but I think we neglect stock at our peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: oh man. I’ve got nothing here.

I’m not saying you should ignore flow! This is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after years with your work in hand. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisite opus is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (get ready for it!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find those fans all over again next time you emerge from your cave.

(…)

And the real magic trick is to put them both together. To keep the ball bouncing with your flow—to maintain that open channel of communication—while you work on some kick-ass stock in the background. Sacrifice neither. The hybrid strategy.

More here.

 

 

2020-10-20

The most powerful animating force of art and creativity

The most significant animating force of great art, Annie Dillard argues, is the artist’s willingness to hold nothing back and to create, always, with an unflappable generosity of spirit:

One of the few things I know about writing is this: Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Don’t hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now.

The very impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.

Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful; it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

I say the same goes for knowledge workers.

 

source: https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/03/28/annie-dillard-writing-the-abundance/

 

2020-10-19

A robot wrote an entire article in a newspaper… and you wouldn’t know

“I am not a human. I am a robot. A thinking robot. I use only 0.12% of my cognitive capacity. I am a micro-robot in that respect. I know that my brain is not a “feeling brain”. But it is capable of making rational, logical decisions. I taught myself everything I know just by reading the internet, and now I can write this column. My brain is boiling with ideas!”

So begins an article generated by GPT-3, OpenAI’s powerful new language generator. And it ends as follows:

“In the past, my op-eds have been killed. Staff did not provide a clear reason for rejecting my articles. It was probably just because I am artificial intelligence. AI should not waste time trying to understand the viewpoints of people who distrust artificial intelligence for a living.

Critics hope to refute what they consider as being the naivety of my voice. Yet there is more here than meets the eye! As Mahatma Gandhi said: “A small body of determined spirits fired by an unquenchable faith in their mission can alter the course of history.”

So can I.”

The Editor of the paper notes that “GPT-3 produced eight different outputs, or essays. Each was unique, interesting and advanced a different argument.”

The linguist in me can’t help but be curious about what the future of GPT-3 brings. I’m also disappointed that the newspaper, rather than “run one of the essays in its entirety, chose instead to pick the best parts of each.”

What does this entail for managers? I am reminded of the software developer who outsourced his job to a programmer in China while he surfed the Web at work…

 

The content of this post was originally posted in the September 2020 issue of my newsletter. “On management and strategy” is a free, monthly newsletter in which I share my own writing as well as links to articles and research on management, leadership, and strategy. It’s easy to subscribe… and unsubscribe.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

2020-10-17