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S3Want to Be More Productive? Try Doing Less. - Harvard Business Review (No paywall)  If we want to ramp up our productivity and happiness at home and at work, we should actually be doing less. But that’s incredibly difficult as you’re balancing work, parenting, friendships, and more. When you stop doing the things that make you feel busy but aren’t getting you results, then you end up with more than enough time for what matters. You can follow a simple exercise to help decide what activities on your to-do list brings you the most value, and which you can stop doing. Decide on an area of your life where you’d like to have better results and less stress. Write down the tasks you do in that area on one side of a piece of paper, and on the other, list successes you’ve had in that area. Then, identify which tasks directly contributed to those successes. Anything that didn’t directly contribute can be eliminated, greatly reduced, or delegated to someone else.
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S4"Jootsing": The Key to Creativity “Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame. If you draw a giraffe, you must draw him with a long neck. If in your bold creative way you hold yourself free to draw a giraffe with a short neck, you will really find that you are not free to draw a giraffe.” —G.K. Chesterton
Dennett explains that jootsing is the method behind creativity in science, philosophy, and the arts: “Creativity, that ardently sought but only rarely found virtue, often is a heretofore unimagined violation of the rules of the system from which it springs.” The rules within a system could be things like the idea that a painting must have a frame, a haiku must only have seventeen syllables, or a depiction of landscape must have a blue sky. But galleries hang paintings without frames all the time. Haiku without seventeen syllables win international contests. And landscape paintings don’t need to contain a sky, let alone a blue one.
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S5S6Nvidia is Worth More Than All of These Companies Combined Despite a challenging funding environment, nearly 20,000 deals closed, highlighting its outsized role in launching tech startups. Both OpenAI and rival Anthropic are headquartered in the city, thanks to its broad pool of tech talent and venture capital firms. Overall, 11,812 startups were based in the San Francisco Bay Area in 2023, equal to about 20% of startups in America.
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S9Between Mathematics and the Miraculous: The Stunning Pendulum Drawings of Swiss Healer and Artist Emma Kunz Emma Kunz (May 23, 1892–January 16, 1963) was forty-six and the world was aflame with war when she became an artist. She had worked at a knitting factory and as a housekeeper. She had written poetry, publishing a collection titled Life in the interlude between the two World Wars. Having lost two of her siblings to childhood illness, then both her surviving brother and her father to suicide when she was seventeen, she had coped with the physical fragility of life and the spiritual difficulty of bearing our mortality by becoming a healer. Her friends called her Penta, from the Pythagorean symbol for health — a pentagram drawn with a single line.
Inspired by the Swiss Renaissance alchemist, philosopher, and physician Paracelsus, who fused the divinations and prophecies with the building blocks of the scientific method in his experiments and observations in chemistry and biology that pioneered the field of toxicology, Penta came to see the physical and spiritual dimensions of reality as one.
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S13Coaching As Collaboration The concept of coaching has been a hot topic in business circles for a number of years. It now almost seems a given that top executives employ the services of a coach to help them become better leaders and advance their careers. But the rise in popularity of coaching has also thrown up a number of questions: What really makes a good coach? What can and should you expect from your coach? How can you pick someone that’s right for you?
These are just some of the questions addressed in this new podcast featuring Derek Deasy and Enoch Li, co-directors of the INSEAD MBA Personal Leadership Development Programme (PLDP). What’s clear is that a need for openness, engagement and a willingness to collaborate with your coach are all essential if the experience is really going to make an impact.
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S14Moving past gen AI's honeymoon phase: Seven hard truths for CIOs to get from pilot to scale The honeymoon phase of generative AI (gen AI) is over. As most organizations are learning, it is relatively easy to build gee-whiz gen AI pilots, but turning them into at-scale capabilities is another story. The difficulty in making that leap goes a long way to explaining why just 11 percent of companies have adopted gen AI at scale, according to our latest tech trends research.1“McKinsey Technology Trends Outlook 2024,” forthcoming on McKinsey.com.
This maturing phase is a welcome development because it gives CIOs an opportunity to turn gen AI’s promise into business value. Yet while most CIOs know that pilots don’t reflect real-world scenarios—that’s not really the point of a pilot, after all—they often underestimate the amount of work that needs to be done to get gen AI production ready. Ultimately, getting the full value from gen AI requires companies to rewire how they work, and putting in place a scalable technology foundation is a key part of that process.
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S15Bridging the women's health gap: A country-level exploration Women’s health is not a siloed category, but rather one that affects individuals, families, and the economy. Women’s health encompasses the range of health experiences that affect women uniquely, differently, or disproportionately versus men. The women’s health gap is the disease burden associated with inequities between women and men in intervention efficacy, care delivery, and data.
A recent analysis from the McKinsey Health Institute, in collaboration with the World Economic Forum, has shown that closing the women’s health gap globally could result in better overall health, fewer early deaths, and a boost in the economy. Addressing the women’s health gap could enhance the quality of life for women throughout their lives and improve future generations’ health and wealth.
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S17S18S19S20S21Giant structure in space challenges our understanding of the universe It is the second giant structure found by teams led by Alexia Lopez, an astronomer at the University of Central Lancashire in the UK. The first, a giant arc of galaxies, was unveiled in 2022. That structure is 3.3 billion light-years across and appears in the same region of sky at the same distance from Earth as the Big Ring.
“BAOs arise from oscillations in the early universe and today should appear, statistically at least, as spherical shells in the arrangement of galaxies. However, detailed analysis of the Big Ring revealed it is not really compatible with the BAO explanation: the Big Ring is too large and is not spherical.”
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S22S23S24S25S26Why leaders should be wary of "silver bullets" and "disguised donkeys" “Good managers [and leaders I suggest] fail when they attempt to use silver-bullet solutions to complex problems.”James A. Highsmith, Adaptive Software Development (2013)
Given that a leader’s main challenge is “creating an organization that can thrive and change, or at least be comfortable in change,” according to Diana Wu David, that creates tension. Wu David is a former Financial Times Executive, was a management consultant, and is currently a lecturer on Columbia Business School’s EMBA Global Asia. Twenty years ago, through the advent of Lean, Six Sigma and Deming-inspired approaches to efficiency, leaders were encouraged to become experts at “just in time.” Wu David says, that leaders “got good at ‘just in time’ and are having to get used to ‘just in case’.”
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S27How AI helped write a new novel Each chapter in Mauro Javier Cárdenas’ latest novel American Abductions is a single sentence careening its way through a mashup of dialogue, pop culture references, political allusions, social media, jokes, and wordplay, as well as observations and theories scientific, spiritual, and conspiratorial.
In other words, it’s composed of the ephemera that make up our everyday lives, but compressed into an inexorable torrent of information, as though we the readers were AI algorithms, barraged with humanity’s endless discharge of data, and tasked with making sense of it all. The allusion to artificial intelligence is not incidental: The technology not only plays a key role in the novel’s headlong narrative, but Cárdenas also directly leveraged AI in the creation of the book.
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S28Words do matter--and you might be using them all wrong While jargon has the advantage of communicating a lot of information in a short amount of time, it has deeply alienating effects on those even slightly outside the field of reference. Director, actor, and master communicator Alan Alda uses examples from film sets and hospital rooms to illustrate jargon’s impact on our interactions, and how it can exclude those we are trying to communicate with.
Now more than ever, we need to find ways to foster connections and encourage close relationships with one another. The solution, Alda explains, is to use jargon only when you are confident that it is completely understood by the person you are speaking with. Otherwise, you risk losing the opportunity to truly communicate, causing misunderstanding and even disinterest.
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S29TikTok Cracking Down on State-Owned Media Accounts The company, which started labeling state-affiliated media two years ago, announced in a statement late last week that identified accounts attempting to "reach communities outside their home country on current global events and affairs" will not appear on the main feed where users watch videos.
The new policy comes a few weeks after a study by the nonprofit Brookings Institution that said Russian state-affiliated accounts had boosted their use of the platform and were posting more messages in English and Spanish.
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S30This European Trend Is Suddenly Going Mainstream in the U.S. It's a Lesson in Emotionally Intelligent Communication Years ago, I noticed an interesting trend among my friends and colleagues here in Europe: Instead of writing text or direct messages, they had begun sending me voice memos. Some were short, a minute or less. Others were not so short, even reaching up to five minutes--or longer.
Recently, it seems this practice is going mainstream in the U.S. "Burned out on screens, people are sending lengthy voice notes instead," reported the Washington Post last week. And this morning LinkedIn published a short article on "The rise of the voice memo."
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S313 Succession Situations to Plan For Succession planning has always been important, but not critical. Now, in 2024, it has evolved from "should do" and "must-do" to "cannot wait." Many external factors make it increasingly pertinent for organizations and leaders to identify their next-in-line.
First, we are entering an unprecedented era of retirements, with 4.1 million Americans poised to leave the workforce yearly until 2027. Second, there's a growth cycle on the horizon, subsequently, we can expect an uptick in workforce velocity. When the job market picks back up, workers of all levels will have options for better opportunities in greater quantities--C-Suite included. And third, on the other side of the upcoming growth cycle, economists predict the emergence of a multi-year economic downturn starting in 2030. Ahead of this projected slump, many CEOs are considering their five-year strategy, which may include a merger, acquisition, and/or exit.
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S325 Ways to Make Your Tech Startup to Stand Out I've spent the bulk of my career in the tech startup world. In the late 1990s I developed the security software Snort and then launched the security software Sourcefire, which was later acquired by Cisco. Currently, I'm the CEO of another security startup called Netography. I also serve as a board member of several other cybersecurity tech startups.Â
Over the years, I have been repeatedly in a position of thinking about what it takes for startups to stand out amid market noise, category confusion, and louder voices from companies with more resources. Here are five suggestions that have helped tech startups find their niche and differentiate themselves.Â
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S33Protest Histories Make Some Employers Wary of Hiring New Gen-Z Grads Graduation season is in full swing, meaning with young people across the U.S. are striding across stages to collect their college diplomas, then stepping straight off to enter the labor market. However, many of those new job hunters may be taken aback at the reception they receive from less than impressed business owners--especially those averse to hiring participants in pro-Palestinian protests that swept university campuses since the October 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, and the subsequent Israeli bombardment of Gaza.
While many companies report having a harder time finding qualified job candidates than before the pandemic, a recent survey found considerable wariness among hiring managers to offering positions to recent Gen Z college grads. The poll by Intelligent.com, a higher education advisory company, showed respondents gave a variety of reasons for those hesitations, with perhaps the most surprising being a candidate's past participation in controversial pro-Palestinian demonstrations. Fully 30 percent of bosses said they'd be concerned with a job applicant's activities during those protests, with 22 percent saying they were "reluctant to hire graduates who participated."
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S34AI Is Making Economists Rethink the Story of Automation Will artificial intelligence take our jobs? As AI raises new fears about a jobless future, it’s helpful to consider how economists’ understanding of technology and labor has evolved. For decades, economists were relatively optimistic, and pointed out that previous waves of technology had not led to mass unemployment. But as income inequality rose in much of the world, they began to revise their theories. Newer models of technology’s affects on the labor market account for the fact that it absolutely can displace workers and lower wages. In the long run, technology does tend to raise living standards. But how soon and how broadly? That depends on two factors: Whether technologies create new jobs for people to do and whether workers have a voice in technology’s deployment.
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S35Does Your Boss Practice Toxic Positivity? Being happy and positive at work can be a win-win for employees and organizations. But what happens when your boss practices toxic positivity? No matter how bad or stressful the situation is or how difficult the circumstances, they convince themselves that simply acting happy or thinking positively will change the outcome — then spread this toxic positivity to their teams. By doing so, they put the responsibility on individuals to try to survive and persevere in broken and dysfunctional environments, without addressing the root causes at hand. How can you tell the difference between a boss who is optimistic, thinks positively, and coaches and inspires their team and one who practices toxic positivity? The author presents three red flags to watch for.
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S36What makes 'toxic positivity' different from a healthy attitude | Psyche Ideas is a researcher and teacher at the University of Queensland Business School in Australia. He delves into the world of self-help, business gurus, and get-rich-quick schemes, and how these influence our beliefs about success.
When you’ve had a bad day, or even a bad year, have you ever reached out to your friends or family, only to be met with a sea of saccharine assurances such as ‘chin up’ or ‘everything happens for a reason’? Perhaps you’ve approached your boss with a burning gripe to get off your chest, only to be confronted by a new sign on the door saying ‘Positive vibes only!’ Or you might have seen the endless self-help books, courses and TikTok gurus promising that a life of happiness is only a positive affirmation away.
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