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Drucker’s solutions for fragmented executives—reserve large blocks of time on your calendar, don’t answer the phone, and return calls in short bursts once or twice a day—sound remarkably like the ones offered up by today’s time- and information-management experts.2

Add to these challenges a torrent of e-mail, huge volumes of other information, and an expanding variety of means—from the ever-present telephone to blogs, tweets, and social networks—through which executives can connect with their organizations and customers, and you have a recipe for exhaustion. Many senior executives literally have two overlapping workdays: the one that is formally programmed in their diaries and the one “before, after, and in-between,” when they disjointedly attempt to grab spare moments with their laptops or smart phones, multitasking in a vain effort to keep pace with the information flowing toward them.

First, multitasking is a terrible coping mechanism.

The relevance for leadership? Facebook, YouTube, Twitter and their lesser cousins have proved the power of the platform. They have shown that if your average 21st century citizen is given the tools to connect and the freedom to create, they will do so with enthusiasm, and often with an originality that blindsides the so-called creative industries.  The result is a growing awareness from those who think about business structures for a living, that good leadership is no longer about ‘taking charge’ or imposing a strategic vision but about creating the platforms that allow others to flourish and create. By way of example, Frederic Laloux – the organisational theorist currently developing a cult-like following across the world – offers a telling story about his meeting with Jos de Blok. De Blok is the founder and CEO of Buurtzorg, a Dutch nursing care firm that has grown from four to 9,000 employees in nine years, by devolving all decision-making down to small teams of nurses across the country. It’s a structure that leaves only 45 people working in central administration and management but has delivered huge gains in the efficiency and impact of nursing care in The Netherlands.

Like social media networks, their job is to create the frameworks that let others take decisions and make change.

It’s what being a leader in this new world is all about: helping others to generate change on their own terms rather than taking on the role of sole changemaker yourself.

free things aren’t going anywhere anytime soon. There’s more free product online right now than at any other time in history. We’re talking Daily Show clips, Google Books and entire libraries of music and news from every corner of the globe backed by advertising. Free is bait. It's supposed to get you hooked. If you’ve played many mobile games, this pattern might be familiar. It’s called “freemium,” in which companies offer their apps at no cost and then charge for the good stuff once you’re addicted. (This model is also popular among drug dealers.)

Not that this was necessarily the takeaway from a recent interview that the OECD Education Today blog did with economist Tyler Cowen, but still: 'There are two things people need to learn how to do to be employable at a decent wage: first, learn some skills which complement the computer rather than compete against it. Some of these are technical skills, but a lot of them will be soft skills, like marketing, persuasion, and management that computers won't be able to do any time soon.' Cowen, a professor at George Mason University, in Va., is more focused on higher education than K-12, but the teaching of soft skills has become a big factor in discussions of college and career readiness. As important as soft skills, though, Cowen said, is the ability of people to be able to learn new things, especially without the formal structure of school to support them: 'Twenty to thirty years from now, we'll all be doing different things. So people who are very good at teaching themselves, regardless of what their formal background is, will be the big winners.'

course alumni group.

encourages reflection, can give a good post-training nudge, and offers a space for graduates to share experiences and get additional support and encouragement as they work to implement their new learning.

Branding and performance support

This isn’t the first time this has happened, that big data sets full of personal information – supposedly obscured, or de-identified, as the process is called – have been reverse engineered to reveal some or even all of the identities contained within. It makes you wonder: Is there really such a thing as a truly anonymous data set in the age of big data?

That might sound like a bore, but think about it this way: there’s more than taxi cab data at stake here. Pretty much everything you do on the Internet these days is a potential data set. And data has value. The posts you like on Facebook, your spending habits as tracked by Mint, the searches you make on Google – the argument goes that the social, economic and academic potential of sharing these immensely detailed so-called “high dimensional” data sets with third parties is too great to ignore.

University of Colorado Law School associate professor Paul Ohm’s 2009 paper on the topic made the bold claim that “data can be either useful or perfectly anonymous but never both.”

exponentially increases the power of assessment by increasing assessments, giving students a firsthand account of what they understand, and giving instructors the opportunity to intervene before a student falls behind. Assessment should mirror good instruction, happen continuously as part of instruction, and provide educators with information about students' level of understanding.

By reaching students at the exact moment they are trying to understand and requiring full comprehension before they move on, we can help prevent students from falling through the cracks later on in their education.

To accelerate their completion of remedial courses and stay on track to complete a certificate or degree program, students should take advantage of personalized learning technology that provides assistance outside of classroom time, such as online self-paced learning and assessment tools. These resources help students test their knowledge to determine areas of strength and struggle. Then, students can work at their own pace to master difficult concepts, and monitor their progress along the way.

According to Loftus, a job has five reward elements: compensation, benefits, work-life balance, career development and advancement, and recognition. While associations often can’t compete with the private sector on pay, they can usually meet or exceed expectations in the other four areas.

In 2004, Rockville, Maryland-based ASHA hired 37 people, and 16 of those people came through a Washington Post ad. A lot has changed in 10 years: “In 2014, we hired 34 people, and one person came from The Washington Post,” says McNichol.

staff referrals, which isn’t a new tactic but has been made much easier with the proliferation of social media.

Poor Joan Didion: "There is always a point in the writing of a piece when I sit in a room literally papered with false starts and cannot put one word after another and imagine that I have suffered a small stroke, leaving me apparently undamaged but actually aphasic."

And yet complain he did. For a while I was a good friend, listening with cuticle-picking patience and reminding him of his successes. Finally I’d had it, mostly because in that moment he reminded me so much of myself. When I realized he’d become a magnifying mirror of my own bad habits and irritating tics, I said to him: "Stop having so many feelings and just do the f-ing work."

conflict and opposition are essential for good thinking.

productive disagreement

1. Appoint a devil’s advocate.