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There is evidence that if you make the connections between knowledge creators and businesses tighter, you can increase success. Compared to stand-alone business incubators, university-based incubators tend to keep more people in the community to start their enterprises and tend to have higher success rates, because they are able to connect small enterprises with mentors. Small business needs capital but it also really needs expertise—so Harvard’s new Innovation Lab is a fantastic thing.

Another aspect of moving from knowledge to enterprise to jobs is collaborative knowledge creation.

That’s thinkers plus makers in Albany.

We should have a national call to action with commitments from big companies to mentor and connect with smaller enterprises.

they ran with it and created Supplier Connection—a universal vendor application, kind of like the common college application. They announce opportunities through Supplier Connection to thousands of small businesses.

community colleges haven’t been well connected to employers—and their graduation rates have been incredibly poor.

There are growing consortiums where leaders of organized labor, community colleges, high schools, businesses, and representatives of the elected officials sit down together to talk about skills needs and who’s going to help deal with them. The two-year colleges in Spartanburg and Greenville were the secret to that manufacturing center. South Carolina is still not the most prosperous state, but it would have been Appalachian poor if not for Governor Dick Riley (later U.S. secretary of education) focusing on the community colleges in collaboration with the industrialists.

the evidence is that you get better outcomes in terms of people finishing their two-year programs and getting jobs when there’s a closer tie to employers.

community leadership and collaboration across sectors. Even if we suddenly had a national program throwing money at community colleges, you still need community leaders talking to each other—where people agree on certain priorities, align their interests, align what they do behind those priorities.

Our strength has been from the ground up.

Amazon Web Services (A.W.S.)

“But now, every start-up is A.W.S. only, so there are no servers to kick, no fabs to be near. You can work anywhere. The idea that all you need is your laptop and Wi-Fi, and you can be doing anything — that’s an A.W.S.-driven invention.” This same freedom from a physical location or, for that matter, physical products has led to new work structures.

Despite its breathtaking arrogance, the question resonates; it articulates concerns about tech being, if not ageist, then at least increasingly youth-fetishizing. “People have always recruited on the basis of ‘Not your dad’s company,’ ” Biswas said.

On a certain level, the old-guard-new-guard divide is both natural and inevitable. Young people like to be among young people; they like to work on products (consumer brands) that their friends use and in environments where they feel acutely the side effects of growth. Lisa and Jim’s responses to the question “Would you work for an old-guard company?” are studiously diplomatic — “Absolutely,” they say — but the fact remains that they chose, from a buffet of job options, fledgling companies in San Francisco.

Cool exists at the ineffable confluence of smart people, big money and compelling product.

Older engineers form a smaller percentage of employees at top new-guard companies, not because they don’t have the skills, but because they simply don’t want to. “Let’s face it,” Karl said, “for a 50-something to show up at a start-up where the average age is 29, there is a basic cultural disconnect that’s going on. I know people, mostly those who have stayed on the technical side, who’ve popped back into an 11-person company. But there’s a hesitation there.”

Getting these job offers depends almost exclusively on the candidate’s performance in a series of technical interviews, where you are asked, in front of frowning hiring managers, to whip up correct and efficient code. Moreover, a majority of questions seem to be pulled from undergraduate algorithms and data-structures textbooks,

“People want the enterprise tools they use at work to look and feel like the web apps they use at home.”

Some of us will continue to make the web products that have generated such vast wealth and changed the way we think, interact, protest. But hopefully, others among us will go to work on tech’s infrastructure, bringing the spirit of the new guard into the old.

Respect Your Volunteers A few weeks back, my colleague Joe Rominiecki made the case that we need to show that we’re supporting our community managers, who may be playing an important role without a ton of support.

“For those that host online communities for their members, the new front-line staff may very well be the person managing the online community,” he explained before hopping into The Community Roundtable’s latest “State of Community Management” report.

It’s clear here that reddit—a site that is pretty much nothing but community—faces the same kinds of disconnects between executives and ground-level support that happen in associations where communities are only small parts of the total member offerings.

The ripple effects of what happened to Taylor only highlight this. Because of the role people near the front lines play in keeping a community moving, they often have tribes of their own, and those tribes may instill a high level of passion among your most active community members—your moderators.

Because of the role people near the front lines play in keeping a community moving, they often have tribes of their own, and those tribes may instill a high level of passion among your most active community members—your moderators.

“Everything about which Reddit talks a big game—curbing abuse, protecting free speech, being the ‘front page of the Internet’—is directly tied to a model of content curation over which the company has little authority.”

tied to a model of content curation over which the company has little authority.”

In other words, volunteer moderators hold huge amounts of control, despite not getting a paycheck. They deserve to know what’s going on, and you have to keep them happy.

Online Courses

In House Training

diagnose the cue and the reward.

every cue falls into usually one of five categories.

t’s usually a time of day, a certain place, the presence of certain other people, a particular emotion, or kind of a set of behaviors that’s become ritualized.

And that’s the reward that I was craving, was socialization.

keystone habits. Some habits seem to have a disproportionate influence

And in a lot of people’s lives a keystone habit is exercise. When they start exercising, they start using their credit cards less. They start procrastinating less. They do their dishes earlier. Something about exercise makes other habits more malleable.

So O’Neill actually said, I want to make workers more safe. I want to change worker safety habits. And everyone could sign on to that. What he was actually saying was, I want to make every single factory more efficient and more productive and producing a higher quality product, because that’s how we make things safer. But if he had come in and he had ordered greater efficiency, everyone would have rebelled, all the workers at least. But you come in and you say, I want to make everything safer, that’s something everyone can sign onto.

But 5% of your job as a CEO is making the big strategy choice. 95% is managing small choices, managing what your culture is going to be like, managing how you structure the rewards and the incentives that determine how people kind of automatically behave.

And when psychologists have looked at quantum changers, what they found is these are people who suddenly became very deliberate about their habits. There’s something almost magical about understanding how habits work, because studies show that once you understand, once you think about the structure of a habit, it becomes easier to change that habit. And once you change that habit, you start making these small, incremental adjustments to your day that over a year or over a decade can add up to a huge difference.

“analysis paralysis,” or

Identify where exactly ‘getting started’ falls apart for you and try to create shortcuts so that the uncomfortable moment is lessened,

For those “what the hell moments,” some startlingly simple advice is to just focus on the total days you’ve done your habit, rather than the fact that you broke the chain.

Making too many decisions is a part of this problem: Baumeister’s research on mental energy suggests that acts of self-control and self-regulation deplete mental resources in future activities.

their employees spontaneously started building wikis to document important discoveries and share scientific information.

They are replacing offices entirely. For people who work in virtual teams, apps like Slack are the workplace.

social media works in the office when it brings like-minded colleagues together for collaboration.

But when you work on a virtual team, your choice is either adopt the new software or stop coming to work. In other words, there is no real choice. You have to accept the new platform, regardless of the changes it brings

The one user survey the company has conducted, however, shows that the majority of Slack administrators believe their teams are up to 40 percent more productive.

Slack founder Stewart Butterfield has said the boost in productivity comes from eliminating e-mail, but Henderson scoffs at that idea. He thinks Slack teams are more productive because they can communicate better. Plus, they can catch up on what's happened while they were gone because conversations are held in searchable logs. Most of all, he says, Slack is about stepping up productivity by "reducing meetings." That's the "big one," Henderson emphasizes.