Group items tagged

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.

53 million voting-age Americans

Politicos, meet freelancers.

More than one in three Americans (34%) is doing some type of freelance work

Ecosystem” conveys the idea that all the pieces of an economy come together in particular places, and that their strength and interactions determine prosperity and economic growth.

Think of it as your garden, where you need fertile soil, seeds, and other ingredients to make things grow.

Four issues strike me as key: turning ideas into enterprises; linking small and large businesses; better connecting education to jobs; and encouraging cross-sector collaboration.

the fear that the ways we work now are harming and/or killing us.

The damage that can be done by workplaces like Amazon’s is much more insidious, and difficult to detect — and when people die, their obituary says things like heart disease or stroke or suicide.

In many cases, we are drawn to behavior that is bad for us, and that arguably applies to the workplace as well. In a piece he wrote for Medium recently, Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz talks about the early days of the company and how he slept little and ate badly, and was hyper-competitive with co-workers. Was this worth it because of what they accomplished? Not at all, he says.

mix of iPads and tablets with detachable keyboards.

HP EliteBook Revolve 810 G3, a laptop-tablet hybrid

Some K-12 systems are moving away from iPads and on to Chromebooks. And many elementary schools use Kindles and tablets made by Samsung and Android rather than Apple iPads.

As for Flash, the change in Chrome's behavior is just another cut that's making the security-flaw-ridden platform less relevant and, hopefully, soon obsolete.

Two professors, computer scientist George Mohler and anthropologist Jeffrey Brantingham, who specializes in crime scenarios, were instrumental in developing the predictive method of fighting crime. Their program is based on models for predicting the aftershocks of earthquakes.

The two data experts, Mohler and Brantingham, have since started a company and are marketing their product, Predictive Policing, worldwide

"Security is one of the biggest growth areas for Big Data applications," says Schröder. In addition to crime and terrorism, Splunk focuses on the growing number of attacks in, and by means of, the Internet and its software can detect hacker attacks or other cyber attacks. "We are positioning ourselves for an expanding cyber war," Schröder says. But the data hunters' new war also has many civilian aspects.

The expression "Big Brother" has become dated. Experts would seem to have reached consensus on the term "Big Data" to describe the new favorite topic of discussion in boardrooms, at conventions like Berlin's re:publica last week, and in a number of new books. Big Data promises both total control and the logical management of our future in all aspects of life.

New is the way companies, government agencies and scientists are now beginning to interpret and analyze their data resources. Because storage space costs almost nothing nowadays, computers, which are getting faster and faster, can link and correlate a wide variety of data around the clock. Algorithms are what create order from this chaos. They dig through, discovering previously unknown patterns and promptly revealing new relationships, insights and business models. Though the term Big Data means very little to most people, the power of algorithms is already everywhere. Credit card companies can quickly recognize unusual usage patterns, and hence automatically warn cardholders when large sums are suddenly being charged to their cards in places where they have never been. Energy companies use weather

According to official figures, since the Swedish capital Stockholm began using algorithms to manage traffic, drive times through the city's downtown area have been cut in half and emissions reduced by 10 percent. Online merchants have recently started using the analyses to optimize their selling strategies. The widespread phrase "Customers who bought this item also bought …" is only one example of the approach.

To start truly collaborating, here are two steps that you should take: First, consider the goal you’re trying to achieve. Map out the end-to-end work that you think will be needed to get the outcome you want.

Second, convene a working session with all of the required collaborators from different areas of the company to review, revise, and make commitments to this collaboration contract.

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."

Silos allow staff to specialize in their unique talents, give them accountability, and provide clarity about tasks that need to be accomplished. “When we start talk about silos, it goes immediately to the negative,” Clancy says. “It's important for leaders to talk about what silos add. They do have a place in organizations to allow for focus on what you're responsible for, moving things forward and getting jobs done. To a certain degree, they are a necessary requirement to getting work done.” Of course, the problems begin when the intensity of organizational silos shifts to the extreme, and inefficiencies and animosity bubble to the surface. Fortunately, there are many ways to break down silos. It's an ongoing process, and nonprofits are continually striving to improve the way people interact with one another.

1. Powering-down helps remove unhealthy feelings of jealousy, envy, and loneliness.

3. Solitude is harder to find in an always-connected world.

4. Life, at its best, is happening right in front of you.

In Axonify’s platform, assessment and training are directly tied together. Because many employees use Axonify regularly, the platform is able to constantly track employee knowledge and intelligently provide the information needed to close an employee’s individual knowledge gap, says Leaman. The app also leverages learning research to optimize retention by repeating the questions in specific time intervals. Even after an employee “graduates” out of a specific topic, the questions will still be revisited about seven months later to help lock in the knowledge.

Tin Can, on the other hand allows companies and employees to record more common learning events: attending a session at a conference, say, or researching and writing a company blog post. “Companies are starting to recognize how employees actually learn and allowing them to do it the way they wish to, rather than forcing them into a draconian system,” Martin says.

more open environments.