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.

Does it mean MOOCs are dead? Not really. It just means they aren't the massive world revolution none of us thought they were anyway. And it also suggests that universities, far from being swept away by MOOCs, are in fact the home of MOOCs. You see, MOOCs make sense as an adjunct to university business, they don't really make sense as a stand alone offering. One wonders if the likes of Shirky will be writing about how wonderful the university model of open education is. So in the end, far from being a portent of doom of the university model, MOOCs are a validation of universities and their robustness.

The key is information aggregation: Different people take note of different “parts,” and if those parts are properly aggregated, they will lead the group to know more (and better) than any individual.

informational signals.

reputational pressures, which lead people to silence themselves or change their views in order to avoid some penalty—often, merely the disapproval of others.

Companies struggle to develop a learning culture. About half (52 percent) of executives says their company can retain, update, and share institutional knowledge, and only 47 percent say their company has a culture of continuous learning.

The 2020 workforce will be increasingly flexible and companies are unprepared. Forty-one percent of executives say their company is increasingly using contingent workers and 42 percent say this approach is affecting their workforce strategy.

Even though executives cite education and institutional training as the most important employee attribute

Supported professional development.

Member needs

common benefits

Why do we have meetings and events? 1) to exchange information; and 2) to network. Virtual meeting and event technology can facilitate these two objectives easily.

The shortfalls of the traditional meeting model, with an on-stage presenter talking to a passive audience, have become clear with the rise of interactive and social networking tools. These advances have driven live meetings to incorporate better peer-to-peer and audience-to-presenter interaction. Today almost all live meetings use significant on-site and Web-based technologies.

These technologies allow attendees to get information without paper, interact real-time with presenters and one another, and build a community based on shared knowledge and interests—all while enjoying actual live contact with other human beings.

HP won't be the first company to host a completely virtual shareholder meeting, but it may very well be the largest.

In 2011, just 21 companies used Broadridge Financial Solutions, a primary provider of online shareholder meeting technology, to hold virtual-only meetings. By 2014, that number had grown to 53.

Big companies, including Intel and Microsoft, have hosted what's known as hybrid meetings, in which a physical event is held but investors can also "attend" online.

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.

mechanism by which this shift in power from institutions to individuals would take place. We now know that mechanism is pull.

Pull allows each of us to find and access people and resources when we need them, while attracting to us the people and resources that are relevant and valuable

Employers that fail to provide sufficient professional development opportunities for their employees. These companies will lose their most talented workers to more magnetic organizations that provide better chances for learning and growth.

beyond ~40–50 hours per week, the marginal returns from additional work decrease rapidly and quickly become negative. We have also demonstrated that though you can get more output for a few weeks during “crunch time” you still ultimately pay for it later when people inevitably need to recover.

My intellectual conclusion is that these companies are both destroying the personal lives of their employees and getting nothing in return.

This kind of attitude not only hurts young workers who are willing to “step up” to the expectation, but facilitates ageism and sexism by indirectly discriminating against people who cannot maintain that kind of schedule.

We can’t just buy iPads (or any device), add water, and hope that strategy will usher schools to the leading edge of 21st century education. Technology, by itself, isn’t curative. Human agency shapes the path.

The social and economic world of today and tomorrow require people who can critically and creatively work in teams to solve problems.

All computing devices — from laptops to tablets to smartphones — are dismantling knowledge silos

Increasingly, they judge our character.

Upstart has over the last 15 months lent $135 million to people with mostly negligible credit ratings. Typically, they are recent graduates without mortgages, car payments or credit card settlements.

ZestFinance, is a former Google executive whose company writes loans to subprime borrowers through nonstandard data signals.

That, ultimately, is the challenge: to identify digitally driven, innovative practices that work and scale them up. Schools can look to a growing number of models to meet that challenge, as well as the lessons that can be learned from others' mistakes.

many schools are turning to open educational resources. They're convinced that the free, malleable, and shareable academic content offers advantages that traditional commercial materials cannot match.

administrators and teachers are learning to embrace the eclectic jumble of student-owned devices, in the belief that taking a flexible approach will benefit instruction.

Next to the clicks on the links I share in social media, shares (or retweets) of my updates is the second most important metric I monitor (depending on what I am working on, it can be the most important metric). Isn’t that what we are all looking for? Shares by others give my posts and content an additional audience. Posts getting viral (meaning an endless number of people share our post) is the ultimate success in social media – or isn’t it?

One of the basic metrics to show success of a Blog, a Tweet or a Facebook post is the number of retweets or shares the post gets. If you want to grow in social media, you have to get yourself and your content in front of a larger audience. One legitimate way to achieve this success is to get your content shared by third parties. Otherwise you will always and forever be talking to yourself and already existing friends and family.

Princeton's Arvind Narayanan and Ed Felten have published a stinging rebuttal, pointing out the massive holes in Cavoukian and Castro's arguments -- cherry picking studies, improperly generalizing, ignoring the existence of multiple re-identification techniques, and so on.

Cavoukian and Castro are rightly excited by Big Data and the new ways that scientists are discovering to make use of data collected for one purpose in the service of another. But they do not admit that the same theoretical advances that unlock new meaning in big datasets also unlock new ways of re-identifying the people whose data is collected in the set.

Re-identification is part of the Big Data revolution: among the new meanings we are learning to extract from huge corpuses of data is the identity of the people in that dataset. And since we're commodifying and sharing these huge datasets, they will still be around in ten, twenty and fifty years, when those same Big Data advancements open up new ways of re-identifying -- and harming -- their subjects.

So far, many companies have tried to dispel such fears by noting that the data they gather, store and analyze remains "anonymous." But that, as it turns out, is not entirely accurate, in that it sells the power of data analysis radically short. Take the analysis of anonymous movement profiles, for example. According to a current study by the online journal Scientific Reports, our mobility patterns are so different that that they can be used to "uniquely identify 95 percent of the individuals." The more data is in circulation and available for analysis, the more likely it is that anonymity becomes "algorithmically impossible," says Princeton computer scientist Arvind Narayanan. In his blog, Narayanan writes that only 33 bits of information are sufficient to identify a person.

A study by New York advertising agency Ogilvy One concludes that 75 percent of respondents don't want companies to store their personal data, while almost 90 percent were opposed to companies tracking their surfing behavior on the Internet.

Is it truly desirable for cultural assets like TV series or music albums to be tailored to our predicted tastes by means of data-driven analyses? What happens to creativity, intuition and the element of surprise in this totally calculated world?

Bethel and Grandview both pursued open resources in large part because they were not satisfied that commercial curricula were closely aligned with the common core.

They called on their teachers, and other content experts, to help them find the open resources that hit the mark.

It's safe to assume many districts switching to open resources will have to devote large amounts of time and money to finding what they need and preparing teachers to use new materials, Mr. Bliss said. Yet that work brings rewards, he argued. In going through that process, teachers get "some of the best PD they've ever had."