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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.

This may be oversimplifying, but the nuance with privacy is that it’s not just about securing personally identifiable information (PII), it’s also about considering what other related pieces of information could be used together to infer PII. Therefore, you need to be very careful about the information you share, and the intentions of the people who collect it.

but the nuance with privacy is that it’s not just about securing personally identifiable information (PII), it’s also about considering what other related pieces of information could be used together to infer PII. Therefore, you need to be very careful about the information you share, and the intentions of the people who collect it.

As we train people to become Data Scientists and design sophisticated algorithms, I encourage practitioners and leaders to consider the trade offs between utility and privacy. This is a new, emerging and complex area, and I’ll explore it further in future posts.

40% to 45% of what we do every day sort of feels like a decision, but it’s actually habit.

There’s a cue, which is like a trigger for the behavior to start unfolding, A routine, which is the habit itself, the behavior, the automatic sort of doing what you do when you do a habit.

And then at the end, there’s a reward. And the reward is how our neurology learns to encode this pattern for the future.

The problem, of course, is that those students represent the precise group MOOCs are meant to serve. “MOOCs were supposed to be the device that would bring higher education to the masses,” Jonathan Rees noted. “However, the masses at San Jose State don’t appear to be ready for the commodified, impersonal higher education that MOOCs offer.” Thrun’s cavalier disregard for the SJSU students reveals his true vision of the target audience for MOOCs: students from the posh suburbs, with 10 tablets apiece and no challenges whatsoever—that is, the exact people who already have access to expensive higher education. It is more than galling that Thrun blames students for the failure of a medium that was invented to serve them, instead of blaming the medium that, in the storied history of the “correspondence” course (“TV/VCR repair”!), has never worked. For him, MOOCs don’t fail to educate the less privileged because the massive online model is itself a poor tool. No, apparently students fail MOOCs because those students have the gall to be poor, so let’s give up on them and move on to the corporate world, where we don’t have to be accountable to the hoi polloi anymore, or even have to look at them, because gross.

SG_Debug && SG_Debug.pagedebug && window.console && console.log && console.log('[' + (new Date()-SG_Debug.initialTime)/1000 + ']' + ' Bottom of header.jsp'); SlateEducationGetting schooled.Nov. 19 2013 11:43 AM The King of MOOCs Abdicates the Throne 7.3k 1.2k 101 Sebastian Thrun and Udacity’s “pivot” toward corporate training. By Rebecca Schuman &nbsp; Sebastian Thrun speaks during the Digital Life Design conference on Jan. 23, 2012, in Munich. Photo by Johannes Simon/Getty Images requirejs(["jquery"], function($) { if ($(window).width() < 640) { $(".slate_image figure").width("100%"); } }); Sebastian Thrun, godfather of the massive open online course, has quietly spread a plastic tarp on the floor, nudged his most famous educational invention into the center, and is about to pull the trigger. Thrun—former Stanford superprofessor, Silicon Valley demigod, and now CEO of online-course purveyor Udacity—just admitted to Fast Company’s openly smitten Max Chafkin that his company’s courses are often a “lousy product.” Rebecca Schuman Rebecca Schuman is an education columnist for Slate. Follow This is quite a “pivot” from the Sebastian Thrun, who less than two years ago crowed to Wired that the unstemmable tide of free online education would leave a mere 10 purveyors of higher learning in its wake, one of which would be Udacity. However, on the heels of the embarrassing failure of a loudly hyped partnership with San Jose State University, the “lousiness” of the product seems to have become apparent. The failures of massive online education come as no shock to those of us who actually educate students by being in the same room wit

nd why the answer is not the MOOC, but the tiny, for-credit, in-person seminar that has neither a sexy acronym nor a potential for huge corporate partnerships.

What you want to do is debrief failures openly. That’s really critical to resilience, because&nbsp;otherwise when people fail they’re totally unprepared for it.

It's much more helpful to say I understand you’re probably in a lot of pain right now, and I want you to know I’m here with you. Just the acknowledgment and conveying you want to support them is much more helpful.

One of the things that affected me most, actually, was watching Sheryl commit to finding joy.