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We chose to highlight six drivers-big, disruptive shifts that are likely to reshape the landscape for organizations and workers. Although each driver is in itself important when thinking about the future, it is the confluence of several drivers working together that produces true disruptions. We then identified ten skills that we believe will be vital for success in the workforce: Sense-making: ability to determine the deeper meaning or significance of what is being expressed Social intelligence: ability to connect to others in a deep and direct way, to sense and stimulate reactions and desired interactions Novel and adaptive thinking: proficiency at thinking and coming up with solutions and responses beyond that which is rote or rule-based Cross -cultural competency: ability to operate in different cultural settings Computational thinking: ability to translate vast amounts of data into abstract concepts and to understand data-based reasoning New media literacy: ability to critically assess and develop content that uses new media forms, and to leverage these media for persuasive communication Transdisciplinarity: literacy in and ability to understand concepts across multiple disciplines Design mindset: ability to represent and develop tasks and work processes for desired outcomes Cognitive load management: ability to discriminate and filter information for importance, and to understand how to maximize cognitive functioning using a variety of tools and techniques Virtual collaboration: ability to work productively, drive engagement, and demonstrate presence as a member of a virtual team

A UX strategy has four primary components: Where are you now? Define the value you're delivering to your users today, identify known issues, and explore ways your product can realize what the business hopes to achieve. Where do you want to be? Specify the purpose of what you're building and what needs it will address. Identify opportunities to enhance your product and the guiding principles that will inform product design decisions. Explore all phases of a user's interaction with your product to identify how all product components will fit together. How will you get there? Plan the development of your product to accommodate continual enhancements while maintaining cohesion across the experience. Translate your plan into tangible requirements. How will you measure success? Define what success looks like for your product and what methods will be used to validate your product's success.

What superficially looks like shifts in the technological capabilities are really transformations in how businesses organize and execute. The fifth shift in this case-after the mainframe, the departmental computer, the PC, and the Internet-I will reiterate is social business. I would say what it has changed is the base nature of how humans interact with each other. These other technologies are certainly fantastic innovations that will accelerate how we get or deliver messages. But consider this: having common languages across cultures certainly accelerated how we communicated with each other, but as we can still see, the real trick is the ability to convey meaning.

Companies that build systems that people use have power. But they have to be very very very careful about how they assert that power. It's really easy to come in and try to configure the user through force. It's a lot harder to work diligently to design and build the ecosystem in which healthy norms emerge. Yet, the latter is of critical importance to the creation of a healthy community. Cuz you can't get to a healthy community through force.

I will mourn the loss of thousands of precious lives, but I will not rejoice in the death of one, not even an enemy. Returning hate for hate multiplies hate, adding deeper darkness to a night already devoid of stars. Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that. Everything except the first sentence is found in King's book, Strength to Love, and seems to have been said originally in a 1957 sermon he gave on loving your enemies.  Unlike the first quotation, it does sound like King, and it was easy to assume that the whole thing came from him. So how did they get mixed together? Thanks to Jessica Dovey, a Facebook user, that's how.  And contrary to my initial assumption, it wasn't malicious.

The daily email deluge is the scourge of productivity, but how can you stem the tide? Over at Six Pixels of Separation, Twist Image president Mitch Joel offers his tips for handling email overload. His advice goes over some ground we've covered about before, such as using rules and folders/labels, but one tip really stood out to me: You should tell people in your emails how to work with you.

Trying to prevent leaks by employees or to fight off hackers only helps so much. Powerful forces are pushing companies to become more transparent. Technology is turning the firm, long a safe box for information, into something more like a sieve, unable to contain all its data. Furthermore, transparency can bring huge benefits. "The end result will be more openness," predicts Bruce Schneier, a data-security guru. It may be useful to think of a computer network as being like a system of roads. Just like accidents, leaks are bound to happen and attempts to stop the traffic will fail, says Mr Schneier, the security expert. The best way to start reducing accidents may not be employing more technology but making sure that staff understand the rules of the road-and its dangers. Transferring files onto a home PC, for instance, can be a recipe for disaster. It may explain how health data have found their way onto file-sharing networks. If a member of the employee's family has joined such a network, the data can be replicated on many other computers.

Chance favors the connected mind. That is what author Steven B. Johnson says to those looking for the next big idea. Johnson is the author of "Where Ideas Come From" a book that looks at the macro trends on how innovation evolves. Ideas are rarely created through a "eureka" moment. It may seem like Doc Brown fell off his toilet and invented the flux capacitor, but really the idea for time travel and how to do it were converging in his brain for quite some time before the blow to head. Instead of an "aha!" moment, Johnson believes that ideas are born of a "slow hunch" that are made possible through periods of technological innovation and evolution. If you are creating a startup, where do you get your ideas from?

The AT&T Tech Channel is featuring a 1950′s Western Electric film on how to dial a telephone without out the assistance of an operator.

Social media provides companies with new opportunities for customer service, research and marketing (within reason of course), but most respondents to a survey of C-level executive conducted by Harris Interactive for Capgemini aren't yet sure how to harness social media. The results are part of Capgemini's Executive Outsourcing Survey, and follows the firm's launch of its social media management service. Harris surveyed 302 senior executives at Fortune 1000 companies. More than half say that social media is a part of their company's customer care operations, but 64% of those said that the marketing department is solely responsible for social media marketing. Most (74%) executives in the study were simply unsure how many employees are dedicated to customer care via the social Web.

Guest Blogger How Zappos makes social media a part of its company culture By Guest Blogger on January 10, 2011 | 1412317 Commentshttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F2011%2F01%2F10%2Fhow-zappos-makes-social-media-a-part-of-its-company-culture%2FHow+Zappos+makes+social+media+a+part+of+its+company+culture2011-01-10+13%3A32%3A19Guest+Bloggerhttp%3A%2F%2Fsmartblogs.com%2Fsocialmedia%2F%3Fp%3D14123 * * Share94 * * * Email * * Share94 * * * Email This post was written by SmartBrief technology editor Susan Rush. When it comes to social media, Zappos.com just gets it. Social media is not just a business strategy, it should be part of the culture, said Zappos' Thomas Knoll during the "Social Media in Action: Philosophies, Strategies and Tactics That Consistently Win" panel discussion at the International Consumer Electronics Show on Friday. Knoll said too much emphasis is often put on the "media" part of social media, adding that he is "a much bigger fan of the social part." The goal of social media is to connect and build relationships with customers.

In 2006, sociologists from the University of Arizona and Duke University sent out another distress signal-a study titled "Social Isolation in America." In comparing the 1985 and 2004 responses to the General Social Survey, used to assess attitudes in the United States, they found that the average American's support system-or the people he or she discussed important matters with-had shrunk by one-third and consisted primarily of family. This time, the Internet and cellphones were allegedly to blame. Keith Hampton, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania, is starting to poke holes in this theory that technology has weakened our relationships. Partnered with the Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project, he turned his gaze, most recently, to users of social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. "There has been a great deal of speculation about the impact of social networking site use on people's social lives, and much of it has centered on the possibility that these sites are hurting users' relationships and pushing them away from participating in the world," Hampton said in a recent press release. He surveyed 2,255 American adults this past fall and published his results in a study last month. "We've found the exact opposite-that people who use sites like Facebook actually have more close relationships and are more likely to be involved in civic and political activities."

After Local Motors won the XC2V competition, they were given a mere 14 weeks to build a prototype of their "FLYPMODE" concept, a vehicle built on a common chassis capable of performing both combat resupply and medical evacuation missions. As it turns out, they didn't even need all 14 weeks, and were able to complete the prototype ahead of schedule, no problem. Check out a bunch of pics of the not yet armed but otherwise fully operational XC2V vehicle in the gallery below. Part of the point of this whole exercise was to see how effectively crowd-sourcing through private industry could be used to design, develop, and build a new vehicle. In a result that will shock nobody at all, the XC2V went from concept to prototype some five times faster than it normally takes our ponderously bloated war machine to come up with something similar. While DARPA hasn't commented on cost, I imagine that it was exponentially cheaper, too.

The researchers found that fulfillment of a diversity of needs, as defined by Maslow, do appear to be universal and important to individual happiness. But the order in which "higher" and "lower" needs are met has little bearing on how much they contribute to life satisfaction and enjoyment, Diener said. They also found that the fulfillment of more basic needs - for money, food or shelter, for example - was more closely linked to a positive life evaluation, the way an individual ranked his or her life on a scale from worst to best. The satisfaction of higher needs - for social support, respect, autonomy or mastery - was "more strongly related to enjoying life - having more positive feelings and less negative feelings," Diener said. An important finding, Diener said, is that the research indicated that people have higher life evaluations when others in society also have their needs fulfilled.

Many businesses have invested in multi-channel campaign management systems, giving them the ability to execute campaigns across e-mail, direct mail, and the Web seamlessly. We classify our campaigns as transactional, promotional, and experiential, among others. When we look at reports, we often compare campaign performance against previous campaigns or similar programs running in parallel. While this focus on campaign management has made e-mail one of the most profitable direct channels in the marketer's arsenal, it has clouded our view of something more important: relationship management. If e-mail marketers are focusing on campaign-level strategy and execution, who is left to focus on the broader relationship between the brand and consumer and how content, cadence, and channel preference all come together to create a relationship of trust between the brand and the consumer? Let's look at some examples of how a focus on the relationship changes the way we look at the programs we run and inevitably makes e-mail campaigns more effective.

In Innovation Deep Dive, Lisa Strausfeld from Pentagram has contrasted the drivers and the impact of innovation of various countries by way of an interactive line ranking. The visualization uses quite a large set of different datasets, ranging from Gallup and business schools reports, to the usual suspects like the UNESCO and the World Bank. The interface requires some trial-and-error to get used to (e.g. the data categories at the top are clickable), but creates a compelling overview of how different nations actually perform versus how their business executives perceive the same issue.

On Friday, I instigated a call to help a friend of mine in New Zealand. What I asked for was not money, and not much time, really; rather, I asked for people to record a short message (20 seconds max) in support of the people in Christchurch who have suffered so much from the earthquakes that have plagued their wonderful city. How this story is supposed to end is this: hundreds of thousands of people heard my plea for help, and overwhelmed my server with messages of hope. The number of messages and the outpouring of passion and love for this cause brought the Interwebs to its knees. The people of New Zealand clung to those messages of hope - and another social media legend was born. This did not happen.

"In their newest study, they show that independent of the content of an article about a new technological development, the tone of comments posted by other readers can make a significant difference in the way new readers feel about the article's subject. The less civil the accompanying comments, the more risk readers attributed to the research described in the news story. "The day of reading a story and then turning the page to read another is over," Scheufele says. "Now each story is surrounded by numbers of Facebook likes and tweets and comments that color the way readers interpret even truly unbiased information. This will produce more and more unintended effects on readers, and unless we understand what those are and even capitalize on them, they will just cause more and more problems." If even some the for-profit media world and advocacy organizations are approaching the digital landscape from a marketing perspective, Brossard and Scheufele argue, scientists need to turn to more empirical communications research and engage in active discussions across disciplines of how to most effectively reach large audiences."

Feedback loops are how we learn, whether we call it trial and error or course correction. In so many areas of life, we succeed when we have some sense of where we stand and some evaluation of our progress. Indeed, we tend to crave this sort of information; it's something we viscerally want to know, good or bad. As Stanford's Bandura put it, "People are proactive, aspiring organisms." Feedback taps into those aspirations. But maybe requiring people to do a little work-to stick accelerometers around their house or plug a device into a wall socket-is just enough of a nudge to get our brains engaged in the prospect for change.

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