Friday, January 26, 2018

Paul's Update Special 1/26




Have you ever been on an executive team where things just clicked? You had a common goal, communication flowed easily, and everyone was willing to put in the long hours for a final push.
Having a set of norms that an executive team consistently follows helps team members be clearer about each other’s intentions, increases trust, saves time, decreases backbiting and politics, and sets a clear operational compass for the rest of the organization. When employees observe their senior executives behaving in intentional, transparent, and consistent ways, they’re inspired to follow them and adopt those norms themselves.

To create your own executive team norms and put them into practice, follow these five steps:

  1. Identify successful norms based on your past experience. Think back to a team where things worked well and then identify one to three norms that contributed to that success. 
  2. Break down the norms into behaviors. Once you have an abstract list of norms, turn them into measurable behaviors. For example, one norm might be to encourage equal participation in meetings. As a team, ask yourselves what equal participation in meetings looks like. 
  3. Commit to five norms or fewer. Prioritize what you want to tackle first. It’s OK to start with just one norm, but don’t take on more than five at once. Focusing on fewer norms increases your chances of remembering them and practicing them regularly.
  4. Create a recurring plan. Too often executive teams spend time at an offsite coming up with well-crafted norms, only to fail to transfer them to the boardroom on Monday morning. Create a plan with owners and time lines for how you will follow through on each norm.
  5. Create a system of mutual accountability. Discuss how you will hold each other accountable if you don’t practice the norms you’ve agreed to. What will you do if, after repeated check-ins, there’s still no progress? 
Consciously agreeing on how you will work together and sticking to that agreement is essential to having a high-performing team — especially at the executive level. Not only will you create a high-functioning team capable of achieving extraordinary results, but you will also model creating such teams for the rest of your organization.




Here are my expectations for 2018!

1) The technological battle against diabetes flares up. According to the latest estimates of the WHO, 422 million people suffer from diabetes worldwide – and the number is growing steadily. We should step up our efforts at least against Type 2 diabetes, which can be prevented with conscious lifestyle choices. Digital health offers great help both in the management of diabetes and hopefully in its prevention.

2) The bond between health insurance and wearable trackers gets stronger. In November 2017, Qualcomm and United Healthcare announced that they have integrated Samsung and Garmin wearables into their national wellness program. It enables eligible plan participants to earn more than $1,000 per year by meeting daily walking goals. I believe this is just the beginning of a beautiful friendship between health insurance companies and wearable manufacturers.

3) Mixed reality integrates into medical education. Augmented and virtual reality has a great potential to reform medical education. More and more apps and programs appear to help medical students learn anatomy or practice surgical procedures.

4) Medical study 2.0 underway. In 2014, Verily, Alphabet’s research organization devoted to the study of life sciences, announced the Baseline Project, a collaboration with Duke University and Stanford University to try to get a sense of what a “normal” human looks like. Then in April 2017, Verily announced that it will enroll 10,000 healthy people to its Baseline Project. The study has the potential to significantly broaden our knowledge about human health. Research starts in the San Francisco Bay Area and North Carolina, though scientists behind the effort hope to expand the areas surveyed. 

5) Regulatory discussions intensify as bioprinting tissues comes closer to reality. The San Diego-based company, Organovo cooperates with the FDA in order for the agency to understand the process of bioprinting to be able to regulate it well. As their first bioprinted products are expected to make it to the FDA in 2019, we’ll see a lot of regulatory discussions about 3D bioprinting in 2018.

6) Artificial Intelligence gets medical evidence. Although A.I. is already thriving in healthcare we have only seen a few peer-reviewed papers written by A.I. ventures by the end of 2017. We should expect to see more scientific papers in 2018 that prove their use cases. It is important as these lay down the foundation for A.I. in healthcare and underpin its credibility as an innovative and useful medical tool.

7) Apple enters the healthcare race. In November 2017, the FDA cleared the first medical device accessory for Apple Watch, EKG wearable manufacturing Alivecor’s Kardiaband. It is basically a sensor able to detect abnormal heart rhythm and atrial fibrillation (AFib); which sends all its findings to the accompanying app on the Apple Watch. Moreover, Kardiaband’s smart algorithm is able to analyze and predict heart rate. A few months earlier, Apple also launched an initiative called the Apple Heart Study in partnership with Stanford Medicine. Moreover, in December 2017, the tech giant announced the development of an advanced heart-monitoring feature for future versions of its smartwatch. All these steps suggest that we can expect a more powerful presence of Apple on the healthcare market.

8) A start-up using blockchain to encrypt health data. The blockchain is as much of a buzzword in 2017 as A.I., but there are many ways to leverage on the complicated technology in healthcare, for example in medical record management, data security or pharmaceutical supply chain management. In September 2017, IBM Watson signed a 2-year agreement with the FDA to explore the use of blockchain technologies to securely share patient data.




Glassdoor's list of the 100 best companies of 2018 saw plenty of newcomers — 40, to be exact.

But only three companies have managed to make the job site's list every year since its launch ten years ago. And they're all big names: Bain & Company, Google, and Apple.
Business Insider decided to take a look at some of Glassdoor's analytics to figure out what reviewers love about these three companies.

Bain & Company
  • Ranking on the 2018 list: No. 2
  • Overall employee rating: 4.7 out of 5
  • 98% of employees approve of CEO Bob Bechek.
  • Interview difficulty: 3.6 out of 4
  • 76% of interviewees had a positive experience.
  • Sample interview question: "Walk me through your résumé."
  • Most talked-about perks on Glassdoor: Maternity and paternity leave, health insurance, vacation and paid time off
  • 96% of employees would recommend Bain to a friend.
Google
  • Ranking on the 2018 list: No. 5
  • Overall employee rating: 4.4 out of 5
  • 96% of employees approve of CEO Sundar Pichai.
  • Interview difficulty: 3.4 out of 4
  • 60% of interviewees had a positive experience.
  • Sample interview question: "What are the guarantees on search time for various data structures?"
  • Most talked-about perks on Glassdoor: Free food, health insurance, 401K plan
  • 91% of employees would recommend Google to a friend.
Apple
  • Ranking on the 2018 list: No. 84
  • Overall employee rating: 4.0 out of 5
  • 93% of employees approve of CEO Tim Cook.
  • Interview difficulty: 3.0 out of 4
  • 66% of interviewees had a positive experience.
  • Sample interview question: "Tell me a time where you made a mistake and admitted so."
  • Most talked-about perks on Glassdoor: Employee discount, health insurance, 401K plan
  • 79% of employees would recommend Apple to a friend.

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Friday, January 19, 2018

Paul's Update Special 1/19




Motherboard has called Ray Kurzweil “a prophet of both techno-doom and techno-salvation.” With a little wiggle room given to the timelines the author, inventor, computer scientist, futurist, and director of engineering at Google provides, a full 86 percent of his predictions — including the fall of the Soviet Union, the growth of the internet, and the ability of computers to beat humans at chess — have come to fruition.

Kurzweil continues to share his visions for the future, and his latest prediction was made at the most recent SXSW Conference, where he claimed that the Singularity — the moment when technology becomes smarter than humans — will happen by 2045. Sixteen years prior to that, it will be just as smart as us. As he told Futurism, “2029 is the consistent date I have predicted for when an AI will pass a valid Turing test and therefore achieve human levels of intelligence.”

Kurzweil’s vision of the future doesn’t stop at the Singularity. He has also predicted how technologies, such as nanobots and brain-to-computer interfaces like Elon Musk’s Neuralink or Bryan Johnson’s Kernel, will affect our bodies, leading to a possible future in which both our brains and our entire beings are mechanized.

This process could start with science fiction-level leaps in virtual reality (VR) technology. He predicts VR will advance so much that physical workplaces will become a thing of the past. Within a few decades, our commutes could just become a matter of strapping on a headset.

As Inverse points out, this paradigm shift could have some interesting consequences. Without the need for people to live close to work, we could see unprecedented levels of deurbanization. People will no longer need to flock to large cities for work or be tethered to a specific location. Inverse suggests that this decentralization may decrease the opportunity for terrorist attacks. Blockchain technology will continue to bolster decentralization as well.
According to Kurzweil, technology will not only enable us to rethink the modern workplace, it will also give us the ability to replace our biology with more substantial hardware. He predicts that by the early 2030s, we will be able to copy human consciousness onto an electronic medium.

Not all of Kurzweil’s predictions are so drastic, and some seem even more likely to come to fruition. For example, his prediction of truly ubiquitous WiFi is well on its way to becoming reality, especially with Elon Musk’s announcement that he hopes to beam the internet across the globe from space, and his belief that many of the diseases currently plaguing humanity will be eradicated by the 2020s also seems remarkably possible given ever more frequent medical breakthroughs.

Kurzweil envisions a future that is exciting, daunting, and a little bit terrifying all at once. Time will tell if his impressive batting average will improve or if the future has other plans for humanity.




Having a four-year college degree is generally regarded as a necessity to score a job in tech. But as the number of tech jobs has climbed, far outpacing the number of applicants, companies like IBM have turned to talent with non-traditional educational backgrounds.

With this drastic shortage of tech workers, the company is now focusing on skills-based hiring rather than credentials to fill these roles.
In a USA Today column, the company's CEO Ginni Rometty explains that not all tech jobs require a college degree. As industries transform, she says, "jobs are being created that demand new skills – which in turn requires new approaches to education, training and recruiting."

These "new collar jobs," says Rometty, are becoming harder to fill. In the U.S. alone, there are more than 500,000 open jobs in tech- related sectors, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. A recent study by Code.org reports that as many as 1 million programming jobs will be unfilled by 2020.

To counter this, IBM's CEO says that the company intends to hire 6,000 employees by the end of this year, many of whom will have unconventional backgrounds.
"About 15 percent of the people we hire in the U.S. don't have four-year degrees," IBM's vice president of talent Joanna Daly tells CNBC Make It. In June, the company announced that it would be partnering with community colleges across the U.S. to better prepare more Americans for "new collar career opportunities." For those who don't have a bachelor's degree, Daly says she likes to see hands-on experience and that you've enrolled in vocational classes that pertain to the industry you're applying to.

"New collar" jobs not only bring in candidates who built skills through coding camps, community colleges or modern career education programs, but they also attract veterans and those reentering the workforce or relaunching their career, says Daly.

Daly adds that it's important for companies to recognize that there are different ways to get jobs in tech and different qualifications. When reviewing applicants for open positions she says to ask, "Do I really need a four-year degree for this?"

IBM's CEO says that an open position does not require a bachelor's degree in many cases.

"At a number of IBM's locations...as many as one-third of employees don't have a four-year degree," Rometty writes in her column. "What matters most is that these employees...have relevant skills, often obtained through vocational training."




The research firm eMarketer estimates that 60.5 million people in the U.S.—a little less than a fifth of the population—will use a digital assistant at least once a month this year, and about 36 million will do so on a speaker-based device like Amazon Echo or Google Home. These things are most popular among people age 25 to 34, which includes a ton of parents of young children and parents-to-be.

And these techno-helpers are not just going to get more popular; they will also get better at responding to queries and orders, and they’ll sound more humanlike, too. At the same time, young users will become more comfortable and sophisticated with the technology. They’ll request help with homework or control devices around their home.

Interest in digital assistant jibes with some findings in a recent MIT study, where researchers looked at how children ages three to 10 interacted with Alexa, Google Home, a tiny game-playing robot called Cozmo, and a smartphone app called Julie Chatbot. The kids in the study determined that the devices were generally friendly and trustworthy, and they asked a range of questions to get to know the technologies (“Hey Alexa, how old are you?”) and figure out how they worked (“Do you have a phone inside you?”).

Cynthia Breazeal, one of the researchers and director of the Personal Robots Group at MIT’s Media Lab (as well as cofounder and chief scientist of the company developing an AI robot called Jibo), says that it’s not new for children to anthropomorphize technology. But now it’s happening a little differently.

For young kids who can’t yet read, write, or type but can talk a mile a minute, voice-operated assistants could help build social skills and push boundaries—two things that are key to a child’s development. If nuances in the user’s tone can affect how the digital servants respond—which is not that unlikely in the near future—it’s possible that kids who use them will become more adept at communicating with others (be the others humans or robots).
What about older children? Will they get bossy and bratty from the habit of ordering Alexa around? Probably not, says Kaveri Subrahmanyam, a developmental psychologist and chair of child and family studies at California State University, Los Angeles. But she does wonder whether having digital butlers will reduce kids’ ability to do things for themselves. “I don’t think we have to be worried about it or paranoid about it, but I do think it’s something to be watchful for,” she says.

The other researchers I spoke to aren’t too worried either. “There’s this notion that if all this technology was turned off, everything would be great. We’d be interacting all the time, we’d be reading all the time,” Vandewater says. “I just don’t believe that.”

In fact, maybe the opposite can be true. Perhaps growing up with Alexa will actually make technology less distracting, enabling it to, in a sense, fade into the background; we’ll get what we need from it, and then move on with our lives until we come back with another request.

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Friday, January 12, 2018

Paul's Update Special 1/12




At one time or another we’ve all been on a really great team. When you’re on this sort of team you believe you can overcome any obstacle. It’s just plain magic, and once you’ve been there you forever look for a way back.

Well, there’s a name for that state of mind, it’s called “flow” and a good friend of mine, Dr. Judy Glick-Smith, has been studying it for years. She recently wrote an article about it that captures perfectly what flow is all about and how to create teams that sustain a flow-state.

To build an exceptional team and to achieve flow with your team:
  • Lead by example. Demonstrate your commitment to service through servant leadership. 
  • Communicate your vision and a sense of purpose.
  • Establish and maintain an infrastructure that supports the work of the organization. Poor systems will pull an individual out of his or her flow state in a heartbeat. Provide your team with tools to get the job done and then let them figure out how to do it.
  • Create trust with rituals and storytelling. 
  • Honor individual creativity. What happens to ideas in your organization? Are people fearful of submitting new ideas because they simple expect them to be shot down? Or do new ideas have to run a gauntlet course to be heard?
  • Use positive motivation. What would your work environment look like if you had people whose sole purpose it was to give encouragement to others?
  • Learn what gives people joy and give them the opportunities to do it. Ask people what they love about their work. Then, listen. Most of us try to identify a person’s weaknesses in an attempt to help in areas where he or she is weak. Try instead providing training that magnifies his or her strengths. People find flow in the tasks and activities where they are strongest.
Creativity and innovation are the inevitable results of unfettered team-flow. If all of these components are in place, each individual in the organization becomes a leader. 




“Holding a curious mindset is a great starting point when you're leading your team or organization. If you're in a truly new space, you won't always know the answers. Your team won't either. You're going to venture into the unknown together. Curiosity is a great way to lead that charge.” Tim Brown, IDEO CEO
Here are 6 techniques you can use to explore with curiosity:
  1. Seek inspiration
    Inspiration is the fire that keeps teams seeking, building, and pushing—it prevents them from getting complacent or bored. Seek it out by looking beyond obviously-related contexts, fields, and networks. Consider both how you’re approaching problems and what you’re working on. 
  2. Adopt a beginner’s mindset
    Expertise and experience are valuable assets. But they can be roadblocks to making new leaps because of their strong connection to what is and what has been. 
  3. Challenge your assumptions
    Assumptions guide the way we think, our ability to generate new ideas, and the filters we use when weighing whether to share those ideas. They can be a serious creativity block. When your team gets stuck, start asking two key questions—“why” and “what if.”
  4. Frame problems as questions
    Questions are a critical component of setting strategic priorities and directions. Whether you’re starting a strategic initiative, or looking to elevate the way you accomplish your daily tasks, try framing your project with the phrase, “How might we…”  It’s an invitation that allows your team to participate, and creates the space for them to surprise themselves and discover the unexpected.
  5. Get uncomfortable
    To explore with curiosity, you have to be willing to step outside of your comfort zone. Spend some time thinking about what that means.
  6. Practice immersive empathy
    So HOW do we do that? How do we learn about what lies beyond what we know? We believe that real empathy is critical to understanding the people a product or service might serve. If step one is having the courage to acknowledge what we don’t know, step two is taking action to explore it.



It takes confidence to simplify. Einstein said that the "highest level of intelligence is SIMPLE." Coach John Wooden often said, "The biggest mistake coaches make is they over-coach." 

Once we become expert on a subject, it is difficult to remember what it was like to be a novice. It is incredibly common to make the mistake of trying to sway others to your argument by educating them on the complexities, thinking they will follow your logic and reach the conclusion you want. This mentality might seem to make sense, as it is beneficial for others to know that you have a deep level of understanding on a topic, but trying to bring others into too deep a level is a losing battle.

Follow these three simple rules to increase your leadership communication:
  • Stick to the Rule of 3. Specifically, allow yourself to cover no more than 3 major points, and the less the better.
  • Highlight the "1 Must." Once you have your 3 main points, clarify the 1 most important point of the three that your audience must take away from your interaction.
  • When In Doubt "Delete." The more you say, the less believable you become. Highly successful people work on being precise with their words and their arguments. Forcing yourself to simplify your presentation will allow you to understand it more deeply yourself.



Here’s how the Smithsonian acquired the instrument of one of the world’s most influential and unconventional American jazz musicians.


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Friday, January 5, 2018

Paul's Update Special 1/5

Everyone needs to be aware of this because almost every computer we use has an Intel processor, and those computers are going to be slowed down up to 30% by the "fix."




It's hard to zero in on the most troubling part of this flaw. Intel's x86-64x processors are the most widely-used chips in virtually every form of laptop. If you don't know what processor you have, you almost certainly have one with this flaw. If you do have an AMD processor, however, congratulations—they are confirmed to be safe from the exploit.

In addition to the ubiquity of Intel processors, the low-level nature of this vulnerability means that hackers who may have learned to exploit it would have access to an unprecedented number of machines. And considering x86-64 has been around and prevalent since 2004, possible hackers have had access for over 10 years. No researchers have yet come forward with an example program that exploits this flaw, but that's hardly proof that hackers, or the NSA, didn't figure out how to make use of this exploit years ago.

On top of it all, the fix requires extremely deep and wide-reaching changes at the root levels of an operating system's software—changes that could impact performance of Intel machines by as much as 30 percent. The only alternative? A new computer with a different processor, or one powerful enough to make up for the performance hit. Even worse, these performance hits won't just come to your computer, but also the army of distant servers that run countless internet-connected services in the cloud.

Late Update: 
When to Decentralize Decision Making, and When Not To


Rare is the business executive who doubts the importance of responsiveness: to be acutely alert to business opportunities and threats, and to be capable of grabbing the opportunity or fending off the threat fast and effectively. We find it useful to start with four qualities most executives want their organizations to have: responsiveness, reliability, efficiency, and perennity (e.g., the quality of being perennial, or continuing reliably in perpetuity). When deciding on the best level at which a given task should be done, assess the impact of the decision on these four qualities.
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1. Responsiveness through immediacy. Responsiveness is all about taking the right action quickly in response to opportunities and threats. Decentralization allows immediacy in time and place, hence responsiveness.

2. Reliability through compliance. For some tasks, it is desirable or necessary to have common rules across the operating units: policies, standards, methods, procedures, or systems. Think of compensation and benefits policies, product design standards, quality assurance methods, fraud reporting procedures, financial reporting systems, and the like. These rules are meant to align the operating units with the company’s overall objectives, and make the business more predictable.

3. Efficiency through syndication. For some tasks the case for centralization is rather straightforward: a centralized unit can serve as the home for a task that is carried out more economically when aggregated in one unit than when all operating units take care of that task separately. 

4. Perennity through detachment. There are certain tasks which, left to the discretion of the operating units, might not get done at all – this can be particularly true for tasks that are essential to the company’s long-term wellbeing, but do not serve a short-term function for the business units. Hence, a central unit with sufficient detachment from front-line operations may be required. 

In an age where the concept of “self-managed organization” attracts much attention, the question of centralization versus decentralization does not go away. Nicolai Foss and Peter Klein argue in the article “Why Managers Still Matter” that “In today’s knowledge-based economy, managerial authority is supposedly in decline. But there is still a strong need for someone to define and implement the organizational rules of the game.” We hope that the simple logic presented in this article helps managers find solutions for achieving a balance between rules and responsiveness.




We at PwC have spent some time envisioning four alternative future worlds of work, each named with a color. These admittedly extreme examples of how work could look in 2030 are shaped by the ways people and organizations respond to the forces of collectivism and individualism, on one axis, and integration and fragmentation on the other. These scenarios can help organizations think through possibilities and how they will prepare to meet them. 
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The Red World
In the Red World, in which individualism and fragmentation reign, small is powerful. Technology allows tiny businesses to tap into the vast reservoirs of information, skills, and financing that were formerly available only to large organizations, and it gives them power and incredible reach. Innovation and people are inseparable, which will trickle down to how companies find, manage and reward workers.

The Blue World
In the Blue World, an individualized and integrated world, global corporations take center stage, becoming larger, more powerful, and more influential than ever — some even have more sway than nation states. Companies see their size and influence as the best way to protect their prized profit margins against intense competition from their peers and aggressive new market entrants.
The Green World
The Green World — collective and integrated — is driven by the need for a powerful social conscience. Reacting to public opinion, increasingly scarce natural resources, and stringent international regulations, companies push a strong ethical and ecological agenda. Social conscience, environmental responsibility, diversity, human rights and fairness are corporate imperatives.
The Yellow World
In the Yellow World — in which collectivist impulses thrive in a fragmented world — workers and companies seek out greater meaning and relevance. Humanness is highly valued. Workers find flexibility, autonomy, and fulfilment, working for organizations with strong social and ethical records. There’s a strong desire to contribute to the common good.
Imagining these four worlds offers one way to stop wondering and speculating and start planning. From each world, work backward by thinking about what your workers and HR function will need. How might the characteristics of each world come together to create a scenario that is uniquely yours? In each scenario, how will your talent needs change? How can you attract, keep, and motivate the people you need? How will your organization need to evolve to stay competitive?

The answers may not seem obvious today. We may not know all the answers. But by imagining different scenarios and taking steps to plan now, we can face the future of work with a greater sense of confidence.





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