Here's why you might have an upset stomach

Good story in the NY Times on what might have caused your most recent bout of tummy trouble.

NY Times: What to Blame for Your Stomach Bug? Not Always the Last Thing You Ate

Another use for superglue

GM introduced a car that is 700 pounds lighter than the version it replaces. One of the secrets?
Superglue!

This is an interesting article that helps explain how innovation is critical to reaching stretch targets (like the massive expected increase in fuel economy over the coming years).

The Superglue Diet

Do Your Friends Actually Like You

Interesting article discussing the nature of friendship. I thought the idea about the limits of time constricting the overall number of deep friendships any one person could have to be quite true.

In my own experience, I think that there is a relatively select group of individuals who have made it to the most exclusive levels of friendship. I think that is entirely appropriate.

Here is an excerpt describing that phenomenon:

Because time is limited, so, too, is the number of friends you can have, according to the work of the British evolutionary psychologist Robin I.M. Dunbar. He describes layers of friendship, where the topmost layer consists of only one or two people, say a spouse and best friend with whom you are most intimate and interact daily. The next layer can accommodate at most four people for whom you have great affinity, affection and concern and who require weekly attention to maintain. Out from there, the tiers contain more casual friends with whom you invest less time and tend to have a less profound and more tenuous connection. Without consistent contact, they easily fall into the realm of acquaintance. You may be friendly with them but they aren’t friends.

“There is a limited amount of time and emotional capital we can distribute, so we only have five slots for the most intense type of relationship,” Mr. Dunbar said. “People may say they have more than five but you can be pretty sure they are not high-quality friendships.”

The article goes on to explain why meaningful friendship is important:

According to medical experts, playing it safe by engaging in shallow, unfulfilling or nonreciprocal relationships has physical repercussions. Not only do the resulting feelings of loneliness and isolation increase the risk of death as much as smoking, alcoholism and obesity; you may also lose tone, or function, in the so-called smart vagus nerve, which brain researchers think allows us to be in intimate, supportive and reciprocal relationships in the first place.
....
In the presence of a true friend, Dr. Banks said, the smart or modulating aspect of the vagus nerve is what makes us feel at ease rather than on guard as when we are with a stranger or someone judgmental. It’s what enables us to feel O.K. about exposing the soft underbelly of our psyche and helps us stay engaged and present in times of conflict. Lacking authentic friendships, the smart vagus nerve is not exercised. It loses tone and one’s anxiety remains high, making abiding, deep connections difficult.

Here is a link to the full article:  Do Your Friends Actually Like You?

Science fights against aging

In the New York Times, there is new hope in the everlasting fight against the ravages of aging.

I find it amazing that this is possible without the use of exotic new substances. It basically uses things that have already been developed and proven to be "generally safe".

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/10/health/second-skin.html

Rooting for the underdog

Last night, the opening round of the NCAA men's basketball tournament began. Commonly known as "March Madness", the spectacle now seems to be a time-honored tradition. People who haven't watched a single contest all year are struggling to get the picks in their brackets correct for their local pools.

Basketball is played with only five players on a team at a time. One superstar can take a lackluster college team quite far in the tournament. The current reigning MVP in the NBA, Steph Curry, led Davidson--at the time a virtual unknown quantity--to the Elite Eight. Many of the teams are actually quite evenly matched. This leads to a number of surprises with the scrappy underdogs upsetting the giant programs with their storied history. It happens every year and it never seems to lose its thrill.

In the NY Times, Jon Werthheim and Sam Sommers write about the eternal appeal of the underdog story. Here is a key excerpt:

There’s science behind this allure of the underdog. Researchers at Bowling Green State University — perhaps none too coincidentally, a typical underdog school — once documented the phenomenon. They told more than 100 survey respondents that Team A was playing Team B in a best-of-seven series in an unspecified sport. Team A was highly favored to win. Which would they root for? Eighty-one percent said the underdog. But then the subjects were told that Team B, the underdog, had, improbably, taken a 3-0 lead in the series. Now which team would they support? Half switched over to Team A, the original favorite, but now the squad on the verge of elimination.

I found this paragraph on how it literally changes your perception of the game to be fascinating:

Another study revealed that underdog status doesn’t merely inspire rooting, it also changes our perception of what we see on the court. When told that a team was the underdog, research participants saw a play like a defender getting close to an opponent and knocking the ball away as reflecting hustle and grit. When watching the very same play, but under the impression that it came from the favored team instead, people saw the tough defense as more of a reflection of natural ability, not effort.

Most of us like to hear about the underdog winning because we see ourselves in the feisty non-favorite. We like to think that, given the same opportunity, we might overcome the obstacles to our own success. At the same time, the article goes on to point out that even though we prefer the story line of the underdog, we wager quite differently.

Yet with our fondness for the underdog, we usually say one thing and do the other. We love underdog independent bookstores but still spend more money at Amazon. We love the neighborhood Italian joint but still take the kids to Olive Garden. We say all the right things about supporting local businesses, but convenience and discount prices often win out.

....

It’s an intoxicating, yet often fleeting and shallow fling, our romance with the underdog. We’re enthralled by David, but wager more on Goliath. We’ll spend this Thursday and Friday rooting for basketball Cinderella stories, but still festoon our walls with the logos of favorites.

Personally, I root for my alma mater. Unfortunately, the Hoyas didn't make the tourney this year. Now, I'll just root for entertaining games.

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/15/opinion/the-eternal-appeal-of-the-underdog.html?ref=opinion&_r=0 

No one ever pays list price

When I was much younger, I remember watching "The Price is Right" with my grandmother. Many of the games involved trying to guess the "actual retail price" for various consumer items. Sometimes, it would be expensive items like cars. Often, it involved various random packaged goods from the grocery store like floor cleaner or dishwasher detergent. 

Today, we've entered a new age. It seems everyone is looking for a deal. Major retailers like Macy's actually tried a strategy to wean their customers off of discount coupons only to hit fierce resistance from their most loyal customers. It seems that nobody likes to pay the same price as everyone else (even if it is a lower price than the "sale"!).

This article from the NY Times notices the trend. With the transparency of web shopping, they found the same sale price at numerous web sites with various percentages off the "list price". Which, of course, makes you wonder what the real "list price" was all along. It seems that no one pays list price. If that is the case, why would you even need it?

Here is one recent example of how retailers use list prices to motivate online buyers: Le Creuset’s iron-handle skillet, 11 ¾ inches wide and cherry in color.

Amazon said late last week that it would knock $60 off the $260 list price to sell the skillet for $200. Sounds like a bargain, the sort of deal that has helped propel Amazon to over $100 billion in annual revenue.

Check around, though. The suggested price for the skillet at Williams-Sonoma.com is $285, but customers can buy it for $200. At AllModern.com, the list price is $250 but its sale price is $200. At CutleryandMore.com, the list price is $285 and the sale price is $200.

An additional 15 or so online retailers — some hosted by Amazon, others on Google Shopping — charge $200. On Le Creuset’s own site, it sells the pan for $200.

This tactic is coming under increasing scrutiny:

“Offline retailers need blowout sales to draw traffic due to the costs of visiting a store — driving, then parking, walking and searching,” said Rafi Mohammed, a consultant and author of “The 1% Windfall: How Successful Companies Use Price to Profit and Grow.” “Online retailers don’t use blowout sales since it’s so easy to shop there. But to provide confidence to consumers that they are consistently getting good deals, it’s even more important for them to provide price comparisons.”

After the Overstock suit, online pricing policies are coming under greater scrutiny.

Two customers sued Amazon in late 2014, saying its list prices violated false advertising laws by bearing no relation to the prevailing market prices. The case was dismissed after Amazon pointed out that its customers gave up their right to sue in favor of binding arbitration.

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/06/technology/its-discounted-but-is-it-a-deal-how-list-prices-lost-their-meaning.html?ref… 

Building a perfect team

Throughout our career, we'll be asked to work on teams. They will come in various shapes and sizes. We'll probably be asked to work with people of different skills with different personalities. 

Google is interested in trying to build the perfect team. They opened "Project Aristotle" to study how they might achieve major improvements in their teams. This article in the NY Times discusses what they found.

Early on in the article, you are asked to decide which team you would rather join:

Team A is composed of people who are all exceptionally smart and successful. When you watch a video of this group working, you see professionals who wait until a topic arises in which they are expert, and then they speak at length, explaining what the group ought to do. When someone makes a side comment, the speaker stops, reminds everyone of the agenda and pushes the meeting back on track. This team is efficient. There is no idle chitchat or long debates. The meeting ends as scheduled and disbands so everyone can get back to their desks.

Team B is different. It’s evenly divided between successful executives and middle managers with few professional accomplishments. Teammates jump in and out of discussions. People interject and complete one another’s thoughts. When a team member abruptly changes the topic, the rest of the group follows him off the agenda. At the end of the meeting, the meeting doesn’t actually end: Everyone sits around to gossip and talk about their lives.

Which group would you rather join?

Researchers studied this issue by analyzing hundreds of teams to see if they could figure out what would work and what would not. Because of the wide differences between the makeup of the teams, they couldn't draw direct parallels. Instead, they found common themes. If a team succeeded in some tasks, they generally built on that success and succeeded at most of them. Conversely, if they ran into problems, they generally struggled at everything.

As the researchers studied the groups, however, they noticed two behaviors that all the good teams generally shared. First, on the good teams, members spoke in roughly the same proportion, a phenomenon the researchers referred to as ‘‘equality in distribution of conversational turn-taking.’’ On some teams, everyone spoke during each task; on others, leadership shifted among teammates from assignment to assignment. But in each case, by the end of the day, everyone had spoken roughly the same amount. ‘‘As long as everyone got a chance to talk, the team did well,’’ Woolley said. ‘‘But if only one person or a small group spoke all the time, the collective intelligence declined.’’

Second, the good teams all had high ‘‘average social sensitivity’’ — a fancy way of saying they were skilled at intuiting how others felt based on their tone of voice, their expressions and other nonverbal cues. One of the easiest ways to gauge social sensitivity is to show someone photos of people’s eyes and ask him or her to describe what the people are thinking or feeling — an exam known as the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. People on the more successful teams in Woolley’s experiment scored above average on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test. They seemed to know when someone was feeling upset or left out. People on the ineffective teams, in contrast, scored below average. They seemed, as a group, to have less sensitivity toward their colleagues.

Based on these findings, it seems as if Team B would go on to have more success. There were other findings, too:

What Project Aristotle has taught people within Google is that no one wants to put on a ‘‘work face’’ when they get to the office. No one wants to leave part of their personality and inner life at home. But to be fully present at work, to feel ‘‘psychologically safe,’’ we must know that we can be free enough, sometimes, to share the things that scare us without fear of recriminations. We must be able to talk about what is messy or sad, to have hard conversations with colleagues who are driving us crazy. We can’t be focused just on efficiency. Rather, when we start the morning by collaborating with a team of engineers and then send emails to our marketing colleagues and then jump on a conference call, we want to know that those people really hear us. We want to know that work is more than just labor.

....

The paradox, of course, is that Google’s intense data collection and number crunching have led it to the same conclusions that good managers have always known. In the best teams, members listen to one another and show sensitivity to feelings and needs.

The fact that these insights aren’t wholly original doesn’t mean Google’s contributions aren’t valuable. In fact, in some ways, the ‘‘employee performance optimization’’ movement has given us a method for talking about our insecurities, fears and aspirations in more constructive ways. It also has given us the tools to quickly teach lessons that once took managers decades to absorb. Google, in other words, in its race to build the perfect team, has perhaps unintentionally demonstrated the usefulness of imperfection and done what Silicon Valley does best: figure out how to create psychological safety faster, better and in more productive ways.

‘‘Just having data that proves to people that these things are worth paying attention to sometimes is the most important step in getting them to actually pay attention,’’ Rozovsky told me. ‘‘Don’t underestimate the power of giving people a common platform and operating language.’’

Project Aristotle is a reminder that when companies try to optimize everything, it’s sometimes easy to forget that success is often built on experiences — like emotional interactions and complicated conversations and discussions of who we want to be and how our teammates make us feel — that can’t really be optimized. Rozovsky herself was reminded of this midway through her work with the Project Aristotle team. ‘‘We were in a meeting where I made a mistake,’’ Rozovsky told me. She sent out a note afterward explaining how she was going to remedy the problem. ‘‘I got an email back from a team member that said, ‘Ouch,’ ’’ she recalled. ‘‘It was like a punch to the gut. I was already upset about making this mistake, and this note totally played on my insecurities.’’

After all of the study, Google didn't seem to learn anything more than "common sense" might have told them. That said, it was likely still worth the effort to underscore just how important some of the "soft skills" could be--even to the hard sciences and technology!

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/28/magazine/what-google-learned-from-its-quest-to-build-the-perfect-team.html 

Tips and Myths on Smartphone Battery Life

Smartphones are an essential component of modern life. These handheld devices are vital pathways to communication and information. Outside of their fragility, their one major weakness lies in the batteries that power them. With most models, it's exceedingly difficult to get more than ten hours out of even the largest integrated battery--especially if the device is used for intensive tasks. External battery packs can sometimes double the charge, but at a tremendous penalty in weight and bulk.

Most of us have tried some of the strategies outlined below to help minimize our drain and maximize our time between charges. This article from the New York Times discusses actual testing of each of these key strategies to help separate the myths from the useful tips.

The first paragraphs discuss the current state of battery technology:

So why is battery technology still underwhelming? Plenty of companies have been developing smarter battery technology for years, including methods to increase battery capacity tenfold or charge devices by pulling energy from the air. But lithium ion, the technology that most mainstream batteries are based on, is low cost and easily reproducible while being safe — so we’ll be stuck with it for the foreseeable future, said Charlie Quong, an executive at Mophie, a battery accessory maker, in an interview.

“There’s a lot of investments on all fronts for improving the technology above and beyond that, but I don’t think we’re going to see that hitting any kind of mass market for several years out,” Mr. Quong said. In general, lithium ion improves about 10 percent a year in terms of the amount of energy that can be stored in a given space, which is partly why consumers perceive batteries as being far behind other technologies.

The article goes on to describe the testing they did on the various tips and tricks. They recommended eight tips. I found these two to be most useful:

• Use auto-brightness for the screen (dimmer screens save energy--unfortunately, they are harder to read)
• Turn off wi-fi when reception is poor (an established connection is no problem; the constant search for wi-fi is very draining)

I found a few of the myths very surprising.

• Closing unused apps doesn't always help. This one shocked me. I thought that you had to shut them down to stop them from draining resources. For most programs on your phone, apps in the background are frozen and do not draw power! In fact, force quitting forces the app to reload from scratch which could end up using more power.
• Don't assume turning off wi-fi will always help. As noted above, established connections can actually save power. It's far more efficient to use wi-fi than cellular data!

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/25/technology/personaltech/tips-and-myths-about-extending-smartphone-battery-life.html?

Intermountain's Big Bet

The Advisory Board printed an article outlining Intermountain Healthcare. This Utah-based system is at the leading edge in many ways. They have made a bold proclamation:  they will pass on $2 billion in savings to their patients or lose money! Here is an excerpt from the article:

The 22-hospital system is guaranteeing that SelectHealth Share, its new health plan, will cap annual rate increases at about 4%—one-third to one-half lower than typical rate hikes for employer-sponsored plans.

Most health systems would have to skimp on care quality in order to provide such a deal, Abelson says. However, Intermountain stands apart because of its innovative efforts to track and analyze care quality. And many of its contracts are value-based: the system is reimbursed a fixed amount to care for about one-third of its patients, providing an extra incentive to keep patients healthy and costs low.

Intermountain says it will reduce SelectHealth Share's rate increases through $2 billion in savings over the next five years, including about $500 million in 2016.

The article goes on to quote Brent James talking about the program. Full disclosure, I have met Brent James at many conferences in the past and worked with him directly on a few projects.

Some of the tactics will have direct impact on Medtronic. I believe that we were one of the companies mentioned in this excerpt from the NY Times article:

Intermountain’s plan is “the first innovative thing we’ve seen in a long time,” said Dave Jackson, managing partner for FirstWest Benefit Solutions in Orem, Utah. “Share has got everybody at the table — everybody’s got accountability and got things to do.”

Intermountain has already saved money by renegotiating the cost of surgical staplers, pitting a cheaper manufacturer against another and saving $235,000 a year. It saved $639,000 a year by ensuring that heart attack patients get into the catheterization lab within 90 minutes of emergency room contact, thereby helping patients recover faster.

Here is the Advisory Board summary of the overall program (Ben Umansky):

Predictability is huge for employers right now. The idea of tying premium increases to something close to overall inflation is really attractive to a market that's seen health costs far outpacing the costs of other inputs. In fact, much of what employers are doing these days is predicated on a drive for predictability; take, for example, the move to defined contribution benefits: an employer who goes that direction knows exactly what it will pay no matter what happens downstream. Intermountain is responding to that same desire, but in a different way.

Select Health Share is the sort of provider-sponsored play so many systems are dreaming about, and this may be a lesson to other health systems about what they would have to offer in order to demand exclusivity. Select Health Share isn't trading on Intermountain's quality reputation alone, strong though it may be—this credible guarantee of predictable (and reasonable) cost growth is what many others aren't willing (or able) to offer.

This isn't something that happened overnight. If Intermountain hadn't spent years aligning governance, incentives, strategic planning priorities, and so many other factors across both the provider and insurer arms, they wouldn't be able to make this kind of play today.

I've always been impressed with how Intermountain designs its financial incentives to reflect and reinforce the system's strategic goals—from overall financial targets all the way down to individual incentives. It's a system that exemplifies "systemness"—everyone's in step—and that's so important for being able to offer this kind of value proposition to the market.

Here is a link to the Advisory Board article: https://www.advisory.com/daily-briefing/2016/02/19/intermountains-big-bet-pass-on-two-billion-in-savings?WT.mc_id=Email%7cDailyBriefing%20Headline%7cDBA%7cDB%7cFeb-19-2016%7cintermountain%7c%7c%7c%7c&elq_cid=348425&x_id=003C000001GLXTHIA5

Here is a link to the NY Times article quoted by the AB:   http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/18/business/a-novel-plan-for-health-care-cutting-costs-not-raising-them.html?_r=3

4G? No, 5G!!

Mobile applications require bandwidth. Generally speaking, speed is a necessity. As the internet becomes more pervasive and we ask our smartphones and devices to perform ever more sophisticated tasks, the demand for greater capacity grows. The planned "Internet of Things" will add billions of new connections. Google's dream of self-driving cars will need near instantaneous responses that can only occur with vastly improved infrastructure--especially in wireless communication.

The current state-of-the-art is 4G LTE. Top speeds can hit about 15 megabits per second. When available, it allows the user to download a high definition movie in about eight minutes. There are lab tests underway on the next generation of access called 5G. At top speeds in excess of 10 gigabits per second, that same movie will download in about five seconds!

Today, this technology is confined to the lab and highly controlled tests. It could be many years before you start to see this in full production. Major companies like Verizon, AT&T, and Cisco are working on plans to invest billions of dollars in the quest for ways to differentiate themselves.

Here are some articles that give more background on the subject.

General overview:  http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/22/technology/what-5g-will-mean-for-you.html?ref=technology

Cisco, Ericsson, and Intel:  Cisco, Ericsson and Intel to work on 5G networks - Business Insider

CNET review of Verizon's plans:  Inside Verizon's vision of smokin' 5G speeds - CNET  

Choosing gratitude

Original post:  Nov 23, 2015

Life continually presents us with moments that can cause serious uncertainty. All around us, there are reports of chaos and mayhem. It seems that there are threats and disruptions everywhere. It sometimes feels as if there is a global conspiracy to put everyone on edge at all times.

As we were driving home, I had the radio on and there were reports on the attacks in Paris. My son asked me why it always seemed as if there were only reports on bad things happening. I struggled with a response about how it's easier for people to pay attention to the one bad thing that happens as opposed to the 99 good things that happen. Still, it felt unsatisfying.

One mantra that I try to live by is that you find what you are looking for. I suppose it's another version of the "glass half full" view of life. Instead of allowing the negativity of the moment to overwhelm me, I'm hoping to place the emphasis on the many bountiful blessings in my life.

In Sunday's New York Times, there was an op-ed entitled "Choose To Be Grateful. It Will Make You Happier." I thought I would share that as we prepare in the United States to celebrate Thanksgiving. The author points to some scientific evidence behind this type of an approach.

But we are more than slaves to our feelings, circumstances and genes. Evidence suggests that we can actively choose to practice gratitude — and that doing so raises our happiness.

This is not just self-improvement hokum. For example, researchers in one 2003 study randomly assigned one group of study participants to keep a short weekly list of the things they were grateful for, while other groups listed hassles or neutral events. Ten weeks later, the first group enjoyed significantly greater life satisfaction than the others. Other studies have shown the same pattern and lead to the same conclusion. If you want a truly happy holiday, choose to keep the “thanks” in Thanksgiving, whether you feel like it or not.

How does all this work? One explanation is that acting happy, regardless of feelings, coaxes one’s brain into processing positive emotions. In one famous 1993 experiment, researchers asked human subjects to smile forcibly for 20 seconds while tensing facial muscles, notably the muscles around the eyes called the orbicularis oculi (which create “crow’s feet”). They found that this action stimulated brain activity associated with positive emotions.

There are other positive benefits that can accrue as well:

In addition to building our own happiness, choosing gratitude can also bring out the best in those around us. Researchers at the University of Southern California showed this in a 2011 study of people with high power but low emotional security (think of the worst boss you’ve ever had). The research demonstrated that when their competence was questioned, the subjects tended to lash out with aggression and personal denigration. When shown gratitude, however, they reduced the bad behavior. That is, the best way to disarm an angry interlocutor is with a warm “thank you.”

The article goes on to include some ways to incorporate this spirit into your daily routine.

I'm sure that there are co-workers and family that deserve your thanks. Over the course of this week, take a moment to let them know that you are grateful. I'm sure they will appreciate it.

Here is another link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/22/opinion/sunday/choose-to-be-grateful-it-will-make-you-happier.html

Reinvention through "design thinking"

I want to work with the fast company part of my organization!

 IBM faces a dilemma. How can they continue to reinvent themselves so they can meet the growth targets Wall Street demands?

IBM has more than 370,000 employees. While its revenues are huge, the company’s quarterly reports have shown them steadily declining in the last two years. The falloff in revenue is partly intentional, as the company sold off less profitable operations, but the sometimes disappointing profits are not, and they reflect IBM’s struggle with its transition. Last month, the company shaved its profit target for 2015.

In recent years, the company has invested heavily in new fields, including data analytics, cloud computing, mobile technology, security, social media software for business and its Watson artificial intelligence technology. Those businesses are growing rapidly, generating revenue of $25 billion last year, and IBM forecasts that they will contribute $40 billion by 2018, through internal growth and acquisitions. Just recently, for example, IBM agreed to pay $2 billion for the Weather Company (not including its television channel), gaining its real-time and historical weather data to feed into Watson and analytics software.

But IBM’s biggest businesses are still the traditional ones — conventional hardware, software and services — which contribute 60 percent of its revenue and most of its profit. And these IBM mainstays are vulnerable, as customers increasingly prefer to buy software as a service, delivered over the Internet from remote data centers.

Virginia M. Rometty, IBM’s chief executive, has warned that this will be a difficult transition year. It will take time, she says, before its new businesses are large enough to become engines of growth for the whole company. The strategy, she insists, is the right one. What remains is to move ahead faster. “People ask, ‘Is there a silver bullet?’” Ms. Rometty said in a recent interview. “The silver bullet, you might say, is speed, this idea of speed.”

One key strategy is called "design thinking". Here is a brief explanation:

Mr. Gilbert answers that question with something called design thinking. (His title is general manager of design.) Among other things, design thinking flips traditional technology product development on its head. The old way is that you come up with a new product idea and then try to sell it to customers. In the design thinking way, the idea is to identify users’ needs as a starting point.

Mr. Gilbert and his team talk a lot about “iteration cycles,” “lateral thinking,” “user journeys” and “empathy maps.” To the uninitiated, the canons of design thinking can sound mushy and self-evident. But across corporate America, there is a rising enthusiasm for design thinking not only to develop products but also to guide strategy and shape decisions of all kinds. The September cover article of the Harvard Business Review was “The Evolution of Design Thinking.” Venture capital firms are hiring design experts, and so are companies in many industries.

This laser focus on customer needs can lead to new insights. Here is an example of how IBM trains its personnel in "design thinking":

Defining problems more expansively is part of the design-thinking ethos. At a course in New York recently, a group of IBM managers were given pads and felt-tip pens and told to sketch designs for “the thing that holds flowers on a table” in two minutes. The results, predictably, were vases of different sizes and shapes.

Next, they were given two minutes to design “a better way for people to enjoy flowers in their home.” In Round 2, the ideas included wall placements, a rotating flower pot run by solar power and a software app for displaying images of flowers on a home TV screen.

IBM is competing for talent against top names in technology like Apple and Google. Here is how they recruit prospective college graduates:

The recruiting pitch made by Mr. Gilbert and his colleagues has been essentially twofold: First, you can make a difference in socially important fields because IBM’s technology plays a crucial role in health care, energy, transportation, water and even agriculture. Second, you can be part of a groundbreaking effort to apply design thinking in business.

At Stanford, the prevailing view of working for IBM, Mr. Burnett said, has shifted from “Are you kidding me?” to “This is a pretty interesting opportunity.”

Joe Kendall thinks so. Mr. Kendall, 28, finished a two-year graduate design program at Stanford and joined IBM in June. He chose IBM over Apple, where he would have worked in its iPhone business. At Apple, he figured, his opportunity would be to help make a great product a little bit better. At IBM, Mr. Kendall sees a different opportunity. “No one is using design thinking to solve problems on this scale,” he said, adding that he could be part of “changing the future of this giant entity.”

The article goes on to note that all of the top senior executives have taken the training. Here is an example of how the work is being executed with one customer:

That proved to be the case for GameStop, a video game and electronics retailer. Jeff Donaldson, a GameStop technology executive, recalled that IBM’s reputation at the company’s suburban Dallas headquarters was as a slow-moving corporate bureaucracy, dominated by a sales culture offering expensive hardware and software. The reputation, he said, was “certainly not positive.”

But in the last year or so, the two companies have worked side by side — often in IBM’s Austin studio — to figure out better ways to serve GameStop customers with mobile devices and data. The floor staff at GameStop’s more than 4,100 stores in the United States can now tap iPads to look up the past purchases of customers who have downloaded the GameStop app or joined the company’s loyalty program. Coupons, trade-ins and loyalty-point rewards can be offered on the spot, as well as game recommendations.

The cloud software to make it happen was built in a few months, tested in a small group of stores and then quickly rolled out nationwide. Further projects are in the works to study how online behavior affects buying patterns.

“They’ve completely turned us around,” Mr. Donaldson said. “We’re working with the fast company part of IBM.”

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/15/business/ibms-design-centered-strategy-to-set-free-the-squares.html

Early lessons to use at work

Original post: Oct 20, 2015

While computers are becoming more and more talented, there are still many things they do not do well. Perhaps the most critical skill they lack is the ability to relate to humans.

We learn how to work with others at a very young age. Many of us learn these lessons as early as preschool. The ability to perceive the emotions of others around us and adjust our behavior to cooperate with the larger group is not easily replicated in silicon! In this article from the NY Times, there are some surprising findings with important future implications:

Yet skills like cooperation, empathy and flexibility have become increasingly vital in modern-day work. Occupations that require strong social skills have grown much more than others since 1980, according to new research. And the only occupations that have shown consistent wage growth since 2000 require both cognitive and social skills.

The findings help explain a mystery that has been puzzling economists: the slowdown in the growth even of high-skill jobs. The jobs hit hardest seem to be those that don’t require social skills, throughout the wage spectrum.

Some of the most important lessons may actually be learned in those early years!

Preschool classrooms, Mr. Deming said, look a lot like the modern work world. Children move from art projects to science experiments to the playground in small groups, and their most important skills are sharing and negotiating with others. But that soon ends, replaced by lecture-style teaching of hard skills, with less peer interaction.

Work, meanwhile, has become more like preschool.

Jobs that require both socializing and thinking, especially mathematically, have fared best in employment and pay, Mr. Deming found. They include those held by doctors and engineers. The jobs that require social skills but not math skills have also grown; lawyers and child-care workers are an example. The jobs that have been rapidly disappearing are those that require neither social nor math skills, like manual labor.

Perhaps the best news is that most of these skills can be taught to others.

James Heckman, a Nobel Prize-winning economist, did groundbreaking work concluding that noncognitive skills like character, dependability and perseverance are as important as cognitive achievement. They can be taught, he said, yet American schools don’t necessarily do so.

These conclusions have been put into practice outside academia. Google researchers, for example, studied the company’s employees to determine what made the best manager. They assumed it would be technical expertise. Instead, it was people who made time for one-on-one meetings, helped employees work through problems and took an interest in their lives.

There was a book series many years back built on the theme "Everything I Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten." I see that there is a lot of truth in that premise!

Here is the link to the full article:  http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/18/upshot/how-the-modern-workplace-has-become-more-like-preschool.html?_r=0