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About Me
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Consultant - Healthcare, IT, ESD, Finance, Industrial, Project Management
I have never been a big reader. Picking up a book and blazing through 100 pages never came naturally to me. But there is one topic that interests me more than anything else: personal finance. 
Investment in research and development (R&D) is the lifeblood of many private sector organizations, helping bring new products and services to market. It's also important to national economies and plays a crucial role in GDP growth. As we recover from the pandemic, R&D will play a key role in underpinning private sector growth and job creation, Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, said at the opening of the World Economic Forum's Pioneers of Change summit. The World Bank analyzed the most recent available data on which countries spend the largest proportion of GDP on R&D activities. While the data predates the pandemic, it helps shine a light on how funding research can bolster economic competitiveness. The top five are: Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden and Japan.
The A.I. project was supposed to change the state of cancer treatment. Here's what happened instead.What if artificial intelligence can't cure cancer after all? That's the message of a big Wall Street Journal post-mortem on Watson, the IBM project that was supposed to turn IBM's computing prowess into a scalable program that could deliver state-of-the-art personalized cancer treatment protocols to millions of patients around the world. Watson in general, and its oncology application in particular, has been receiving a lot of skeptical coverage of late; STAT published a major investigation last year, reporting that Watson was nowhere near being able to live up to IBM's promises. After that article came out, the IBM hype machine started toning things down a bit. But while a lot of the problems with Watson are medical or technical, they're deeply financial, too.
Farming is going vertical, thanks to startups like San Francisco-based Plenty. According to Nate Storey, the future of farms is vertical. It's also indoors, can be placed anywhere on the planet, is heavily integrated with robots and AI, and produces better fruits and vegetables while using 95% less water and 99% less land. But the future of farms is also personal, emotional, and deeply meaningful. "The objective of all technology really should be to enable human joy, right?" Storey asked me on a recent episode of the TechFirst podcast. "For me, it's the memory of being a child in the garden and eating a carrot that my grandfather gave me that still has the grit on it, and the snap and the crunch and the flavor and the aroma, or a tomato from my grandmother's garden."
Chances are you think you're a good listener. People's appraisal of their listening ability is much like their assessment of their driving skills, in that the great bulk of adults think they're above average. In our experience, most people think good listening comes down to doing three things:
There are some kinds of work that you can't do well without thinking differently from your peers. To be a successful scientist, for example, it's not enough just to be correct. Your ideas have to be both correct and novel. You can't publish papers saying things other people already know. You need to say things no one else has realized yet. The same is true for investors. It's not enough for a public market investor to predict correctly how a company will do. If a lot of other people make the same prediction, the stock price will already reflect it, and there's no room to make money. The only valuable insights are the ones most other investors don't share. You see this pattern with startup founders too. You don't want to start a startup to do something that everyone agrees is a good idea, or there will already be other companies doing it. You have to do something that sounds to most other people like a bad idea, but that you know isn't - like writing software for a tiny computer used by a few thousand hobbyists, or starting a site to let people rent airbeds on strangers' floors.
No, "humble narcissism" is not an oxymoron; it's a combination of qualities that the best leaders and companies have. Organizational psychologist Adam Grant explains why. Who would you rather work for: a narcissistic leader or a humble leader? The answer is more complicated than you think. In a Fortune 100 company, researchers studied whether customer service employees were more productive under narcissistic or humble leaders. The least effective bosses were narcissists - their employees were more likely to spend time surfing the Internet and taking long breaks. Employees with humble bosses were a bit more productive: they fielded more customer service calls and took fewer breaks. But the best leaders weren't humble or narcissistic. They were humble narcissists. How can you be narcissistic and humble at the same time? The two qualities sound like opposites, but they can go hand in hand. Narcissists believe they're special and superior; humble leaders know they're fallible and flawed. Humble narcissists bring the best of both worlds: they have bold visions, but they're also willing to acknowledge their weaknesses and learn from their mistakes.
A founder recently asked me how to stop caring what other people think. I didn't have an answer, and after reflecting on it more, I think it's the wrong question. Almost everyone cares what someone thinks (though caring what everyone thinks is definitely a mistake), and it's probably important. Caring too much makes you a sheep. But you need to be at least a little in tune with others to do something useful for them. It seems like there are two degrees of freedom: you can choose the people whose opinions you care about (and on what subjects), and you can choose the timescale you care about them on. Most people figure out the former but the latter doesn't seem to get much attention. The most impressive people I know care a lot about what people think, even people whose opinions they really shouldn't value (a surprising numbers of them do something like keeping a folder of screenshots of tweets from haters). But what makes them unusual is that they generally care about other people's opinions on a very long time horizon - as long as the history books get it right, they take some pride in letting the newspapers get it wrong.
When you start a new job, you have a fresh perspective on what has to be done and you can see the low-value work more easily. Take a look at everything on your plate. Propose three-month goals to your manager, getting rid of as many useless tasks as you can. When more responsibility is added to what you already do, you have an opportunity to restructure your work and present your plan. Offer choices to your manager: "Should I lead this task force considering it will take approximately 20% of my time? Or, should I...?" When there is a reorganization, you have to be careful not to take on too much. People have a tendency to think they can't say no or they will be the next person laid off. But actually, after a reorganization, the survivors are critical to the organization's future success, so if you offer to restructure you own job, it will typically be perceived positively. 
In his TED Talk "The Psychology of Your Future Self," Harvard psychologist Dr. Daniel Gilbert explains a bias that almost all of us have: We tend to think that the person we are today is the person we will always be. Most people, when asked if they are the same person they were 10 years ago, will say no - but we have a much harder time seeing potential for change in the future. Gilbert and others refer to this as the "end of history illusion." Despite awareness that our past self is clearly different than our present self, we tend to think that who we are right now is the "real" and "finished" version of ourselves, and our future self will be basically the same as who we are today. Gilbert puts it simply: "Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they\'re finished." 
People can be notoriously reluctant to give up control. Managers often hesitate to delegate tasks and decision making to others, even when they would benefit from doing so. Yet anyone who has worked in a large organization will tell you that, just as often, decisions can get passed from person to person, making it difficult for everyone to get work done. So how do we encourage delegating when it's beneficial and reduce it when it's not? To answer this, we first have to understand why people delegate choices, and when they're more likely to do it. Our research, recently published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, shows that although people fiercely defend their ability to make decisions, they eagerly hand off those that will affect others as well as themselves - especially when the choice is between unattractive outcomes. In seven experiments, we found that participants who were tasked with choosing meals, hotels, investments, or tasks to complete, were two to three times as likely to delegate if the choice affected others and if the options were unappealing.
Men want to step up. Here are four places to start.While fathers are increasingly recognizing the value of caring for, educating, and raising their kids, there are still imbalances that make working parenthood more difficult for mothers. In particular, new research shows that fathers, on average, still do only around half of the unpaid work that mothers do. The good news is that men want to step up, and they can do so by acknowledging the problem, aiming for equity in household tasks, collaborating with their partners on decision making, and speaking up at work about their family's needs. Organizations can help, too, by rethinking assumptions about fathering, by role-modeling, by championing flexible work arrangements and time off, and by supporting access to childcare for their workers.
Climate change and global food demand could drive a startling loss of up to 23 percent of all natural habitat ranges in the next 80 years, according to new findings published in Nature Communications. Habitat loss could accelerate to a level that brings about rapid extinctions of already vulnerable species. Shrinking ranges for mammals, amphibians and birds already account for an 18 percent loss of previous natural ranges, the study found, with a jump expected to reach 23 percent by this century's end. Global food demand currently fuels agricultural sectors to increase land use, moving into habitats previously untouched. What results - deforestation - leaves more carbon dioxide in the air, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the main driver of climate change. In the U.S. alone, agriculture-related emissions measure 11.6 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, which include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide.
Young people around the world are more disillusioned with democracy than any other generation in living memory, according to new research. The report, from Cambridge University's Centre for the Future of Democracy, found that millennials, the generation born between 1981 and 1996, are less satisfied with democracy than any other age group. Researchers spoke to nearly five million people in over 160 countries between 1973 and 2020, and found that in almost every region, it's among 18 to 34-year-olds that satisfaction with democracy is in steepest decline. They're also less happy with democracy than either their parents' or grandparents' were at the same age. 
Some executives pride themselves on having a strong intuition, honed through years of experience, that guides their decisions. Others are ambivalent about relying on their intuition to make important choices, concerned that their gut reaction is inherently biased or emotional. This latter group is no doubt responding to the oft-given advice that we should use formal data and analysis to "check" our intuitions. So who's right? Should leaders make decisions based on their gut feel, or shouldn't they? My recent research suggests that gut feel can in fact be useful, especially in highly uncertain circumstances where further data gathering and analysis won't sway you one way or another. In several studies I've conducted over the past eight years looking at high-stakes decisions, such as surgeons making life-or-death emergency room decisions, or early-stage investors deciding how to allocate millions of dollars in startup capital, I found that the role of gut feel is often to inspire a leader to make a call, particularly when the decision is risky. 
Tactics for increasing B2B salesWhen your own inbox is overflowing with unread messages, it may not seem like the best tactic but with the right approach, email can be a powerful negotiation tool, not least in the B2B realm. According to 2019 research by IACCM, a global contract management association, about 75 percent of contract negotiations are completely virtual. Nowadays, many B2B sales negotiations involve an open bid process with a standardised communication where relationship bonds are less important. In that context, emails offer a number of advantages. For instance, they can be instantly accessed, often by many parties in an organisation, thus creating transparency. Emails also allow a rich diversity of materials to be used as attachments. Negotiations via email can be particularly suitable when gender, age or racial biases - or linguistic issues such as a strong accent - could mar the process. It can also help when there is a power distance between parties or when some voices risk being unheard. However, email communication requires a certain technique in order to maximise the chances of closing the deal. As email is so widely used, every salesperson is competing for buyers' attention. According to a study involving a top B2B manufacturer of customised equipment for heavy industry, a successful combination of influence tactics can increase buyers' interest and the likelihood of a contract.
The old methods of demand generation won't work in the always-online era. A new, digital era of B2B sales and marketing is upon us. It's driven by corporate customer demand for online access to their suppliers' offerings and expertise. Taking advantage of this shift is challenging because it requires moving from deeply embedded B2B sales and marketing models to data-driven, digitally powered partnerships between sales, marketing and analytics. The rewards of digital demand generation - a pivotal piece of the B2B digital transformation puzzle - can be significant. For example, GE Healthcare Life Sciences, a biopharma business, grew by building an extensive digital demand generation operation that engages researchers through thought leadership content and software, allows customers to fulfil orders through an e-commerce portal, and supports online research into unique, custom biological agents. In March 2020, Danaher completed the purchase of what is now called Cytiva for seventeen times of the firm's 2019 EBITDA.
In 2006, Drew Houston got on a bus from Boston heading to New York. He planned to use the three-hour ride to get some work done, so he opened his laptop, and realized he had left his thumb drive with all of his work files at home. Drew decided he never wanted to have that problem again. On that bus ride, he started writing the code to build a cloud-based file storage and sharing service he called Dropbox. Fourteen years later, Drew and his co-founder, Arash Ferdowsi, have built Dropbox into a public company worth close to $8 billion.
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