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15 January 2016

Posted on January 15, 2016 Leave a Comment

New Year resolutions are very personal. But discussions with colleagues have proven useful in refining mine in the past. So let me share some on my work list. For the past years, they’ve focused on improving productivity. The main productivity disturbances at my end come from emails and meetings. They suck up time and maintain a reactive mode. For email management, Owen Barder’s “Take control of your email in 2013” has been a super useful guide. It takes time to set up the whole triage system, and then some willingness to turn off Outlook several times a day, but it is worth the investment. For optimizing the work day, I borrowed a lot from Shane Parrish’ ”How to be insanely more productive” seminar. Four main tips: (i) plan creative work in the morning, keep reactive work for the afternoon [yes, that means don’t start the day with the email backlog]; (ii) work in chunks, schedule them in your calendar, and try to apply the no-email/no-meeting rule to at least one time-period; (iii) before leaving the office, write down the 2-3 key deliverables for the next day; and (iv) “say no” [probably the hardest part]. At a less mundane level, I have enjoyed Maria Popova’s “16 elevating resolutions for 2016 inspired by some of humanity’s greatest minds”, even though her selection suffers a serious Western bias.

The 2016 World Development Report “Digital dividends” is out. I only read the 45-page executive summary but the message is clear: despite the rapid spread of the internet and mobile phones, and the many individual success stories, digital technologies have not delivered the expected positive development outcomes in particular for the poorest. Where positive business environments, good education systems and accountable institutions are present, digital technologies can help enhance growth and foster inclusion and innovation. Where this “analog foundation” is absent, they won’t and can even exacerbate inequalities. This aligns with previous arguments made about technology acting as an amplifier of pre-existing good or bad policies. So most recommendations proposed by the World Bank are not technology-specific, they are about providing some development basics.

My graph this week is from the World Economic Forum’s “Global Risks Report 2016”. It shows that the top estimated risks this year are environment- and migration-related. Inequalities which were at the top of the WEF list in previous years do not feature prominently this time around.

 

 

My quote of the week is from George Lucas in a recent Charlie Rose interview [9’02”]:
Rose: “Because you have worn all these hats: film-maker, director, story-teller, writer, technological innovator, what do you want the first line of your obituary to say?”
Lucas: “That I was a great dad.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: digital, inequality, productivity, workplace

4 December 2015

Posted on December 4, 2015 Leave a Comment

You can add Frances Jensen’s “The teenage brain” to your Christmas gifts list. It is a useful and accessible read for anybody working with adolescents, including at home. She digests the latest neuroscience findings on brain development to show that adolescence is a critical window of vulnerabilities and opportunities. As connectivity of the brain matures from back to front lobes through childhood, 20% remains unwired when kids enter their teens. She shows the effects of stress, substance abuse, and physical shocks on the adolescent brain development and discusses implications for education and justice systems inter alia. This is mind-blowing stuff that Jensen thinks should be made widely available to practioners, parents and adolescents themselves. So we invited her to our Conversation with Thought Leaders series, see here.

Some of you asked me what I read about ISIS. Like many of you, probably too much. But here are some of the (non-book) write-ups that helped me think and take a long view. On the origins of ISIS, I found Tim Urban’s “From Muhammad to ISIS: Iraq’s full story” clear and useful. On what ISIS is, I was interested in Graeme Wood’s “What ISIS really wants” because of the debate it triggered around the role of religion vs other pull factors attracting recruits. Lydia Wilson’s “What I discovered from interviewing imprisoned ISIS fighters”, for instance, points to “humiliated and enraged young men [seeking] a way out of their insecure and undignified lives; the promise of living in pride as Iraqi Sunni Arabs, which is not just a religious identity but cultural, tribal, and land-based, too.” For the Francophones, I would add Olivier Roy’s “Le djihadisme est une révolte générationnelle et nihiliste” because of his thought-provoking thesis, based on the study of recruits’ profiles, that we are witnessing the Islamization of (youth) radicalism rather than the radicalization of Islam [English speakers can read his Quartz interview here]. And Alain Bertho’s “Il faut être clair un monde a pris fin et il n’y aura pas de retour en arrière” which contrasts ISIS with the 1970ies political terrorism and post-communist social rebellions, and looks at the ideological vacuum they fill for destabilized young people. But I would like to hear which readings you found useful.

I found myself glued to the Bloomberg Carbon Clock, a real-time estimate of the global atmospheric CO2 level. Not very constructive. So my visual this week is from ITU’s “Measuring the information society report 2015”.  The good news: 3.2 billion people are online, and 95% of the global population are covered by mobile-cellular networks. The interesting trend: Over the past year, mobile broadband subscriptions (47.2%) overtook households with internet access (46.4%). The bad news: multiple digital divides persist between and within countries; between rural and urban areas; between men and women; between rich and poor; between the more and less educated; and between social groups.  The projections: by 2020 53% of people will be online globally; 45% in developing countries; but only 11% in LDCs.

My quote this week is from Nesta CEO Geoff Mulgan in “Meaningful meetings: How can meetings can be made better?”: “Some of the best meetings don’t happen.”

Filed Under: Uncategorized Tagged With: book review, brain, climate change, conflict, digital, terrorism, workplace

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