What's Wrong With the Teenage Mind? - WSJ.com

The crucial new idea is that there are two different neural and psychological systems that interact to turn children into adults. Over the past two centuries, and even more over the past generation, the developmental timing of these two systems has changed. That, in turn, has profoundly changed adolescence and produced new kinds of adolescent woe. The big question for anyone who deals with young people today is how we can go about bringing these cogs of the teenage mind into sync once again.

This might be a more important question for the future than we think. When children reach puberty earlier and adulthood later the number of people behaving in a way we used to ascribe to teenagers increase dramatically we are increasingly living in a world where those who shape it are behaving like teenagers… Can this effect have even more impact than e g an aging Western society will? Meaning more teenage logic??

Culture Eats Strategy For Lunch | Fast Company

Culture, like brand, is misunderstood and often discounted as a touchy-feely component of business that belongs to HR. It’s not intangible or fluffy, it’s not a vibe or the office décor. It’s one of the most important drivers that has to be set or adjusted to push long-term, sustainable success. It’s not good enough just to have an amazing product and a healthy bank balance. Long-term success is dependent on a culture that is nurtured and alive. Culture is the environment in which your strategy and your brand thrives or dies a slow death.

I would say this even stronger: culture is what is implemented in the organization and in the head of the employees while strategies, plans and organization charts are incomplete and one dimensional sketches of what we want the organization to be. The problem is that we think that we can bypass the concept of culture to get directly from these sketchy plans to changed organizational behavior, when in fact the changed culture is what we really want to achieve.

One Per Cent: FBI releases plans to monitor social networks

The US Federal Bureau of Investigation has quietly released details of plans to continuously monitor the global output of Facebook, Twitter and other social networks, offering a rare glimpse into an activity that the FBI and other government agencies are reluctant to discuss publicly. The plans show that the bureau believes it can use information pulled from social media sites to better respond to crises, and maybe even to foresee them.

Why 3-D Printing Will Go the Way of Virtual Reality - Technology Review This isn’t just premature, it’s absurd. 3-D printing, like VR before it, is one of those technologies that suggest a trend of long and steep adoption driven by rapid advances on the systems we have now. And granted, some of what’s going on at present is pretty cool—whether it’s in rapid prototyping, solid-fuel rockets, bio-assembly or just giant plastic showpieces. But the notion that 3-D printing will on any reasonable time scale become a “mature” technology that can reproduce all the goods on which we rely is to engage in a complete denial of the complexities of modern manufacturing, and, more to the point, the challenges of working with matter. […] Hype is inevitably followed by some level of backlash, or at least disinterest, and it would be a shame for 3-D printing to head into a too-deep trough of the Gartner hype cycle. There will be plenty of interesting applications for 3-D printing, but I’ll bet the ones that will have the biggest impact will be within traditional factories, where rapid prototyping is already having a huge impact. I believe this is right. That is why it is interesting to try to look where 3D print might have a unique advantage. Following Bruce Sterlings early insights about this I think one of these possible areas are places on the planet where they don’t have access to factories yet, but is in need of things – many cheap, small but specialized things like e g spare parts for important machines. Update: Ian Pearson commented on Twitter on this post by noting that 3D print will create a great digital craft industry, which I agree with. And that is a whole interesting area in itself since a whole new craft area will most likely redefine how we relate to design and production. Maybe not for everything but for the things that are perceived to be special and we really like and have emotional relations.
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Why 3-D Printing Will Go the Way of Virtual Reality - Technology Review

This isn’t just premature, it’s absurd. 3-D printing, like VR before it, is one of those technologies that suggest a trend of long and steep adoption driven by rapid advances on the systems we have now. And granted, some of what’s going on at present is pretty cool—whether it’s in rapid prototyping, solid-fuel rockets, bio-assembly or just giant plastic showpieces.
But the notion that 3-D printing will on any reasonable time scale become a “mature” technology that can reproduce all the goods on which we rely is to engage in a complete denial of the complexities of modern manufacturing, and, more to the point, the challenges of working with matter.

[…]

Hype is inevitably followed by some level of backlash, or at least disinterest, and it would be a shame for 3-D printing to head into a too-deep trough of the Gartner hype cycle. There will be plenty of interesting applications for 3-D printing, but I’ll bet the ones that will have the biggest impact will be within traditional factories, where rapid prototyping is already having a huge impact.

I believe this is right. That is why it is interesting to try to look where 3D print might have a unique advantage. Following Bruce Sterlings early insights about this I think one of these possible areas are places on the planet where they don’t have access to factories yet, but is in need of things – many cheap, small but specialized things like e g spare parts for important machines.

Update: Ian Pearson commented on Twitter on this post by noting that 3D print will create a great digital craft industry, which I agree with. And that is a whole interesting area in itself since a whole new craft area will most likely redefine how we relate to design and production. Maybe not for everything but for the things that are perceived to be special and we really like and have emotional relations.

Source: technologyreview.com

Student loan debt now stands around $1 trillion. Education is often a great investment – but the proposition is more in question every day. Higher education prices increased 440% over the last 25 years – four times the rate of inflation, and twice as bad as health care. Elementary and secondary ed prices have skyrocketed, too, with not even adequate outcomes. On the other side of the ledger is the Moore’s law ecosystem, the most ruthless force in technology and the world economy. Last quarter Netflix streamed two billion hours worth of video – or 228,000 years worth in three months. In just the last week of December, smartphone and tablet owners gobbled up 1.2 billion apps – 43% by Americans. Twenty years ago, a terabyte hard drive, if such a thing had existed, might have cost $5 million. Today, you can pick one up for $69. The price of information plummets. Yet the price of education soars. These two trends cannot both continue. Guess which will crack first.
Apple and the Education-Information Chasm - Forbes (via infoneer-pulse)

(via infoneer-pulse)

Source: forbes.com

Fear among international experts of a major geopolitical disruption over the next 12 months has risen significantly to 54%, just as confidence in the state of global cooperation has dropped, according to the World Economic Forum’s third Global Confidence Index. (via Global Confidence Index | World Economic Forum-Global Confidence Index)
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Fear among international experts of a major geopolitical disruption over the next 12 months has risen significantly to 54%, just as confidence in the state of global cooperation has dropped, according to the World Economic Forum’s third Global Confidence Index.

(via Global Confidence Index | World Economic Forum-Global Confidence Index)

Source: weforum.org

Strategic Insight is Not on the CEO Radar - Alessandro Di Fiore - Harvard Business Review

This is really something that echoes a problem I have been pondering for years: I really agree with Drucker on the issue and I been for many year but why is strategic insight so under valued and overlooked? When discussing the need for real insights the whole discussion usually ends with a lunch-to-lunch exercise in the woods… because “we have already planned that and we don’t have more time to spend”. The message about the importance of investing time and energy looking for a strategic insight simply doesn’t get through!

In the research ECSI have found a four suggestions to why might be that way:

  • Insight is confused with innovation = wrong expectations of what it is
  • Insight has no owner = pieces of it are spread
  • Schumpeter’s bias  = we seems to believe insight is an individual property
  • Lack of internal integration = thinking and doing is usually not connected
I think I should write something more about this soon since I believe there are some other underlying aspects as well.
Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition | World Economic Forum-Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders, indicating a shift of concern from environmental risks to socioeconomic risks compared to a year ago. Respondents worry that further economic shocks and social upheaval could roll back the progress globalization has brought, and feel that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. The report analyses the top 10 risks in five categories - economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological - and also highlights “X Factor” risks, the wild card threats which warrant more research, including a volcanic winter, cyber neotribalism and epigenetics, the risk that the way we live could have harmful, inheritable effects on our genes. Key crisis management lessons from Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters are highlighted in a special chapter. An interesting report that underlines the need to transform our society from an productivity optimizing hence brittle one to a resilient and adaptive society. But for me this report also raise the need to again argue for a necessary analysis of what is going on and from which standpoint the discussions in Davos is held. One of the core issues underlying many of the problems and risks in this report is the structural transformation of the power and consequently governance, a lot due to the emergence of radically new communication capabilities. Because of that the platform from where this discussion is taking place is a completely different place in the power hierarchies than most of the participants think. Underlying many of the risks in these lists we can trace the effects of a differently wired world i e an emerging bottom-up model of governance. From the Davos perspective i e the perspective from a traditional and hierarchical standpoint to much of what is going on is perceived as societal threats or risks to address, when in fact they are just threats to the traditional ways of governing! To be able to focus on the real risks and challenges in the world we must understand that a changing communication paradigm is NOT a risk to hedge for or a problem to solve. It is more like the paradigmatic shift when your life changes when you give birth your first child. It is not a problem to solve but rather a case when you mature and realize that the world doesn’t gravitate around you alone anymore, but around the new unit of the family, suddenly and magically appear. It is rather a new prerequisite that you have to come to turn with and understand how to relate to, and consequently adapt to in the best way you can, but not a problem to solve.
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Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition | World Economic Forum-Global Risks 2012 - Seventh Edition

Economic imbalances and social inequality risk reversing the gains of globalization, warns the World Economic Forum in its report Global Risks 2012. These are the findings of a survey of 469 experts and industry leaders, indicating a shift of concern from environmental risks to socioeconomic risks compared to a year ago. Respondents worry that further economic shocks and social upheaval could roll back the progress globalization has brought, and feel that the world’s institutions are ill-equipped to cope with today’s interconnected, rapidly evolving risks. The findings of the survey fed into an analysis of three major risk cases: Seeds of Dystopia; Unsafe Safeguards and the Dark Side of Connectivity. The report analyses the top 10 risks in five categories - economic, environmental, geopolitical, societal and technological - and also highlights “X Factor” risks, the wild card threats which warrant more research, including a volcanic winter, cyber neotribalism and epigenetics, the risk that the way we live could have harmful, inheritable effects on our genes. Key crisis management lessons from Japan’s earthquake, tsunami and nuclear disasters are highlighted in a special chapter.

An interesting report that underlines the need to transform our society from an productivity optimizing hence brittle one to a resilient and adaptive society.

But for me this report also raise the need to again argue for a necessary analysis of what is going on and from which standpoint the discussions in Davos is held. One of the core issues underlying many of the problems and risks in this report is the structural transformation of the power and consequently governance, a lot due to the emergence of radically new communication capabilities. Because of that the platform from where this discussion is taking place is a completely different place in the power hierarchies than most of the participants think.

Underlying many of the risks in these lists we can trace the effects of a differently wired world i e an emerging bottom-up model of governance. From the Davos perspective i e the perspective from a traditional and hierarchical standpoint to much of what is going on is perceived as societal threats or risks to address, when in fact they are just threats to the traditional ways of governing! To be able to focus on the real risks and challenges in the world we must understand that a changing communication paradigm is NOT a risk to hedge for or a problem to solve. It is more like the paradigmatic shift when your life changes when you give birth your first child. It is not a problem to solve but rather a case when you mature and realize that the world doesn’t gravitate around you alone anymore, but around the new unit of the family, suddenly and magically appear. It is rather a new prerequisite that you have to come to turn with and understand how to relate to, and consequently adapt to in the best way you can, but not a problem to solve.

Source: weforum.org

MIT Media Lab Rolls Out Folding Car | Singularity Hub

You think European cars are small now, wait till the Hiriko takes to the roads in Spain’s northern Basque country. The two-seater is about the size of a SmartCar, but when parked, it can actually fold. After folding the car takes up about a third of a normal parking space.

Source: singularityhub.com

IAF has developed Primary Care 2025: A Scenario Exploration, a set of scenarios describing the alternative futures of primary care in the U.S. in the year 2025. These scenarios consider the nation’s economic challenges, political polarization, and opportunities afforded by disruptive technological advances and new delivery systems. The report includes implications and recommendations based on the scenarios, developed at a National Workshop of leaders. The scenarios help organizations, associations, and communities to gain greater understanding of the challenges facing primary care as well as the options we may have in the years to come. (via Primary Care 2025 | Institute for Alternative Futures)
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IAF has developed Primary Care 2025: A Scenario Exploration, a set of scenarios describing the alternative futures of primary care in the U.S. in the year 2025. These scenarios consider the nation’s economic challenges, political polarization, and opportunities afforded by disruptive technological advances and new delivery systems. The report includes implications and recommendations based on the scenarios, developed at a National Workshop of leaders. The scenarios help organizations, associations, and communities to gain greater understanding of the challenges facing primary care as well as the options we may have in the years to come.

(via Primary Care 2025 | Institute for Alternative Futures)

Source: altfutures.org