You know I'm a big fan of the cloud and it just keeps getting more and more interesting. Now the next generation of cloud computing is upon us. It’s mobile, collaborative, and social and available today with Cloud 2. It’s changing everything! A big salesforce.com event in San Jose on June 22, 2010 will address the Cloud 2 trend.
Salesforce.com Chairman and CEO Marc Benioff and industry luminaries from CA, VMware, and BMC, and thousands of others will see how the next generation of cloud computing will transform entire businesses. Watch !
Check out this wonderfully animated video, Professor Philip Zimbardo (of the famed Stanford Prison Experiment) "conveys how our individual perspectives of time affect our work, health and well-being. Time influences who we are as a person, how we view relationships and how we act in the world."
The secret isn't really secret: building a great organization is about getting talented people to work together toward a common goal. Actually doing it is the challenge and that is where many folks get it wrong.
I continue to see organizations and leaders approaching this challenge with old school methods that just don't work. For example, incentives and false motivational tactics; these are PROVEN to be ineffective, yet so many still attempt to operate their organizations in this manner.
Are you "old school" and have trouble believing that something like incentives don't work ? Read on.....
In Dan Pink's new book Drivehe makes the distinction between extrinsic motivators like strict schedules and large bonuses and intrinsic motivators like autonomy, mastery, and purpose. Dan makes the case that employees performing jobs that require more than just basic cognition, are less productive when motivated by an extrinsic source than an intrinsic source. Watch the RSA presentation by Dan below and perhaps you'll get a grasp on the secret: helping people in an organization obtain more autonomy, purpose and mastery of their skills is the real secret to more productivity.
Tom Friedman's Op-Ed in the NYT's today was titled "A Question from Lydia". In it Tom addressed a question a 10 year old Greek girl wrote at the site of the Marfin Engatia Bank, which was firebombed a few weeks ago. The question was "In what kind of world will I grow up?". Tom answered, "that's a good question Lydia", and I agree. Good news is that world is changing to a place with great potential for not tolerating such bad behavior.
My writing proposes that 6 degrees of change are increasingly emerging as the result of the revolution created by technology, global ism and demographic shifts:
1. Transparency modality becomes essential;
2. Traditional institutions vanish;
3. Orchestration strategy dominates;
4. Participation explodes;
5. Wealth increasingly is redistributed;and
6. Human conciousness profoundly evolves.
The increasing adoption of transparency as a requirement for doing things cannot be ignored or discounted. This will be driven by hyper-connectivity and a world where people's behaviors will not be able to be hidden.
When Greeks binge and rack up billions of euros of debt, Germans have to dig into their mattresses and bail them out because they are all connected in the European Union. Lost in Athens, felt in Berlin. Lost on Wall Street, felt in Iceland. Yes, such linkages have been around for years. But today so many more of us are just so much more deeply intertwined with each other and with the natural world. That is why Dov Seidman, the C.E.O. of LRN, which helps companies build ethical cultures, and author of the book “How,” argues that we are now in the “Era of Behavior.”
Of course, behavior always mattered. But today, notes Seidman, how each of us behaves, consumes, does business, builds or doesn’t build trust with others matters more than ever. Because each of us, each of our banks, each of our companies, now has the power to impact, for good or ill, so many more people’s lives through so many more channels — from day-trading to mortgage-lending to Twitter to Internet-enabled terrorism.
Watch Dov's lecture below. Dov calls this , "The Era of Behavior". After reviewing the book, I recommend it highly thanks to Tom's editorial.
Gary Wolf, writes about science and social issues for Wired, where he is a contributing editor. Gary is also working on a project with Kevin Kelly and a book termed, "The Quantified Self". He recently wrote an interesting article for NYT Magazine, The Data Driven Life which reflects on the surge of new devices that track everything and demonstrates his keen interest in the quantified self concept. The advent of inexpensive technologies is creating new ways for people to think about how they live. As I have spoken about recently at the IHRSA show for the health and fitness industry this is a significant trend that is and will continue to have tremendous impact and implications. Here are some excerpts from Gary's recent article:
Millions of us track ourselves all the time. We step on a scale and record our weight. We balance a checkbook. We count calories. But when the familiar pen-and-paper methods of self-analysis are enhanced by sensors that monitor our behavior automatically, the process of self-tracking becomes both more alluring and more meaningful. Automated sensors do more than give us facts; they also remind us that our ordinary behavior contains obscure quantitative signals that can be used to inform our behavior, once we learn to read them.
“The real expertise you need is signal processing and statistical analysis,” says James Park, the chief executive and co-founder of Fitbit, a company that makes a tracker released late last year. The Fitbit tracker is two inches long, half an inch wide and shaped like a thick paperclip. It tracks movement, and if you wear it in a little elastic wristband at night, it can also track your hours of sleep. (You are not completely still when sleeping. Your pattern of movement, however, can be correlated with sleeping and waking, just as the acceleration of a runner’s foot reveals speed.) Park and his partner, Eric Friedman, first showed their prototype at a San Francisco business conference in the summer of 2008. Five weeks later, Park and Friedman, who are both 33, had $2 million in venture capital, and they were flying back and forth to Singapore to arrange production. Last winter they shipped their first devices.
At nearly the same time, Philips, the consumer electronics company, began selling its own tiny accelerometer-based self-tracker, called DirectLife, which, like the Fitbit, is meant to be carried on the body at all times. Zeo, a company based in Newton, Mass., released a tracker contained in a small headband, which picks up electrical signals from the brain, and uses them to compile the kind of detailed record of light sleep, deep sleep and REM sleep that, until now, was available only if you spent the night in a sleep-research clinic. Lately I’ve been running into people who say they wear it every night. And Nike recently announced that its Nike+ system, one of the first personal speedometers, has been used by more than 2.5 million runners since its release in 2006.
Read the article and follow Gary and Kevin. They have a lot to say and share about what is happening with technology and its impact on our everyday lives and culture.
