Earlier this year, rapper Curtis James Jackson III, known as 50 Cent, got the attention of the judge hearing his bankruptcy case by posting to his Instagram account photos of himself lounging with stacks of cash. The money hadn’t been disclosed in his bankruptcy-court filings. Faced with questions, Mr. Jackson was forced to admit: The cash was fake.
Baby boomers and millennials indicate a strong desire to live near urban centers and, in many cases, they don't own a vehicle. Consumers will quickly get used to riding in driverless vehicles, similarly to how they replaced the horse and buggy. Data sharing will be crucial for vehicles’ navigation around the roads, but also for safety.
The modern economy is notable for its limitlessness. The stream of incoming emails is endless: you’re still Sisyphus, rolling his boulder up that hill for all eternity – you’re just rolling it slightly faster. Techniques designed to enhance one’s personal productivity seem to exacerbate the very anxieties they were meant to allay. The better you get at managing time, the less of it you feel that you have.
Analysis attributed roughly 13 percent of manufacturing job losses to trade and the rest to enhanced productivity because of automation.
The benefits of machine-learning chatbots multiply tenfold when that chatbot operates on an open contact center platform. There is no limit to what the chatbot can do or learn. It can traverse APIs and gain access to an infinite knowledge base stored within integrated software — if the chatbot can access it, the chatbot can learn from it.
The ultimate vision would be to predict outcomes of meetings before they are completed, and to guide people to take certain actions throughout the day. Within five years, nearly three-quarters of management decisions to be determined by (the algorithm). The role of many remaining humans at the firm wouldn’t be to make individual choices but to design the criteria by which the system makes decisions, intervening when something isn’t working.
Almost anything bad you can think of doing to a machine-learning model can be done right now. And defending it is really, really hard. Researchers have demonstrated various ways in which machine-learning programs could be manipulated by exploiting their propensity to spot patterns in data. They are vulnerable, in part, because they lack actual intelligence.
Nearly 16% of the U.S. workforce in 2015 was composed of people in contingent work arrangements, including freelance graphic designers and part-time management consultants. Contractors and consultants with niche skills have many options, and they are demanding to be treated “with dignity and almost as if they’re your employee. That means offering them not just respect but even some of the benefits available to permanent employees
81% of all supply chain executives surveyed who say big data analytics is ‘disruptive and important’ are likely just assuming it’s big rather than knowing first-hand. Big data analytics is less about mysterious mathematics and more about using our fast-evolving computing tools to answer the questions we care about.
Capgemini, an IT services company, sent an employment offer. (Employees) responded with a counteroffer (that) asked for "a one-time, $100,000 donation to a charity of your choice providing services to the unemployed American workers." The counteroffer also included a provision asking for "a personal, signed apology letter from both the CEO of Capgemini, as well as the CEO of Carnival, to each of the families who have been affected by this decision."
Despite Nielsen’s push into more expansive and detailed means of tracking consumers, it has faced steady criticism for outdated methods of measuring media ratings. In recent years, the company still relied on paper diaries to track television viewing, for example, and TV networks have said repeatedly that Nielsen’s ratings are unreliable.
Given the fact that nobody knows for sure what our minds are, information seems a reasonable candidate. (And) the crucial role of information suggests a progressive shift from reality to the data we collect. (But) information is not the Soul 2.0. Pressing the ‘save’ button won’t save us.
Starbucks has been a technology company for the past few years as much as it has been a coffee purveyor. The company was the first to integrate digital payment into its app, making it common to see people pay holding their phones to a scanner. Starbucks also led with Mobile Order & Pay that allows people to skip the line. The next step in evolving that platform will be using what it has learned about its customers to better serve them.
Uber passengers are paying only 41 percent of the actual cost of their trips; Uber is using these massive subsidies to undercut the fares and provide more capacity than the competitors who had to cover 100 percent of their costs out of passenger fares.
Reshoring reduces transportation costs and cuts down on the time required to bring new designs to market. But it doesn’t do much for employment, because the operations that are moving back to the U.S. are largely automated. This is the major reason that there is a reshoring trend; salaries are no longer an issue once you get rid of the salaried.
As innovations like artificial intelligence and connected devices become popular, customers are putting cloud components in mobile computing, home games and email marketing campaigns. In other words, the big clouds aim to be everywhere.
The 1.3 billion miles of data Tesla said it has collected represents those covered by its vehicles even when Autopilot isn’t switched on—it operates in “shadow mode,” with sensors tracking real-world data when it’s off. "They can learn from a wider range of experiences and at a much faster rate than a company that is testing with trained drivers and employees behind the wheel.”
Developed by a software engineer, Holacracy pushes humans to run like a computer. The barrier to hyper-efficiency is human emotion. (So) it attempts to eliminate the ways in which humanity interferes with productivity. The appeal of Holacracy’s organizational design reflects the Silicon Valley ethos— an optimal confluence of human and technology. (But) “Silicon Valley has an empathy vacuum. People become numbers, algorithms become rules, and reality becomes what data says. Empathy is not a buzzword but something to be practiced.”
Burger King customers in Miami Beach, London and Brazil can bring unwanted Christmas presents to select stores to trade for a Whopper. Itchy sweaters... Trump neckties... smelly candles... and more no longer have to get stashed into your closet until being passed along to a new victim recipient.
The increasing popularity of e-commerce—which accounts for over 8 percent of total retail sales as of last quarter—has been a boon for protective-packaging companies, now a $5.6 billion industry. Historically, the industry served mostly manufacturing and wholesale clients. But e-commerce is playing a much bigger role. Retail has gone from less than 20 percent of packaging sales in the U.S. to 30 percent. U.S. demand for air cushions alone is up by 5.5 percent this year.
As more shoppers migrate from the mall to their phones, tablets and computers, Christmas surprises are getting harder to pull off. People with online accounts say they live in fear of having their covers blown by their browsing histories, or by cookies that generate ads that follow them around the internet. Home package deliveries and tech-savvy children are compounding the problem, too.“Before you used to check mom’s closet for all your presents, and now you check her online account.”
(Those surveyed) estimated that their holiday gifts had cost $508.90 on average. But they would have been just as happy with $462.10 in cash. Between a tenth and a third of the value of holiday gifts is destroyed by gift-giving. Generalized across the economy, holiday gift-giving was destroying billions of dollars in value annually. I would happily pay someone not to give me a rock with a spiritual inscription. But the rock was a gift from my mother, and so I’ll never part with it. To me, its value is incalculable.
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As a Partner and Co-Founder of Predictiv and PredictivAsia, Jon specializes in management performance and organizational effectiveness for both domestic and international clients. He is an editor and author whose works include Invisible Advantage: How Intangilbles are Driving Business Performance.
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