Why is sustainability seen as a rollercoaster for business leaders? | Guardian Sustainable Business If you really want to know what's going on in the minds of executives when it comes to embedding sustainability, then look no further than the business coaches they pour their hearts out to. "I feel like I've been on a rollercoaster" is one of the most common complaints that executive coach John Blakey hears. Blakey, co-author of Challenging Coaching, suggests individuals' fears of being out of control, of failure, ridicule, isolation, being left behind, and of the sheer complexity and speed of work lives are among the biggest obstacles to driving the sustainability agenda forward. When Blakey hears the rollercoaster comment, he now tries to add in some humour: "I say, 'That sounds exciting. It's not that Blakey sees leaders' struggles or fears as a laughing matter, it's just that he sees a need to reframe their worldview: "They use it as a negative statement, about feeling out of control, feeling like everything is rushing by. "Their confidence was ebbing by the day," he says. Complexity
Training to Save? Does financial education training for children in Ghana help instill a culture of good decision-making? Take a reader survey and find out. Many of us remember the first thing we saved money for, depositing loose change or hard-earned cash in piggy banks. Dean’s son has been saving to purchase a soccer jersey from every country he’s visited with his dad. At a time when nearly half of American households carry over credit card balances every month, we wonder: How much did our early financial education affect us? Evidence of the impact of financial education programs on financial outcomes for adults is mixed. As part of Innovations for Poverty Action’s efforts to evaluate poverty-reduction programs, we posed this question: Would financial education trainings for children in a developing country, with one of the lowest savings rates in Africa, help instill a culture of saving and good financial decision-making in these kids?
Thoughts | Designing the new normal + When we contemplate the future, we may find ourselves wondering what we should be designing. Our world is changing; it always has and it always will. Our greatest challenge is often not how to recognize change, but what to do about it. What responsibility does it place upon designers? I believe that a big part of our responsibility is to look openly and honestly at change, understand the implications and then consider what can/should/could be done about the evolving context. There is no singularity of normal on our planet today. Each of us should be asking questions of ourselves as we work: Do we have a duty, perhaps even a professional responsibility, to design to broader parameters than current frameworks, like local building regulations, demand? These are really tough questions for a firm of consultants who compete in a global marketplace. When we contemplate the future, we may find ourselves wondering what we should be designing. I am Director for Global Foresight and Innovation...
Can Management Consulting Help Small Firms Grow? Economic development efforts are best served by testing and refining assumptions about what works. Should we assume that small enterprises in developing countries are lacking in business skills—and that guidance and training will improve these businesses? Economic theory says that firms do as much as possible to maximize profits—including paying for advice from management consultants. Two randomized evaluations recently conducted by Innovations for Poverty Action (IPA) in Ghana (by Dean Karlan, Ryan Knight, and Chris Udry) and in Mexico (by Miriam Bruhn, Dean Karlan, and Antoinette Schoar) explore this question for small and medium enterprises (SMEs). In February, we asked SSIR website readers to predict the results of the two studies. Why did we study these programs with randomized evaluations? In Accra, Ghana, IPA partnered with Ernst & Young to provide urban tailors and seamstresses with customized consulting advice on record keeping, customer service, and management of employees.
How Not to Kill Creativity – Jonah Lehrer LIVE on Big Think | Big Think TV Jonah Lehrer has been described as a kind of "one man third culture" – after training in Neuroscience at Columbia with Nobel Laureate Eric Kandel, he studied literature and philosophy on a Rhodes scholarship to Oxford. Since then, he has written three books that examine and blur the boundaries between science and art, reason and imagination. His latest: Imagine: How Creativity Works, looks at the neuroscience and the real-world phenomenon of creativity in case studies ranging from the emotional and spiritual burnout that led to Bob Dylan's brilliant album Highway 61 Revisited to the invention of the Swiffer. Here, Lehrer talks with Big Think's Jason Gots about failure as an integral, essential part of the creative process, and why American schools are so good at killing creativity.
Jobs for Billionaires - By Joshua E. Keating An unmanned rocket owned by the private company Space Exploration Technologies launched Tuesday on the first commercial flight to the International Space Station. SpaceX, founded by PayPal's Elon Musk, has spent about $1.2 billion to date -- $400 million of it from NASA -- in its bid to develop private space flight into a viable commercial enterprise. It's been a busy couple of weeks for rich guys with outer space ambitions. Space exploration may one day provide the Earth with tangible benefits. In its 2012 challenge report, the Copenhagen Consensus Center -- which convenes economists, including several Nobel Prize winers, to provide cost-benefit analyses of solving various global crises -- ranked efforts to combat childhood malnutrition as its highest priority. According to the center's analysis, a $3 billion investment in interventions to reduce chronic undernutrition in pre-schoolers could reduce it by up to 36 percent in developing countries. ADEK BERRY/AFP/Getty Images
Why Nations Fail Co-authored by the M.I.T. economist Daron Acemoglu and the Harvard political scientist James A. Robinson, “Why Nations Fail” argues that the key differentiator between countries is “institutions.” Nations thrive when they develop “inclusive” political and economic institutions, and they fail when those institutions become “extractive” and concentrate power and opportunity in the hands of only a few. “Inclusive economic institutions that enforce property rights, create a level playing field, and encourage investments in new technologies and skills are more conducive to economic growth than extractive economic institutions that are structured to extract resources from the many by the few,” they write. Acemoglu explained in an interview that their core point is that countries thrive when they build political and economic institutions that “unleash,” empower and protect the full potential of each citizen to innovate, invest and develop. We can only be a force multiplier. And America?
Interview: A Business-Like Approach to Foreign Aid - By Samuel Loewenberg The son of Indian immigrants from Ann Arbor, Mich., and a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School and the Wharton School of Business, Rajiv Shah began his career at the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, where he ran the organization's agriculture program and went on to serve as chief scientist at the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA). In December 2009, at the age of 37, he was sworn in as head of the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) -- only days before a devastating earthquake hit Haiti. In an interview for Foreign Policy, Samuel Loewenberg spoke with Shah about how he is reinventing USAID, an often-embattled agency charged with helping the world's poorest countries develop, while at the same time dealing with crises around the globe. Foreign Policy: Dr. FP: Fixing the world is a lot more complicated than fixing Microsoft Windows -- and even that usually doesn't go very well. RS: When I joined, we launched a strategy review of our areas of work.
Jonah Lehrer on How to Be Creative How Not to Write About Africa - By Laura Seay It's hard out here for us old Africa hands. We are desperate to see more coverage of important stories from the continent and for our neighbors to become more educated about the places where we study and work. Yet when we get that coverage, it tends to make us cringe. Take, for instance, the current violence in northern Mali. In the last six weeks, Mali has experienced a coup d'état and a declaration of independence from rebels who now loosely control half its territory. Or consider the flurry of coverage of Central Africa that followed March's "Kony 2012" phenomenon. Western reporting on Africa is often fraught with factual errors, incomplete analysis, and stereotyping that would not pass editorial muster in coverage of China, Pakistan, France, or Mexico. To Africa-watchers, there is a clear double standard for journalistic quality, integrity, and ethics when it comes to reporting on the continent. Why is there so much bad reporting on Africa? This is insane. John Moore/Getty Images
A Wandering Mind Is an Intelligent Mind What's the Latest Development? Resent research suggests that mind wandering is associated with good working memory, itself a measure of intelligence, reading comprehension and IQ score. The new study, published in Psychological Science, asked individuals to perform routine tasks and monitored how often their minds wandered. Later, scientists measured each person's working memory and found that people with better memories were also more likely to have a roaming mind. The results are the first indication that memory may enable off-topic thoughts. What's the Big Idea? Despite humans' proclivity for self-conscious and intentional behavior, scientists estimate that our minds wander about half the time, demonstrating the complex behavior and purpose of our brain. Photo credit: shutterstock.com
Dumb and Dumber - by Charles Kenny Columnist John Derbyshire's recent effluvia on the subject of things your white kid should know about black people was met with suitable disdain and a rapid expulsion from the web pages of the National Review. Genetic determinism with regard to racial intelligence -- alongside the very idea that intelligence can be meaningfully ranked on a single linear scale of intrinsic worth -- has been firmly debunked by Stephen Jay Gould, among others. Sadly, Derbyshire-like prattishness on the intellectual inferiority of dark-skinned races and its impact on social and economic outcomes in the United States has a historied international equivalent. The supposed superiority of the white man's genetic endowment was one important justification for his colonial "burden" at the height of empire, perhaps especially in Britain, where the country's industriousness was taken as a sign and symptom of Saxon racial superiority. KAMBOU SIA/AFP/Getty Images
Making Sense of Minimum Viable Products Minimum Viable Products–what does this mean? If you read any article or listen to any talk about minimum viable products, you will notice that the word “confusion” shows up early and often: Steve Blank: “This minimum feature set (sometimes called the “minimum viable product”) causes lots of confusion. Founders act like the ’minimum’ part is the goal. It’s not just that the concept is confusing. MVPs are born from confusion: the “extreme uncertainty” that Ries defines as a fundamental condition of a startup. Making Sense of MVPs Rather than trying to definitively make sense out of MVPs, I stress that “making sense” is what MVPs are about: MVPs are mechanisms to create meaning where little or none currently exists. It doesn’t matter if it’s actually a product in the traditional sense. What is a meaningful set of features for customers? Each one of these questions has an impact on how we go about our work as product strategists and designers. Meaning as Vision Meaning as Learning Final Thought