In his words:

“The answer, in the peer-reviewed study of the online habits of girls aged 8 to 12, finds that those who say they spend considerable amounts of time using multimedia describe themselves in ways that suggest they are less happy and less socially comfortable than peers who say they spend less time on screens.”

I owe my livelihood to technology and I love the raw capability it offers us as a tool, but I fear it a bit more than most people do. It’s a tool, but it’s not quite a hammer, because a hammer doesn’t seduce you into sitting around lonely in your underwear for 6 hours at a stretch clicking on youtube videos and refreshing Twitter. I fear technology because I fear that bad feeling I get after a three day XBox binge I go through every year around the holidays. I fear technology not because I think it’s evil, but because it’s too easy to start clicking and never stop, even if the stream of data starts to go from meaningful to useless after the top 5%.

I am fascinated by this study because everything I have been doing in the last year professionally and personally has been to reduce the overage of technology and noise in my life and it has increased my happiness by many fold.

By Brian Lam

 The World Economic Forum is about to begin again in Davos, Switzerland but Davos Man, that quintessential pan-national, pro-market, global leader of finance and business is all but dead. First created by that great political analyst Samuel P. Huntington, Davos Man may be walking and talking in Davos next week, but he is stricken with a terminal irrelevance that infects both him and the conference that once celebrated his masterly success. 

The Great Recession of the past two years is revealing that globalization, the economic ideology of Davos Man, was never more than a gloss over nascent nationalism. In the end, it is the nation-state and the local taxpayer that is saving the banks and businesses run by Davos Man from total destruction. The Great Recession is also showing that Chicago-School efficient market theory is as false an economic belief system for the global economy as it is for national policy. While globalization has clearly improved the lives of millions of Chinese, we can now see that it has also led to the immiseration of millions of middle class and poor Americans. The theory that efficient markets within a free trade system would benefit ALL participants is now proven wrong.

By Bruce Nussbaum via GigaOm

A. Youll start to see the experience change month by month. Everyone thinks its an overnight success but it never is. I was at Apple from 2000 to 2011, but it wasnt until 2004 that the iPod became an important part of peoples lives. It wasnt until 2007 that Apple reinvented the phone. It wasnt until 2009 that Apple launched the iPad. But we look at it today and we feel Apple had always been beloved. It took time and this will take time as well.

Q. What ideals have you embraced from Steve Jobs?

A. The importance of doing everything you do to your very best. And that the journey is the reward. If you do things well one at a time, you end up in a really good place. Dont get ahead of yourself. Control the things you can.

via Business & Technology | AP Interview: JC Penney CEO talks about the chain | Seattle Times Newspaper.

In the latest podcast he talks to Bob Moesta who Horace says is the pioneer of the Job to be Done theory which was introduced to Clay Christensen’s book; The Innovators Solution following his Innovators Dilemma.

Bob and Horace have a great discussion around the idea of how we need to understand customers better and what job they use products for. It is a lot of design thinking. At TACSI we do the same thing with our Radical Redesign process for social issues and coming out with solutions like Family by Family.

The second part of the discussion in the podcast is about where does kind of work fit in an organisation? Sales, marketing, design, engineering? Who does it?

When Arunachalam Muruganantham hit a wall in his research on creating a sanitary napkin for poor women, he decided to do what most men typically wouldn’t dream of. He wore one himself–for a whole week. Fashioning his own menstruating uterus by filling a bladder with goat’s blood, Muruganantham went about his life while wearing women’s underwear, occasionally squeezing the contraption to test out his latest iteration. It resulted in endless derision and almost destroyed his family. But no one is laughing at him anymore, as the sanitary napkin-making machine he went on to create is transforming the lives of rural women across India.

More on the company here.

This VC threw up a slide at the end of his slide to summarize most of his talk. It had the following sentence in bold which made the room break into applause.

Don’t be so f-king strategic

All large companies (and I do mean all – this is not a post about Microsoft) tend to be in love with finding the right ‘strategy’ in place before doing anything. There are reams and reams of text written on what exactly strategy is and how to go about having a good one. Some of them are actually quite good (for example, Porter’s work on the five forces). You could often get rapped on the knuckles (or worse) for being ‘off-strategy’.

Don’t get me wrong. Good strategy combined with good execution is a joy to watch (case in point – Apple over the last decade). The last thing you would want is people off doing their own thing and being all ‘off-strategy’ and rebellious.

But here’s the problem.

You’re not Steve Jobs and your organization is not Apple. And your well-thought out strategy is probably terrible.

Read the rest of the article. Very relevant to Entrepreneurs and fast changing organisations in the social sector. Prototyping, experimenting, design thinking…all come to mind.

The “making work pay” program in the US was designed to give people stimulus money in small additional payments to their salary and in theory they would have spent the money. What actually happened was that people did not see the small additional difference and saved the money. That by itself is not a bad consequence just that it does fit with the Keynesian stimulus economics.

What is interesting here is that in Australia it was the other way round. There is clear agreement here that lumpsum money is spent immediately on big ticket items. For example, Kevin Rudd when he was Prime Minister decided to give $900 in stimulus for most people and a lot more for families with children. There were stimulus ads everywhere for people to spend that money. And they spent.

Another example is the baby bonus. In Australia when we have a child the government provides $5000 as a baby bonus to families. What was observed that for some families that created a negative situation in how the money was spent. Now, the bonus is paid over 13 weeks and it seems to work better.

What I am not sure is how did the behavioral economists in the US came to the opposite conclusion for the spending of stimulus money?

There is no “Next”. There is only making more drawings and writings, and trying to stay healthy and happy. “Ambition” is for amateurs.

Wow!

From Hugh McLeod