Super Inspiring Leaders Have these 33 Characteristics We tend to put great emphasis on leadership skills and ways we can learn and build them (and spend a ton of money on professional development each year, too). But if you really want to inspire the people around you, you need to focus on developing the characteristics that make you a standout leader. In fact, there are 33 characteristics employees find most inspiring about their colleagues and managers, according to new research conducted over three years by Mark Horwitch and Meredith Whipple Callahan at Bain & Co. Out of those findings, they came up with four groups of characteristics, based on the types of interactions they’re most closely associated with: Leading the Team: your formal leadership skillsConnecting with Others: how you connect with others one-on-oneDeveloping Inner Resources: how you lead or handle yourselfSetting the Tone: how you work in groups when you’re not the formal leader. There’s one inspiring characteristic that trumps all others, though: centeredness.
Amazon & the CIA Want to Teach AI to Watch from Space Why can’t computers watch the Earth from above and automatically map our roads, buildings, and trash heaps? Satellite operator DigitalGlobe is teaming up with Amazon, the venture arm of the CIA, and chipmaker Nvidia to try to make it happen. In a joint project, DigitalGlobe today released satellite imagery depicting the whole of Rio de Janeiro to a resolution of 50 centimeters. The outlines of 200,000 buildings inside the city's roughly 1,900 square kilometers have been manually marked on the photos. DigitalGlobe says the SpaceNet data set should eventually include high-resolution images of half a million square kilometers of Earth, and that it will add annotations beyond just buildings. “We need to develop new algorithms for this data,” says Tony Frazier, a senior vice president at DigitalGlobe. Mark Johnson, CEO of Descartes Labs, a startup that predicts crop yields from public satellite images, says the new data should be welcome to startups and researchers.
The AI Revolution: Road to Superintelligence PDF: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing. Buy it here. (Or see a preview.) Note: The reason this post took three weeks to finish is that as I dug into research on Artificial Intelligence, I could not believe what I was reading. We are on the edge of change comparable to the rise of human life on Earth. — Vernor Vinge What does it feel like to stand here? It seems like a pretty intense place to be standing—but then you have to remember something about what it’s like to stand on a time graph: you can’t see what’s to your right. Which probably feels pretty normal… The Far Future—Coming Soon Imagine taking a time machine back to 1750—a time when the world was in a permanent power outage, long-distance communication meant either yelling loudly or firing a cannon in the air, and all transportation ran on hay. This experience for him wouldn’t be surprising or shocking or even mind-blowing—those words aren’t big enough. This works on smaller scales too. 1. What Is AI?
Steve Blank Books for Startups See the “Startup Tools” Tab for Tools and Blogs. For Books on Silicon Valley History see here Free Harvard Business Review article here Entrepreneurial Management StackOver the last few years we’ve discovered that startups are not smaller versions of large companies. The skills founders need are not covered by traditional books for MBA’s and large company managers. Osterwalders follow-on book Value Proposition Design describes how to get product/market fit right. Eric Ries was the best student I ever had. Ben Horowitz’s The Hard Thing About Hard Things is a series of essays about what CEO face in the “Build” phase – the transition from searching for a business model into a company. It’s impossible to implement any of this if you don’t understand Agile Development. If you’re in a large company, The Other Side of Innovation makes sense of how to actually insert innovation into an execution organization. Talking to Humans is a great simple primer on Customer Discovery. Order Here Books Books
Ahimsa Online — The Message But for those who have never had power, the difference is not one of subtlety. Internet speech is access to the world that has never existed, a chance to be heard for the first time, a chance to shout down those who have kept you silent all your life. You can say anything as horrible to them as they said all your life to you. There is nothing in Ahimsa, the idea of non-violence, that requires surrender, cooperation, or compliance with violence against us. There are those who see any gentleness as surrender, and complicity with their enemies. Ahimsa is not any kind of acquiescence. The fundamental contention of non-injury, or Ahimsa, is this: all humans are human. The Everyday of Other People “Lmao. On the net, I can find myself talking to just about anyone, and they can find themselves talking to me. Sometimes I go to the net for comfort, and that’s not what I get from it. It’s difficult to just let the net be what it is, at any moment, especially when it’s not what you want it to be.
The American Presidents—Johnson to McKinley Note: This is Part 2. Part 1 (Washington to Lincoln) is here. Last year, I published the post, The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln. Washington to Lincoln. Two superstars, bookending legends like Adams, Jefferson, Madison, and Jackson; the birth of the constitution; the expansion from 13 East Coast colonies to a huge nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific; two foreign wars; and a fierce debate over the issue of slavery—all leading up to the sizzling climax of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. It’s not for everyone—but I’d click the shit out of that headline if I saw it on Facebook. This year, I’ve gone a different direction. Here’s what the full scale looks like: So forgive me if I’m a little confused why you’re here right now—why you’re voluntarily involving yourself in a piece of writing that will focus on Andrew Johnson, Ulysses S. Maybe you clicked on this by accident while trying to click “Hide all posts from Wait But Why.” Three notes before we start:
Public Resources - Business Architecture Guild Please note the Business Architecture Guild members maintain a separate library for members of the Guild Community Reston, 2017 Presentation Decks from Summits and Workshops Reston Innovation Summit Links Common Reference Model Downloadable PDF's of portions of A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK® Guide) Table of Contents - for A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK® Guide) 5.5 Part 1 Introduction - of A Guide to the Business Architecture Body of Knowledge® (BIZBOK® Guide) 5.5. Guild Related Resources FEAPO Adopted Architecture Definitions Business Capabilities Guide, Open Group, March 2016, ISBN 1-937218-72-0 (registration will be required at the link} Putting "Business" into Enterprise Architecture, Article by William M. Resources Produced by the Business Architecture Guild Aligning Business Architecture and the Scaled Agile Framework® A Business Architecture Whitepaper Special Webinar Presentation of the Business Architecture Guild
Reusable Takeaway Smart Cup is Arrives in Melbourne Cafes The Frank Green reusable takeaway cup has been sitting on cafe and gift store shelves since early this year, looking quite smart – a compact thermoplastic cylinder in a range of nifty colour combinations with a cute red button in the middle of the lid that pops it open for drinking. But its real smarts are only now being realised: hidden in that cute button is a chip that connects to a just-released app, CafePay, so you can pay for your coffee with the cup. That might not sound like such a big deal – unless you're the type who regularly forgets your wallet, or you've been in a queue behind someone doing the morning office run: a mixed dozen lattes, magics and skinny cappuccinos, and can I pay for them all separately, and get some change, too, please … The cup and the app are the brain children of Ben Young, a former mergers and acquisitions guy who has been working on the project since 2011. The cup uses NFC (Near Field Technology) to connect to the app. See frankgreen.com.au
The American Presidents—Washington to Lincoln President’s Day is one of those weird American holidays where no one quite knows why it’s there or what it is, but it’s a day off so no one asks too many questions. The holiday kind of celebrates Washington’s birthday (February 22), kind of celebrates both Washington and Lincoln’s birthdays (Feb 22 and 12), and kind of celebrates all 43 presidents all at once. In any case, it seemed like the perfect time to research presidents for 60 hours and post a 7,000-word, 30-hour-late post diving into who each American president really was and what he really did. (My apologies to all non-American readers—you did nothing to deserve this.) In deciding where to start, I looked at the whole line of presidents, and it turns out the story of the United States divides cleanly into three even parts, each 75 years long: Before we get started, eight general thoughts I had during my research: 1) 17/43 presidents, or 40% of them, were named John, James, George, or William. 2) There was a Mustache Era.
Know-All 10: Knowledge Management Assessment (David Skyrme Associates) This set of ten questions provides a quick check of where your organization is along ten critical success dimensions. Rate your organization (or part of it) on a score 0 to 10, where 0 is doing nothing at all, and 10 is world-class. We suggest that several people from different groups do this, then come together to discuss and compare. © Copyright. There is a full 50 question Know-All Assessment, which is available at our knowledge shop or you can add to your shopping basket and download now ($15): The 50 questions, along with additional commentary are described in Chapter 7 of Knowledge Networking: Building the Collaborative Enterprise, David Skyrme, Butterworth-Heinemann (1999). Other free tools in this series include The Knowledge Benefits Tree and a Knowledge Usage Template.
Are Chatbots the Future of Banking (...& Customer Service)? Earlier this year I wrote about an interesting new start-up that’s using machine learning to provide a more intuitive interface between customers and their banks. The platform utilizes machine learning to classify the transactions we make each month, and then provide intelligent insights into the patterns it observes. For instance, it might tell us how much we’re spending at a particular coffee shop, or whether we might be able to save money on our utility bills. Automated banking It seems part of an interesting trend towards more automated banking. Digibank are using technology developed by New York based Kasisto to ‘man’ the service. Whilst this may sound rather limited, the team are confident that their system goes beyond the provision of a simple ‘if-then’ type expert system and believe their bots can engage in real conversations with customers. Better customer service “Customers are increasingly craving the right answer to their problem in as quick a time as possible.
The Cook and the Chef: Musk's Secret Sauce This is the last part of a four-part series on Elon Musk’s companies. For an explanation of why this series is happening and how Musk is involved, start with Part 1. ← also click these Three quick notes: 1) PDF and ebook options: We made a fancy PDF of this post for printing and offline viewing (see a preview here), and an ebook containing the whole four-part Elon Musk series: 2) Here’s a G-rated version of the post, appropriate for all ages (with its own URL, so safe to share too). 3) Extra big thanks to our Patreon supporters for making WBW sustainable and for being immensely patient during the long wait. Welcome to the last post in the series on the world of Elon Musk. It’s been a long one, I know. Anyone who’s read the first three posts in this series is aware that I’ve not only been buried in the things Musk is doing, I’ve been drinking a tall glass of the Elon Musk Kool-Aid throughout. I kind of feel like that’s fine, right? Pretty Kool-Aid worthy. Two Kinds of Geology And bingo. Or:
Better Coaching Using the GROW Model Better Coaching Using the GROW Model ~ By Duncan Haughey In my article, Why Project Managers Should Coach - I outline the benefits of coaching your project team to produce better results. In this article, I look at a coaching technique that will help you become a better coach. First, let's understand why you should coach. Why Coach Coaching helps people develop and become better at what they do. There are many definitions of coaching, one I particularly like comes from Eric Parslow who describes coaching as, a process that enables learning and development to occur and thus performance to improve. Coaching is not just for poor performance, it can be used to help project team members develop and achieve their goals, while producing better results on your projects. The GROW Model In the 1980s, Sir John Whitmore and his team of Performance Consultants developed the GROW model; now firmly embedded in the world of business coaching. GoalRealityOptionsWay Forward Options: what choices do they have?