I notice that Facebook has just announced a new policy concerning who owns a person’s account once they die. The issue of what happens to and who owns a dead user’s accounts is a huge and growing global issue as everything goes into the cloud. I had an employee who died about 3 years ago. I forwarded his emails to me since I didn’t want to lose bus...
I just watched a TV show about a guy with locked-in syndrome. That occurs when someone is paralyzed, and can’t speak or move and is diagnosed as being in a vegetative state. We now realize that many such people are indeed conscious and aware but can’t make anyone aware of that fact. It’s a tragic state but at least we are becoming more aware of the...
Did you see that miillennials expect to have about 15-20 jobs in their lifetimes? So the idea of one job for life has gone the way of the transistor. Out of the window with it goes hallowed virtues such as employee loyalty and company training. But I fear that even 15-20 jobs doesn’t get to the heart of the problem. Maybe 15-20 careers captures the...
So many unfair behaviors are not legally discrimination, even if in real life they reflect unfair or unequal treatment. Discrimination against races, genders, disabilities, gay marriages and so on has all been legally proscribed. Could there be any forms of discrimination left? Well yes, although it hasn’t become fashionable yet, but maybe it will....
Did you notice that Skype/Microsoft has just launched its simultaneous translation service for Spanish to English? Believe it or not, in a real-life man-bites dog story, Microsoft beat Google to the punch. Pretty soon we can expect simultaneous translation between most major and even many minor languages. Who could have predicted that just a few ye...
I guess you have seen all the hoopla around driverless cars? But to me they look very passé. Antennae sticking out everywhere; otherwise old wine in bottles. And they look the same as they do now. What’s exciting about that? After all, when you have a driverless car you don’t need a steering wheel, controls, even a driver’s seat. That frees up a lo...
The “nut rage” incident at Korea Airlines exposed once again the feudal leadership culture there. This was supposed to have been eradicated with the training given by Delta Airlines many years ago to eliminate the dysfunctional culture in the aircraft cockpit which had led to several crashes by KAL planes. Clearly this culture is still alive and we...
Now here’s an interesting idea. Is the cause of obesity simply due to the antibiotics that every meat producer puts in the food supply for their animals? You might have thought that meat producers add antibiotics to their animal feed to prevent or cure disease. You would be wrong. They do it because it results in a significant weight gain for the a...
Did you notice that the NASA’s Curiosity Rover has just seen spikes of methane on Mars? People are already putting one and one together to get five, namely the presumed presence of life on Mars, inferred from the production of methane. But there’s another possibility. That is, that the methane comes from inorganic, non-biological processes. If so, ...
The new kid on the block is smartwatches. They will have everything that a fitness tracker has, and then some. But I think we are going to lose an important signal of people’s potential in so doing. You wear a fitness tracker all the time. It measures your activity including steps in walking, running, stair climbing, calories and so on. It’s part o...
See, everyone’s talking about the emerging (or emerged) bubble in startup valuations. My thesis: there are now far fewer startups so valuations have to go up. Duh. So you thought the number of startups was rising? All those Silicon Valley startups, every university having courses in entrepreneurship? Think again. You are totally wrong. Check out th...
Yep, it’s true. If you don’t believe me read the January 2015 issue of Consumer Reports here. Before we get to the killing part, Consumer Reports points out that their research shows that gluten-free foods usually have a lot more fat, sugar and calories than gluten-ful foods. And of course, they are way more expensive. But the killer argument, pun ...
Another day, another mega-hack. Sears, JP Morgan, the US Post office, etc. The only organizations that haven’t been hacked are the ones that don’t realize it has happened to them anyway. It’s clear that a new type of digital ecosystem is emerging. In this ecosystem, cyber spies are continuously monitoring what you are doing. Meanwhile the organizat...
Hobby Lobby just opened up in my town. Now the parking lot is always full. How come this stuff is so popular these days? Is it something to do with Pinterest? What has made Pinterest such a massive success anyway? People like making stuff. It’s innate to humans. Even animals like making stuff too. We now know that animals such as chimps, crows and ...
So Oscar de la Renta just died. A fashion icon par excellence. Can a fashionista be anything more than a dressed up peacock, no matter how wealthy? Every era has its leadership zeitgeist. Usually in the heady times, the zeitgeist favors pomp and circumstance, narcissists, unachievable visions and huge fortunes. That was the early 2000s. Now the zei...
The EBOLA crisis is giving us a pointed lesson about leadership. On the one hand there’s a rules-based approach to addressing the crisis adopted by government and the US medical bureaucracy. On the other there’s the passion-based approach championed by the NGOs and particularly Doctors without Borders (donate to this great organization here). The p...
You can’t lift up any piece of news or commentary these days without seeing a discussion or article about entrepreneurship and innovation and how to improve one, the other or both. Prescriptions abound. But my question is: are entrepreneurship and innovation the same thing or are they different? I ask that because you usually see them come in twos ...
Scientists are always looking for the next Big Thing so they all got excited several months ago about what looked like the discovery of the long-predicted gravitational waves. I got pretty excited too. I even blogged about it (“Ripples In Corporate Space-Time: Do Companies Have An Internal Clock?”). Now it looks like it was wrong. Dust on the lens ...
I guess you noticed that Calpers has just ditched investing in hedge funds. The official line was that it was too complicated. The truth of the matter was that it didn’t work. . That tells us a lot about hedge funds and investing generally and you know I am going to draw my own conclusions from that. First it’s been clear for a long tim...
I just read Peter Thiel’s new book “One to Zero”. You know Peter Thiel right? Co-founded Paypal, founded Palantir, well-known for his scholarships that give chosen entrepreneurs $100,000 if they quit college and start a company. Quite a guy. The book is really a series of reflections on innovation and entrepreneurship whose quality varies more than...
