Where social enterprise, human-centered design, and behavioral economics intersect
Much of my writing time these days is being dedicated to SocialEarth.org, where I’m a contributing writer. It’s a fantastic site, so please check it out – http://www.socialearth.org.
My articles on SocialEarth can be found here – Mike’s Posts. Thanks for reading!
If you are looking for a primer on behavioral economics, Sendhil Mullainathan does a nice job of outlining a few key ideas here.
The discipline is, of course, much richer than what he puts forward in these 18 minutes, but it is nonetheless an entertaining and informative talk.
Today, as the globe struggles with an historic economic decline, it’s time for a new revolution. I’d like to advance a hypothesis: Today’s great competitive challenge isn’t going from Good to Great. For people, companies, and countries, it’s going from great to good.
Going from great to good is the single most disruptive move a country, company, or person can make today. Here are five principles from going from great to good — contrasted with their Good to Great predecessors.
Brilliant. I do believe Haque just coined a phrase.
Read the entire article for seven principles to live by when making the transition from Great to Good.
SAP is a good company, but they often make me wonder why engineers ever get to make design decisions.
Collaborative decision-making is something that most organizations are bad at. They’re not going to get better because a technology now exists to support the process.
Henry Chesbrough’s “Open Innovation” was based on the idea that “not all the smart people work for you.” Simple but brilliant.
Credit Card vs Savings – Public.xls (31 KB)
View this on posterous
Apologizing has been complicated over the years by the threat of liability. This has led to apologies that have been carefully parsed to remove any real regret or accountability. “So many apologies are constructed by legal or P.R. people” as a defensive mechanism, not as a sincere expression of remorse, Ms. Weeks said.
This can be true for politicians, doctors and business executives, but also for you or me if we’re, say, involved in a traffic accident. Should we say we’re sorry? Is that admitting fault?
In fact, it was a traffic accident in the 1970s that led politicians to try to resolve some of these problems. According to Jonathan R. Cohen, a law professor at the University of Florida, a Massachusetts state senator’s daughter was killed while riding her bicycle, and the driver who hit her never apologized.
The father couldn’t believe that the driver had never expressed contrition, Professor Cohen said, and was told that the driver had dared not risk even saying “I’m sorry,” because it could have been seen as an admission in the litigation surrounding the girl’s death.
When the state senator retired, he worked with his successor to introduce and win passage of legislation that allowed a “safe harbor” for people to offer “benevolent gestures expressing sympathy or a general sense of benevolence,” said Professor Cohen, who has written extensively on the intersection of law and apologies
Now, a majority of states have enacted “I’m sorry” laws — some that address just medical malpractice, while others apply to all civil cases.
The acceptance of personal responsibility sometimes seems to be an artifact of the the US political past. So Obama’s acknowledgements in the State of the Union address of mistakes he and his administration have made were very welcome and refreshing.
But it’s not just our politicians who have gone wrong, as the NYTimes article indicates. It’s very sad that our society has come so far in its inclination toward litigation and finger-pointing that we struggle to offer sincere apologies for anything but the most mundane wrongs.
The Financial Times is not exactly transparent about how “International Experience” is calculated, though it sounds specific to students and their time during the MBA program.
If these rankings are any reflection of reality, it’s amazing to see just how poorly many top US schools and, specifically, Harvard Business School rank. Are we preparing people to lead in an increasingly globalized world?
(Credit: Apple)Now that the dawn of the iPad is upon us, the inevitable comparisons between Apple’s wundertablet and the Kindle–and what it all means for Amazon–have begun in earnest.
For example, in its write-up of the iPad launch, The New York Times said that Apple’s new deals with five major publishers basically amounted to a declaration of war. “The announcement puts Apple on a collision course with Amazon,” the Times said. And Steve Jobs, while praising Amazon for pioneering the e-book category, told the world that, “we are going to stand on their shoulders and go a little bit farther.”
That may very well be true, especially when it comes to stuff like comic books, graphic novels, textbooks, and interactive children’s stories, but the war we’re looking at isn’t the war we’re used to seeing in the consumer electronics world, where one piece of gear simply is superior, sexier–and better-priced–than another.
After a long day (or month, for that matter) of hyperbole, finally an iPad review that is well-reasoned and in touch with reality.
Click on the link citation above for the full review. You’ll be smarter for it.
(click on the gizmodo link to see the video)
WAIT! So you mean if I pay (at least) $650 PLUS another $30/month for data, I can make my eReader simulate flipping pages!!!
Hmm… Think I’ll stick with my Kindle, thank you very much.
People who thought this would kill the eReader market were delusional.
Source: McKinsey Quarterly
ht: @urbanverse
A nice graphic here from the McKinsey Quarterly showing results of a survey of corporate executives done in both October and December last year. The summary shows that trust in the future of the economy seems to improving. Good news, since trust usually creates a virtuous economic circle.
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