3 Events to Attend
NEW JOURNALISM
In just over three years, The California Sunday Magazine has emerged as one of the best in the country — incredible storytelling around intimate character portraits and ideas that propel us forward. Extending its view far beyond its San Francisco base, it includes coverage of national and universal themes encompassing the American West, Asia and Latin America. Check out their live production, Pop-Up Magazine, featuring multimedia stories performed by writers, radio producers, photographers, filmmakers, and musicians. Tickets are on sale now for upcoming events around the country. We will be attending the one at BAM in New York on February 7, 2019.
BIG DATA
Wharton People Analytics Conference is a mash-up that explores workplace management through applied data science. While an initial focus of academic research and early stage start-ups has been using data to help counteract unconscious bias in hiring, the conference is growing to include a range of new learnings around the future of humans at work. The brainchild of Adam Grant, Cade Massey and a posse of Penn faculty and students, the next conference is in April 2019. Carolyn is going for a second time — let her know if you want to meet up in Philly.
THE FUTURE OF WORK
Disrupt HR is an information exchange event designed to energize, inform and empower those interested in improving what we used to call people management. We attended two different sessions this year — 14 speakers, 5 minutes each, with a range of cool networking activities alongside — and they were so worth it: super high energy people sharing ideas and experiments. If you are looking to get inspired by what innovative thinkers are doing in the leadership space, or are just looking to widen your network to include other seekers of holistic change, these meetups — which occur around the country — are a great place to start.
3 Tools to Try
Whether you need a better way to track time for clients, or just want to be more aware of — or need helping changing — how you are spending your awake time, this app (and accompanying desktop gizmo) is a great way to increase your awareness. Got the lead on this from Chris Bailey’s blog. See below.
This is a super easy to use “to do” app that allows you to organize and schedule your undone tasks far away from the prying eyes of FAANG companies. If you get a lot of requests into email and want an easy way to schedule and integrate these with other tasks, this app is worth a close look. Simple and very dependable, Good ToDo was created by Mark Hurst. See below.
If you need to make a critical new hire, or simply need to increase the creativity or collaboration of your existing teams, the Belbin test is one of our go-to diagnostic tools. It is inexpensive and the best way we’ve found to help individuals both self-assess and collect impact from co-workers in non-threatening ways. If you want some help using it, we’ve developed a short module that uses it to identify opportunities aligned with your business priorities.
3 People to Follow
Tech skeptics need no introduction to Mark, who as Creative Good founder and across his many projects, has long carried the banner of putting the human customer at the center of product and service development (vs. considering the human to be the product). For the last half-decade or more, he’s been consistently taking a prosumer view of privacy and big technology. More of the world caught up to his way of thinking in 2018 — thank you #FacebookFails — and he is looking pretty prescient on what’s truly good and bad in tech. He’s got a Techtonic podcast series with WFMU.
“CRISPR” — This was quantitative futurist Amy Webb’s answer on stage at the Penn’s 2018 People Analytics Conference in March, 2018. She had been asked about what technologies she was watching most closely. By November, we were all reading about the science and ethics of the Chinese twin experiment. If you haven’t heard of Amy, taken her classes at NYU’s Stern School, read her previous books, pre-ordered her next book due in spring 2019 — The Big Nine: How the Tech Titan and their Thinking Machines Could Warp Humanity — or watched her speak, cue some FOMO. Her engaging, high energy, and refreshingly non-woo-woo discussion of future trends is based on careful data analysis, not on the alignment of the planets.
Chris is a productivity expert who this year published his second book, HyperFocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction. Chris, a self-admitted geek seeking to help us mortals manage our limited attention spans, does all the heavy lifting: reading study after study about how today’s information economy is at war with our very human limitations. I have found his recommendations and hacks very useful and implementable, as they are all keyed off experimental data — his and others. If you are a fan of Cal Newport’s Deep Work — and jettisoned most or all social media from your lives as I did four years ago — Chris will help you insure that all those hours you’ve saved from the scroll can be put to best work. One New York Times review is here.
Learn on!