Microsoft have unveiled their vision of the future in a slick tube imaginatively titled Productivity Future Vision (2011). While the video showcases Microsoft “innovations” [rather than an actual vision of the future] some of the the comments are timeless, ensuring this glitzy promo will be talked about for all the wrong reasons…
“I never asked for this.”
“Fake! The World will ends in 2012.”
“OMG, you left your porn on the fridge again.”
“I was expecting more than a better touch screen.”
“Cannot retrieve user data. Data Plan may be exceeded.”
“How about Microsoft stop daydreaming and create some damn jobs for the working class.”
“That mom is having affair with that Japanese administrator, while father is forced to stay home with daughter, cooking like a woman.”
“Where are the fucking robots and flying cars already?”
We all are familiar with mediocrity. It’s everywhere and growing rapidly. Here are seven reasons that are contributing to the alarming rise of mediocrity.
A situation in which abundant unused reserves of all kinds of resources (including all intermediate products) exist may occasionally prevail in the depths of a depression. But it is certainly not a normal position on which a theory claiming general applicability could be based.
Yet it is some such world as this which is treated in Mr. Keynes’s General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, which in recent years has created so much stir and confusion among economists and even the wider public. Although the technocrats, and other believers in the unbounded productive capacity of our economic system, do not yet appear to have realized it, what he has given us is really that economics of abundance for which they have been clamoring so long.
When corporate leaders talk about change, they usually have a desired result in mind: gains in performance, a better approach to customers, the solution to a formidable challenge. They know that if they are to achieve this result, people throughout the company need to change their behavior and practices, and that can’t happen by simple decree. How, then, does it happen? In the last few years, insights from neuroscience have begun to answer that question. New behaviors can be put in place, but only by reframing attitudes that are so entrenched that they are almost literally embedded in the physical pathways of employees’ neurons. These beliefs have been reinforced over the years through everyday routines and hundreds of workplace conversations. They all have the same underlying theme: “That’s the way we do things around here.”
Science has shown that human beings prefer routine roughly 12 times more than they do change. The more pressure we’re under, the more we seek to surround ourselves with familiar rituals and protocols to maintain an ongoing (if slightly spurious) peace of mind. This holds true for business leaders and managers, as well as consumers. Which helps explain why in the wake of the recession, such stalwart, time-tested toys such as LEGO, the Rubik’s Cube and even Barbie continued boasting brisk sales. In shaky or uncertain environments, we slide by default into the proven, the tried and true.
Yet paradoxically, there’s no better time than in the midst of routine to disrupt business as usual by coming up with an apparently wild idea that thumbs its nose at every entrenched wisdom your company holds dear. Along the way, you might stumble across a random slogan that transforms your industry’s future.
The time constraints on today’s executives are more numerous than ever before. Between the economic downturn, ever-changing industry regulations, fast-moving information and simple day-to-day management tasks, corporate executives are trapped in the virtual jail cell that is today’s business climate. The unintended result of executive “information-imprisonment” is a workplace where they may have little insight into employee morale, culture, and general goings-on during the workday. Blinded by the reflection of their own to-do-lists, executives are turning to consumer social networks to stay connected to the people that execute on daily tasks inside their organizations.
Ever since I started using WebCite a couple of years ago I have been interested in the idea of online curation. It seems that there has been a proliferation of curator services of late and a heightened sense of the potential benefits that come with the extraction and aggregation of content from tweets, Facebook, blog posts, RSS feeds and what-have-you.
Services like Paper.li, Tabbloid, The Tweeted Times, and Feedly mash-up the linked-to content, typically in a newspaper or magazine format. I am noticing that even sites like LinkedIn are jumping on the bandwagon with the recent launch of LinkedIn Today. Whatever next?
Driven by improvements in technology — and particularly by an explosion in the availability of mobile technology and increased access to broadband — the world of work is changing rapidly. From solving employer-employee trust issues through better communication to cultivating an increasingly mobile, cloud-based workforce, here are the top trends and key issues we found for the future of work in 2011.
Ever since I started using 
