Customer Data: Designing for Transparency and Trust

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Customer Data: Designing for Transparency and Trust   With the help of technology, companies today sweep up huge amounts of customer data. But they tend to be opaque about the information they collect and often resell, which leaves their customers feeling uneasy. Though that practice may give firms an edge in the short term, in the long run it undermines consumers’ trust, which in turn hurts competitiveness, say authors Morey, Forbath, and Schoop. Continued here

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How to Grow Up: Nick Cave's Life-Advice to a 13-Year-Old   Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.“Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life,” Bertrand Russell counseled in his timeless advice on how to grow old. There is a lovely symmetry between this orientation to the winter of life and the natural state of its springtime — in youth, curiosity unfurls centripetally from the self to the world, touching more and more facets of it with that electric jolt of discovery when everything is new and interesting and dazzling with delight. How to harness youth’s centripetal curiosity as a creative force for bettering the world is what Nick Cave — himself an insightful reckoner with the art of growing older — explores in answering a 13-year-old boy’s question about how to live a full, creative, actualized, spiritually rich life in “a world ridden with so much hate, and disconnect.” Continued here

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Love and Fear: A Stunning 17th-Century Poem About How to Live with the Transcendent Terror of Love   Each month, I spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars keeping The Marginalian going. For seventeen years, it has remained free and ad-free and alive thanks to patronage from readers. I have no staff, no interns, not even an assistant — a thoroughly one-woman labor of love that is also my life and my livelihood. If this labor has made your own life more livable in the past year (or the past decade), please consider aiding its sustenance with a one-time or loyal donation. Your support makes all the difference.Love is both the tenderest mirror and the cruelest. How much and how well we show up for love reflects what we believe ourselves worthy of. What we desire reflects what we believe we deserve. What we long for reflects both our limitations and our restless yearning to transcend them. In love’s mirror, we are revealed to ourselves, stripped of the ego’s flattering self-image, our vulnerabilities and inadequacies laid bare — a revelation laced with the sublime, both beautiful and terrifying to the bone. How to live with the transcendent terror of love is what the seventeenth-century metaphysical poet, priest, and musician George Herbert (April 3, 1593–March 1, 1633) explores in one of his poems — poems composed in the hope that they might “turn to the advantage of any dejected poor soul.” Reaching across space and time the way only art can, the poem’s final line went on to inspire the final line of Derek Walcott’s superb “Love After Love,” composed nearly four centuries later. Continued here

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How to Demonstrate Your Strategic Thinking Skills   Developing your strategic thinking skills isn’t enough to get you promoted. In order to advance in your career, you need to demonstrate them. Leaders want to know what you think, and they view your worthiness for promotion through the lens of how ready you are to make bigger decisions. Ask yourself: “Do people know where I stand?” If not, what do you need to do to bring your perspective to the table? It’s also important to demonstrate that you can put new ideas into action. Take the initiative on new projects that show how your understanding extends beyond your current function. Continued here

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How Managers Become Leaders   Few managerial transitions are more difficult than making the move from leading a function to leading an entire enterprise for the first time. The scope and complexity of the job increase dramatically, in ways that can leave executives feeling overwhelmed and uncertain. It truly is different at the top. But how, exactly? Career transition expert Michael Watkins set out to explore that question in an extensive series of interviews with leadership mentors, HR professionals, and newly minted unit heads. Continued here

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Emotional Intelligence Has 12 Elements. Which Do You Need to Work On?   Although there are many models of emotional intelligence, they are often lumped together as “EQ” in the popular vernacular. An alternative term is “EI,” which comprises four domains: self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, and relationship management. Within those domains are 12 EI competencies, starting with emotional self-awareness in the self-awareness domain. Emotional self-control, adaptability, achievement orientation, and a positive outlook fall under self-management. Empathy and organizational awareness make up social awareness. Relationship management includes influence, coaching and mentoring, conflict management, teamwork, and inspirational leadership. Leaders need to develop a balance of strengths across these competencies. Assessment tools, like a 360-degree assessment that uses ratings from yourself and those who know you well, can help you determine where your EI needs improvement. To best improve your weak spots, find an expert to coach you. Continued here

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Pillars of Resilient Digital Transformation - SPONSORED CONTENT FROM Red Hat   The acceleration of digital transformation because of the pandemic recast the position of the chief information officer (CIO) to that of a big-picture strategist. From ensuring ongoing alignment of IT and business demands to leading the transition to full digital enablement, the CIO role requires expert proficiency in a broad range of both technology and management skills. Continued here

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Why Business Leaders Must Resist the Anti-ESG Movement   U.S. business leaders are increasingly being exposed to the culture wars, with company decisions around issues like DEI, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion and even ESG investing being attacked by right-leaning politicians and pundits. Instead of retreating to the sidelines, this article argues that leaders can’t avoid these topics and that they have a business and moral obligation to address them head-on with courage. Continued here

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Don't Let Perfection Be the Enemy of Productivity   Perfectionism is often driven by striving for excellence, but it can be self-sabotaging. There are three big mistakes that tend to kill perfectionists’ productivity. First, they are often unable to designate any decision as unimportant which prevents them from quick action or delegation. Second, they feel morally obligated to overdeliver. Third, they rigidly cling to habits that might no longer be serving them. Awareness is the first step in overcoming these problems. Perfectionists can also develop heuristics, such as “if I have thought about this choice three times, I will make a call and get on with it,” picking areas in which to overdeliver and areas in which meeting expectations is okay, and reviewing commitments to make sure they are still of use.  Continued here

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When It's Safe to Rely on Intuition (and When It's Not)   We often use mental shortcuts (heuristics) to make decisions. There is simply too much information coming at us from all directions, and too many decisions that we need to make from moment to moment, to think every single one through a long and detailed analysis. While this can sometimes backfire, in many cases intuition is a perfectly fine shortcut.  However, intuition is helpful only under certain conditions. Continued here

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Demystifying Strategy: The What, Who, How, and Why   Many leaders I work with struggle with strategy. They know it’s important to have strategies in order to align decision making in their businesses. They understand that they can’t observe and control everything in their organizations (much as many of them would like to). They earnestly want to develop good strategies and they get the theory. But when it comes down to the nitty-gritty of crafting strategy, they rapidly get bogged down. Continued here

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The Unequal Rewards of Peer Support at Work   Supportive relationships with colleagues are critical to job satisfaction, retention, and productivity — but with the dramatic shift to remote work over the past few years, those ties have weakened for many employees.1 Our latest research suggests that as leaders focus on strengthening organizational culture and encouraging social ties, they should proceed with greater care and intentionality than they have in the past. The results of our investigation indicate that men may be earning a higher return on their social investments at work than women are.Concerns about inequity in the way relationships are built and maintained in organizations are not new. Community-building and social support activities are rarely written into job descriptions or compensated, making them easy to overlook. Scholarship has previously highlighted the likelihood of gender bias in expectations and rewards for “organizational citizenship” and “emotional labor” behaviors at work.2 For example, research found that women are more likely than men to be asked to engage in extra-role activities such as organizing a holiday party, and they are more likely to say yes when asked — often at a cost to their career progression and job satisfaction.3We set out to investigate employees’ experiences investing in — and their career benefits for providing — multiple forms of social support to coworkers. (See “The Research.”) We conducted a survey in late 2020, a time when social support was especially important. We collected data from 836 U.S.-based office workers across a variety of roles, company sizes, and industries. In order to explore equity issues, we recruited a split sample, with 438 men (52%) and 398 women (48%). Continued here

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Are pay transparency laws working?   Throughout the past year, more and more states and cities across the US have introduced laws designed to force companies to be more transparent about how much they pay employees. The most high-profile recent moves came in the states of California and New York – two major job markets – which signed off on pay transparency legislation mandating employers post salary ranges in job adverts in late 2022.According to experts, the legislation is designed to stamp out pay gaps, particularly along gender and racial lines, by preventing both unconscious bias and outright discrimination that skews compensation in favour of certain groups. Employer discrimination drives some pay gaps, but research also shows that women and minority workers, for example, tend to ask for less money than their white, male counterparts. Experts say transparent pay standards can help address these issues. Continued here

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Poisson cru: A simple raw fish salad from French Polynesia   If not for French explorer Louis-Antoine de Bougainville claiming Tahiti in the name of France in 1768, poisson cru, the national dish of present-day French Polynesia, might have been called by its original Polynesian name i'a ota – or ota ika as it's known in Tonga, or even its Fijian name kokoda.French Polynesia, which comprises more than 100 islands in the South Pacific, has had a long history with European settlers, but in the end, it's the French who prevailed. While governed autonomously today, French Polynesia is technically an overseas territory of France, with the French language officially spoken and taught in schools – and used in many kitchens. Continued here

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Demons, monsters and witches: The surprising power of horror stories   Horror films and stories confront us with the darkest parts of life. For the visual artists who use them in their work, horror tropes can provide a route to healing and empowerment. Some subvert culturally entrenched clichés, such as stigmatised female bleeding and demonised witchcraft. For others, the horror of lived experience is conveyed through grotesque imagery."Horror has given me the strength and language to discuss trauma and things I'm ashamed of in a way that distances me from them," says Lydia Pettit. The London-based artist has just opened a solo exhibition, In Your Anger, I See Fear at Berlin's Galerie Judin, in which she inhabits the roles of terrorised victim, knife-wielding killer and formidable witch. She confronts sexual trauma and PTSD through painting, addressing not just the victimised parts of herself, but also her sense of vengeance.  Continued here

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We're using VR to help find the next generation of basketball stars   Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry is one of the world’s leading basketball players and unquestionably the greatest shooter of all time. The video below may look like it’s on a loop, but it’s actually Curry sinking 105 three point shots in a row – that’s five minutes of the same precise and highly-skilled action, without a single miss:Curry is 6'2". In the real world he is tall, fast and strong, but in the NBA, where players average height is about 6'6" (198cm), he is on the small side. Many previous basketball superstars were first scouted as freakishly tall teenagers, but his game instead relies on clever movement, smooth dribbling and that famous pinpoint shooting. So how do you identify such attributes in order to spot the next Steph Curry? Continued here

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Before and after the Nakba: Palestinian literature of resistance and love for a lost homeland   When a society experiences oppression and trauma, literature helps its people by giving them a voice and reinforcing their identity. It gives the trauma those people have suffered a universal resonance. So it is for Palestinians, whose literature – particularly that of resistance – plays this role. Indeed, Palestinian writers have been noted for articulating their pain and suffering, but also for their contribution to bringing hope and aesthetic enrichment through literature.Palestinian literature is part of a broader Arabic literature that extends back to the pre-Islamic era. It is linked to the story of the Arabic language and its longstanding literary production. Yet it was under the British Mandate in Palestine (1918-1948) that the first distinct stirrings of Palestinian poetry of resistance emerged. Continued here

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8th Street Samba: here's why the authentic collaboration behind the 'perfect sneaker' matters   From Nike Air Force 1 x Tiffany & Co to Crocs x KFC, footwear collaborations are rife. But the recent release of Kith founder Ronnie Fieg’s 8th Street Samba for Adidas Originals and Clarks Originals is special.In a saturated market, fatigued by increasingly gratuitous partnerships, fashion news outlets have praised the collaboration for its timeless authenticity, touting it the “perfect sneaker” and “holy trinity” of collaborations. Continued here

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Black and Bold Queens is a new children's book celebrating women in Ghana's history   In 2020, during the first months of the COVID pandemic, I kept thinking about the stories we document and whose history is compiled and kept. In Ghana, this is overwhelmingly male. This led to my attempt to make a list of the women I know in Ghana’s history off the top of my head. It was extremely difficult. It took days to compile without resorting to Google or any books. I realised we needed a reference book, especially for children who needed to know this history. And it needed to be accessible, interesting and fun. Continued here

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I'm an educator and grandson of Holocaust survivors, and I see public schools failing to give students the historical knowledge they need to keep our democracy strong   The Florida Department of Education announced on April 10, 2023, that it had rejected 35% of the social studies books publishers submitted for approval and use in the state’s public schools. The move was based on a determination the books contain references to social justice issues “and other information” not aligned with Florida Law.The decision garnered a great deal of media attention. But it was just the latest in a series of efforts around the country to limit students’ access to books, lessons and courses about certain historical and societal topics, often dealing with race. Continued here