Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination | Employers need to stop treating workers like 7th graders, says ADP's talent chief | Why Customers Leave Platforms — and How to Retain Them

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click). For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

You Might Like � � � You Might Like � � � � � � � � � Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium Einstein on Free Will and the Power of the Imagination    We are accidents of biochemistry and chance, moving through the world waging wars and writing poems, spellbound by the seductive illusion of the self, every single one of our atoms traceable to some dead star. In the interlude between the two World Wars, days after the stock market crash that sparked the Great Depression, the German-American poet and future Nazi sympathizer George Sylvester Viereck sat down with Albert Einstein (March 14, 1879–April 18, 1955) for what became his most extensive interview about life — reflections ranging from science to spirituality to the elemental questions of existence. It was published in the Saturday Evening Post on October 29, 1929 — a quarter century after Einstein’s theory of relativity reconfigured our basic understanding of reality with its revelation that space and time are the warp and weft threads of a single fabric, along the curvature of which everything we are and everything we know is gliding. Considering the helplessness individual human beings feel before the immense geopolitical forces that had hurled the world into its first global war and the decisions individual political leaders were making — decisions already inclining the world toward a second — Einstein aims in his sensitive intellect at the fundamental reality of existence: Continued here Employers need to stop treating workers like 7th graders, says ADP's talent chief    Kids are often caught in a pubescent tractor beam between childhood and young adulthood. And many hapless tweens, eager to be seen as older than they are, try to wring new freedoms from skeptical parents and teachers. It's a period few of us would want to repeat. Yet workplace expert Amy Leschke-Kahle thinks many fully formed adults are, in essence, forced to relive school-age indignities when they're given too little say over things like how they get their job done. "Work is very much like seventh grade," Leschke-Kahle, vice president of talent insights and innovation at ADP, told Insider. "Return-to-office is an example of that." Continued here Why Customers Leave Platforms — and How to Retain Them    Companies often misunderstand the problem of users leaving their platforms. Disintermediation is a sign that your customers don’t think you are adding as much value as you think you are. Firms struggling with disintermediation can take simple steps to stop the bleeding before it’s too late — if they understand what’s really taking place. They should consider six factors: urgency, rake, risk, skill, frequency, and modularity. The solution for disintermediation is quite simple: Create more value than you take. Stop playing the role of toll-taking gatekeeper and start playing the role of value-adding partner. Platform firms — businesses that enable transactions between two parties — constantly struggle to prevent those partners from taking their deals off-platform. The technical term for this is “disintermediation,” and examples of it include readers buying online rather than from bookstores, Upwork and ZBJ (China’s Zhu Bajie) programmers contracting directly with clients, and Airbnb struggling not only with guests contracting directly with hosts, but also with some of its biggest professional hosts reportedly competing against it on new platforms. Disintermediation — and the failure to understand and address it — killed once thriving businesses like Borders books, Blockbuster movies, and Tower records. It’s easy to understand why platform companies worry so much about being cut out of the loop. Here’s the thing, though: True disintermediation is rare. Most buyers and sellers don’t cut out the middleman entirely, but rather find a new provider that cuts transaction costs or adds more value so that switching is a natural choice. Readers buy from Amazon, not authors directly. Movie watchers and song listeners don’t buy from Hollywood studios or musicians but from Netflix and Spotify. Simply put, these are not atomic markets of many-to-many interactions. New centers of attraction (Amazon, Netflix, and Spotify) have re-intermediated the old ones (Borders, Blockbuster, and Tower). Continued here

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber. We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials. Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 412729