Peter Vander Auwera - Issue #10

The very best

Some find it comforting to think of life as a story. Others find that absurd. So are you a Narrative or a non-Narrative?

The five toughest obstacles.

Cultural anthropology can help explain why the downturn caught everyone by surprise: Experts around the world tend to focus on the same mathematical models, looking for patterns in the same limited number of places.

Sapiens by Yuval Harari has got a lot of (deserved) attention. Within it, Harari sketches out a number of provocative theses about what human beings have been, are and will become, and shows how they play out over hundreds of thousands of years.

The tasks where humans will continue to stand out above technology are mostly soft and squishy relational stuff.

“BECAUSE of the increased efficiency of machines, it is getting harder and harder for a human to make a productive contribution to society,” says Sebastian...

Innovation

The innovation center needs the full support of the corporate leadership team. The report concludes that large corporations can tap into thriving technology hubs and innovation ecosystems. By empowering their innovation centers they can re-energize their innovation capability.

PSFK in partnership with HP Matter speaks with Joyce Kim, co-founder and Executive Director of Stellar, about developing platforms that make a difference.

Artificial Intelligence

Creators of a new bricklaying robot say its purpose is to leverage human jobs, not entirely replace them.

Recently, Amazon made its first foray into helpful home devices—Echo, the perky remote-vending-machine-disguised-as-smart-home-hub that answers questions, controls a few lights, and, incidentally, orders products from the mega-company. The introduction of this small black monolith has brought another voice into the home that people can have a chinwag with, Alexa. If you want to know the...

When it comes to artificial intelligence, we may all be suffering from the fallacy of availability: thinking that creating intelligence…

Is a human borg-mind inevitable?   The answer, I think, is kinda …A “borg” mind, as popularized by the classic Star Trek episode, is a group of people all controlled by a single collective will, consciousness and memory.  It’s obviously an extreme invented for entertainment purposes.   A more common term is “hive mind”, but there are many kinds of hive minds, of which the Borg Collective in Star Trek is a particular variety.

FinTech

The banker who helped give the world credit-default swaps wants to upend finance again—this time with the code that powers bitcoin.

Work

Request an invitation to Next:Economy, our event aiming to shed light on the transformation in the nature of work now being driven by algorithms, big data, robotics, and...

How do you lead a team at a distance when leadership traditionally happens in the place and moment? Through asynchronous communication and leadership.

While organizations wage wars for talent, it seems talent is at war with itself.

How to rein in the dynamic that enriches executives and financiers—at everyone else’s expense

The history of business is the story of entrepreneurs, executives, leaders, and employees, all of whom along the way add to the theory of management. For the 20th anniversary of strategy+business, we, the editors, decided to track the milestones of management history. This interactive catalog is the result.

Futurists

Other

We’re all different but there are some basic guidelines that we can use to help understand ourselves and others much bet…

Where do Toyota and other powerful Japanese companies go for management advice? To Ina Food Industry, a small company that makes a living turning seaweed into a gelatin-like substance called agar.