Showing posts with label ted tuesday. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 24, 2015

TED Tuesday: How Blood Pressure Works

Good Morning Folks,

If you lined up all the blood vessels in your body, they’d be 60 thousand miles long. And every day, they carry the equivalent of over two thousand gallons of blood to the body’s tissues. What effect does this pressure have on the walls of the blood vessels?

In this informative TED Lesson, Wilfred Manzano gives the facts on blood pressure while answering almost 7,000 questions on the subject.

It goes without saying that lowering stress improves blood pressure. That in mind, I hope that you find comfort and peace in some quiet time-out with your friends and families later this week.

Enjoy!

Cheers,

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form.TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the second consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

See a brief video portrait of who we are and what can can do for you, HERE

Tuesday, November 17, 2015

TED Tuesday: How To Take The Best Courses From The Top Ivy League Schools— For FREE!

With Coursera, Daphne Koller and co-founder Andrew Ng are bringing courses from top colleges online, free, for anyone who wants to take them.

Good Morning Folks,

Daphne Koller is enticing top universities including Stanford, Yale, and Princeton to put their most intriguing courses online for free — not just as a service, but as a way to research how people learn. With Coursera (cofounded by Andrew Ng), each keystroke, quiz, peer-to-peer discussion and self-graded assignment builds an unprecedented pool of data on how knowledge is processed.

Says Daphne, "Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people. I was born to a family where education was pervasive. I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities, which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity. Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky.

A 3rd generation Ph.D who is passionate about education, Stanford professor Daphne Koller is excited to be making the college experience available to anyone through her startup, Coursera. With classes from 85 top colleges, Coursera is an innovative model for online learning. While top schools have been putting lectures online for years, Coursera's platform supports the other vital aspect of the classroom: tests and assignments that reinforce learning.

At the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, computer scientist Daphne Koller studies how to model large, complicated decisions with lots of uncertainty. (Her research group is called DAGS, which stands for Daphne's Approximate Group of Students.) In 2004, she won a MacArthur Fellowship for her work, which involves, among other things, using Bayesian networks and other techniques to explore biomedical and genetic data sets.

Filmed June 2012 at TEDGlobal 2012, with over three million online views since, I proudly present: Daphne Koller: What we're learning from online education...

As Daphne notes, "And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. AAnd if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us.

Thanks for listening and have a GREAT Day,

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

About FSO Onsite Outsourcing
Recognized on the Inc. 5000 list of the nation's fastest growing companies for the third consecutive year, and lead by industry pioneer, Mitch Weiner, FSO's growth and success can be attributed to making a positive and powerful impact on their clients' bottom lines, as well as their employees' careers and lives.

Tuesday, November 3, 2015

TED Tuesday: Got a wicked problem? First, tell me how you make toast with Tom Wujec

(re) Imagine! Tom's collected a bunch of best practices. and so you can learn how to run a workshop here, so the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear, engaged and aligned.

Good Morning Folks,

When customers approached us before we went back into the Outsourcing business as Future State Outsourcing in 2010, they were fed up with the status-quo: Onsite Outsourcing as usual.

Though a great idea at its inception, Onsite Outsourcing became complacent and less innovative over time. So we set out to re-invent a business my co-founders had essentially invented. As our successors to those businesses, merged or got acquired, providers had become big, bloated behemoths incapable of making fast decisions and innovating, it was clear that customers wanted something different. Something more. And we (re)Imagined it.

Had I known of Tom Wujec back then, I could have described the process of (re) Imagination as being akin to he telling me how we make toast.

Filmed June 2013 at TEDGlobal 2013, this short TED talk that since has been viewed millions of times, showcases a simple design exercise that helps people understand and solve complex problems, and like many of these design exercises, it kind of seems trivial at first, but under deep inspection, it turns out that it reveals unexpected truths about the way that we collaborate and make sense of things.

Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated — until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’s surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast.

The simple act, Tom describes, of visualizing and doing over and over again produces some really remarkable outcomes. What's really important to know is that it's the conversations that are the important aspects, not just the models themselves. And these visual frames of reference can grow to several hundreds or even thousands of nodes. So, one example is from an organization called Rodale. Big publishing company. They lost a bunch of money one year, and their executive team for three days visualized their entire practice. And what's interesting is that after visualizing the entire business, systems upon systems, they reclaimed 50 million dollars of revenue, and they also moved from a D rating to an A rating from their customers. Why? Because there's alignment from the executive team. So Tom's now on a mission to help organizations solve their wicked problems by using collaborative visualization, and on a site that he's produced called drawtoast.com.

Tom's collected a bunch of best practices. and so you can learn how to run a workshop here, so the seemingly trivial design exercise of drawing toast helps us get clear, engaged and aligned.

So next time you're confronted with an interesting challenge, remember what design has to teach us. Make your ideas visible, tangible, and consequential. It's simple, it's fun, it's powerful, and I believe it's an idea worth celebrating. Here's Tom:

Thanks to TED and to you for listening.

Have a GREAT Day,

Mitchell D. Weiner
Chief Happiness Officer

Ideas are not set in stone. When exposed to thoughtful people, they morph and adapt into their most potent form. TED Tuesdays on MitchWeiner.com highlights some of today's most intriguing ideas. Look for more talks on Technology, Entertainment and Design -- plus science, business, global issues, the arts and much more— HERE.

Tuesday, October 27, 2015

TED Tuesday: DAVID GRADY: HOW TO SAVE THE WORLD (OR AT LEAST YOURSELF) FROM BAD MEETINGS

"It's funny because it's true. Eerily, sadly, depressingly true. It made me laugh until I cried. And cried. And I cried some more."

Good Morning Folks,

An epidemic of bad, inefficient, overcrowded meetings is plaguing the world’s businesses — and making workers miserable.

David Grady has some ideas on how to stop it.

David Grady is an information security manager who believes that strong communication skills are a necessity in today’s global economy. He is known for a video online about ineffective conference calls. Short and to the point, David is an entertaining speaker. His point is important, but not much to it.

Picture this:

You've just come into work. As you're getting set up for the day, a co-worker comes in and proceeds to walk out with your chair, without saying a word. No comments on why he needs it, or if and when he's going to bring it back. Just up and out.

That's how David Grady begins this hilarious six-minute TED Talk, "How to save the world (or at least yourself) from bad meetings," which has now been viewed over 1.5 million times. Grady's performance, in which he acts out every terrible conference call you've ever been on, begins at 2:38 in the video.

In the presentation, Grady asserts that attending a meeting without a clear purpose or agenda, and in which you are unsure of your role or contribution, allows others to steal your valuable time in the same way they would steal your seat. As Grady puts it, "When this highly unproductive session is over, you go back to your desk ... and you say, 'Boy, I wish I had those two hours back. Like I wish I had my chair back.'"

So who's at fault for this (not so) petty larceny? Logic dictates that the brunt of responsibility lies with the meeting proposer. But Grady places the primary blame on meeting attenders--those who choose to inflict themselves with what he describes as the global epidemic of MAS: mindless accept syndrome.

Have a look:

People feel powerless to resist these meetings. David suggests “¡No Mas!” that instead of always accepting: if you don’t know why you were invited or what the meeting is about, you should instead reply ‘Tentative”. You can the call the organiser and offer your assistance, but get more details about how you can help. By doing this, people will hopefully start to think more before sending out an invitation – publishing an agenda or rethinking why they need to set up a meeting at all.

Dave's No MAS is based on two primary principles:

1. When you receive a meeting invitation that's missing desired information, click the "tentative" button.

2. Next, get in touch with the meeting proposer. Tell the proposer that you're very excited to support his or her work, ask about the goal of the meeting, and find out if (and how) you can be of help in achieving that goal.

And as Grady gracefully and succinctly concludes:

People just might start to change their behavior because you changed yours. And they just might bring your chair back, too.

No MAS! Who's with me? Worth a quick look, or for subtly forwarding around at work. You know who you are :)

Thanks to TED and to you for listening.

Have a GREAT Day,

Tuesday, October 20, 2015

Ted Tuesday— Yves Morieux: How Too Many Rules At Work Keep You From Getting Things Done

"Productivity is not everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything."

Good Morning Folks,

Today I am sharing a great TED talk which shows that even having best people doesn't guarantee great results. More often than not, the team, able and willing go the extra mile will take the victory.

This talk very much reminded me of the advantage FSO has serving our clients as an outsourced partner. Being on the outside, looking in, we are not mired by the bureaucracy and internal politics that can impede teams from cooperating fully.

Modern work - from waiting tables to crunching numbers to dreaming up new products - is about solving brand-new problems every day, flexibly, in brand-new ways. But as Yves Morieux shows in this insightful talk, delivered at TED@Boston Consulting Group London and since viewed over a million times line— too often, an overload of processes and sign-offs and internal metrics keeps us from doing our best. He offers a new way to think of work - as a collaboration, not a competition.

Yves Morieux thinks deeply about what makes organizations work effectively. A senior partner in BCG’s Washington D.C. office and director of the BCG Institute for Organization, Morieux considers how overarching changes in structure can improve motivation for all who work there. His calls his approach "Smart Simplicity." Using six key rules, it encourages employees to cooperate in order to solve long-term problems. It isn’t just about reducing costs and increasing profit -- it’s about maximizing engagement through all levels of a company. Morieux has been featured in articles on organizational evolution in Harvard Business Review, The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Fast Company and Le Monde.

Yves believes that our organizations are wasting human intelligence. They have turned against human efforts. When people don't cooperate, don't blame their mindsets, their mentalities, their personality -- look at the work situations. Is it really in their personal interest to cooperate or not, if, when they cooperate, they are individually worse off? Why would they cooperate? When we blame personalities instead of the clarity, the accountability, the measurement, we add injustice to ineffectiveness.

We need to create organizations in which it becomes individually useful for people to cooperate. Remove the interfaces, the middle offices -- all these complicated coordination structures. You, as leaders, as managers, are you making it individually useful for people to cooperate? The future of our organizations, our companies, our societies hinges on your answer to these questions.

Have a look:

Thanks to you for listening.

Have a GREAT Day,

Tuesday, October 13, 2015

TED Tuesday— Apollo Robbins: The art of misdirection

"If you can control someone's attention, what would you do with it?"

Good Morning Folks,

We all enjoyed watching those magic acts last summer on America's Got Talent, right? But the show always leaves you wondering, "how does he do that?"

On today's TEDTuesday, we'll find out.

Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? Even more than that, what about predicting human behavior?

Hailed as the greatest pickpocket in the world, Apollo Robbins studies the quirks of human behavior as he steals your watch. In a hilarious demonstration, Robbins samples the buffet of the TEDGlobal 2013 audience, showing how the flaws in our perception make it possible to swipe a wallet and leave it on its owner’s shoulder while they remain clueless.

Have a look. 10 million other have before you.

As Apollo says, "Attention is a powerful thing. Like I said, it shapes your reality. So, I guess I'd like to pose that question to you. If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it?"

Thanks to you for listening.

Have a GREAT Day,

Tuesday, October 6, 2015

TED Tuesday— Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Meet the women fighting on the front lines of an American war

"The Army Ranger who trained them had served 12 deployments. And when they told him that he had to go train girls, he had no idea what to expect. But at the end of eight days with these women in the summer of 2011, he told his fellow Ranger, 'We have just witnessed history. These may well be our own Tuskegee Airmen.'"

Good Morning Folks,

God bless those who serve in our military and protect our freedom. Today, from TEDWomen 2015, a different twist on combat:

In 2011, the US Armed Forces still had a ban on women in combat — but in that year, a Special Operations team of women was sent to Afghanistan to serve on the front lines, to build rapport with locals and try to help bring an end to the war. Reporter Gayle Tzemach Lemmon tells the story of this "band of sisters," an extraordinary group of women warriors who helped break a long-standing barrier to serve.

I'll end as Gayle does: "IIt is time to celebrate all the unsung heroines who reach into their guts and find the heart and the grit to keep going and to test every limit. This very unlikely band of sisters bound forever in life and afterward did indeed become part of history, and they paved the way for so many who would come after them, as much as they stood on the shoulders of those who had come before. These women showed that warriors come in all shapes and sizes. And women can be heroes, too."

Thanks to you for listening.

Have a GREAT Day,

Tuesday, September 29, 2015

Ted Tuesday: Without Self-Meaning, Money Means Nothing

"This is the battle cry of the millennial generation who is shaping the future of the workplace, here at FSO, and everywhere."

Good Morning Folks,

When I shared a Wharton Americus Reed, II's (the Whitney M. Young Jr., Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania) take on today's TED Talk on LinkedIn, a colleague stood up and took immediate notice.

Her takeaway was that money, in the abstract, is meaningless. Just chits on the digital page, dollars in the trading account.

It's a tool, like a hammer.

A hammer is meaningless until you lift it and build a house, or smash a skull. A hammer can be good, or bad.

Likewise, money.

It means nothing until you do something with it.

Bad, frivolous, or good.

Opined Professor Reed in a Huffington Post review of this Ted talk, "If I had a dime for every business student who entered my office; lamenting the self-described drudgery that is their work-life. They thought that a career on Wall Street or in heavy duty consulting would bring that pristine pot of gold. They were right. And wrong. Yes, those hundred plus hour weeks catapult you into that illusive 5% earner stratosphere. But if I had a dime for every student who would later confide in me: "it just was not fulfilling," ironically, I would be as wealthy as the financial institutions from which they feverishly depart.  "

Enter social psychologist Paul Piff and his provocative TEDx talk "Does money make you mean?" Sixteen and a half minutes of summarized laboratory and field data show an association between wealth, and lack of compassion, empathy and pro-social motivation.

It's amazing what a rigged game of Monopoly can reveal. In this entertaining but sobering talk, social psychologist Paul Piff shares his research into how people behave when they feel wealthy. (Hint: badly.) But while the problem of inequality is a complex and daunting challenge, there's good news too. (Filmed at TEDxMarin.)  

Professor Reed, II observes, "This Isn't Your Father's Business Person Identity--therein lies the paradigm shift. There is a new model of business and business student afoot: The student who enters my office with a deep passion to do two things. Make money and do good. Business schools are "rebranding" themselves to welcome this new identity. It's being called "social impact." The identity of the student, who has realized that mindless self-investment into the false idol of material things for their sake, is an empty void--a fast track to an empty soul--is changing. Business students are becoming much more aware, and self-reflective."

This is the battle cry of the millennial generation who is shaping the future of the workplace, here at FSO, and everywhere.

Watch the short 16 minute presentation and see if you don't agree.

Whatever your takeaway is, it takes a brave person to take on the Corporate interests in today's world, because they are global and pernicious - just like they have always been. Bravo Paul for helping us (re)IMAGINE new and different possibilities.

Let’s have some fun.. ITS OUR TIME, together we can do it.

Mitchell D. Weiner

Chief Happiness Officer

Tuesday, September 22, 2015

TED Tuesday Rosie King: How Autism Freed Me To Be Myself

Rosie King challenges stereotypes of people with autism and contextualizes the issue by asking us, “Why be normal?”

Good Morning Folks,

In the past we've used our TED Tuesdays to create awareness, compassion and understanding around some subjects that are a little bit uncomfortable and not always talked about. But since no two people walk in the same shoes, I think it is helpful to shed light on challenges, that perhaps you, or someone you work with, or love, is going through in an optimistic way. To me, this is one of TED's greatest contributions to the world at large. With ten million views on TED and another quarter million on Youtube, today's featured talk is a case in point.

“People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with a specific label,” says 16-year-old Rosie King, who is bold, brash and autistic. She wants to know: Why is everyone so worried about being normal? She sounds a clarion call for every kid, parent, teacher and person to celebrate uniqueness. It’s a soaring testament to the potential of human diversity.

When she was nine years old, doctors confirmed Rosie King’s self-diagnosis of Asperger’s Syndrome. With two younger siblings severely affected by autism, Rosie had a burning desire to help make the world a more tolerant place for people with autism ever since she was a young girl. She found the opportunity to do so when her family was invited to do a local news segment on her mother’s children’s books, which featured Rosie’s illustrations. Her lack of inhibition made her a natural presenter, and she was asked to host BBC Newsround’s special program “My Autism and Me,” bringing her a much wider audience and an Emmy Kid’s Award. Rosie continues to raise awareness about autism, and is working towards her goal of becoming a professional actress and storyteller.

I'll end as Rosie does: "I'm going to leave you with one question: If we can't get inside the person's minds, no matter if they're autistic or not, instead of punishing anything that strays from normal, why not celebrate uniqueness and cheer every time someone unleashes their imagination?"

Thanks to you for listening.

Have a GREAT Day,

Tuesday, September 1, 2015

TED Tuesday: How To Stand Out At Your New Office— Career Advice for Millennials

Mitch is in Seattle as we go live at our newest client. In his stead from TED Blogs we share...

Career advice for millennials (and really, anyone) from Margaret Heffernan

Posted by: Juliet Blake and Kate Torgovnick May July 3, 2015 at 3:00 pm EDT

BuMargaret Heffernan speaks onstage at TED@BCG in London on June 30. Photo: Paul Clarke/TED

In her career, Margaret Heffernan has been the CEO of five businesses. What advice does she have for people just starting their careers? First: Get to know your coworkers. Photo: Paul Clarke/TED

It’s a few months after graduation, which means the luckiest new college grads are knee-deep into internships and entry-level jobs. How to stand out? Business writer Margaret Heffernan suggests: Start by taking a coffee break with your coworkers. Companies grow best, she suggests, when workers are connected by social bonds.

Heffernan’s TED Book, Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes, rounds up the academic research that backs up her workplace-tested insights. She’s calling for managers to feed workers’ hunger for connection — and for workers to recognize that coffee breaks and hallway chats can actually make them more valuable, and valued, employees. (Learn more in her TED Talk, “Why it’s time to forget the pecking order at work.”)

Just before Heffernan hosted the TED@BCG conference, she sat down with curator Juliet Blake to offer advice for young people just starting their careers. Insights from their conversation:

The job requirement no one tells new hires about: Build your social capital.

“Social capital is a form of mutual reliance, dependency and trust. It hugely changes what people can do. This is more true now than ever. It’s impossible in modern organizations to know everything that you need to know. What you need are lots of people who know lots of different things. Collectively you’re smarter.

Social capital develops from people spending time together. I learned this when I was running my first software company. I hired lots of brilliant people, but felt that there was something wrong. I realized that everybody was so focused on their own work and tasks, that they didn’t know anything about the person sitting next to them. So I decided, “Okay — Friday afternoons at 4 o’clock everybody’s going to get together and three people are going to stand up and tell us who they are and what matters to them.” At the time I thought it was hokey. Even now, this doesn’t feel like elevated management thinking. But it completely changed the game. You need that level of trust to have the freedom to think and to have the really good kind of argument from which the best ideas emerge.”

Isn’t it different for this generation because of social media? Not really.

“We talk about millennials in a language of exceptionalism. I’m a little skeptical about that. Digital intelligence and techno-savvy is an entry-level requirement. But without social capital, it won’t get you very far.

I remember when I worked at the BBC, I was given a trainee who was making his first film. He had a first in mathematics from Oxford, and thought he was the smartest kid on the block. He had no concept that what he needed to do was to connect to the very rich network of social capital that existed within the team. So he wrote the film alone. He went in and shot it using his own lights — he didn’t ask for help from the unbelievably seasoned, prize-winning technicians he was working with. Surprise, surprise — the film was a mess. All he needed to do was invest a bit of time and effort in getting to know the people around him, and it would have been a completely different story.”

Work sensible hours. Take breaks. Really.

“In engineering, people talk about asset integrity, which means that you service the machinery before it breaks. In modern organizations, the work is thinking and the machinery is your brain. We know from cognitive science that there are hard limits to what the brain can deal with. And yet, there’s an awful lot in the way we work which flies in the face of that.

We think that if we work through the night, we’re being very clever. We’re not. We think we can work long hours — month after month, year after year — and that there won’t be any wear and tear. But there is.

I’m a big fan of mind wandering. I do my best thinking when I’m writing. Or when I stop thinking about a hard problem — how to deal with a client, how to fix a paragraph — and get up. You walk away from your desk, you do something mind-numbingly dull —hanging up the laundry or taking the dog out for a walk — and the idea will come to you.”

And yes, time management means taking time off email and chat.

“The crucial thing around time management is Leslie A. Perlow’s observation that we have what we think of as “real work,” which requires thought and concentration. And then the other work of meetings, phone calls, video conferences and email. If you want to be profoundly more productive, separate those two. Do the thinking work uninterrupted, which will result in better work with less fatigue. And then do all the other stuff, comfortable in the knowledge that the real work is done. It will mean at the end of the day you’ll feel less fried.”

The advice I’d give my younger self…

“It’s the same advice I give my teenage kids. Grades aren’t everything. Learning is for the joy of learning; it’s not for the certificate. You have to set your own agenda. Question everything. I mean, this is a rod from my own back.

Think for yourself. Think for yourself. Think for yourself. I’m really concerned that many of major institutions don’t want people to think for themselves. My advice to any young person starting out is: don’t be a sheep. It’s your life and your decisions, and you can’t blame other people if you make the wrong choice. It’s your choice.”

Learn more about Margaret Heffernan’s TED Book, Beyond Measure: The Big Impact of Small Changes. And read up on the talks from the TED@BCG event she hosted.

+ FSO News (02/15)