Every crisis is an opportunity. The Great Reshuffle and post-COVID recovery present an opportunity for the green transition and activating the jobs. However, LinkedIn’s Global Green Skills Report suggests that we face a number of challenges. This chart shows one of them. The current pace of transitions into green and greening is too slow. According to LinkedIn data, for every 10,000 workers leaving a Not Green job, only 1 moves into a Green job.
One possible accelerator of transition is skills formation. Recent publication by the European Training Foundation “The future of skills: A case study of the agri-food sector in Morocco” provides a glimpse into future of skills. Trends like automation, digitisation, global trade, competition, climate change, sustainable farming and changing consumer behaviour put a pressure on the agri-food sector, which has relied upon traditional technologies and skills. No doubts, the forthcoming radical changes will affect jobs, by creating new ones or transforming existing ones. For instance, the boundaries between disciplines call for entirely new professions, like environmental economist or nutritionist engineer. In general, these changes imply introduction, use, and maintenance of new technologies, and more interactions with people from different disciplinary or professional backgrounds. From the skills point of view, this mean increase in demand for multi-disciplinary competences and the ability to cooperate and interact with people from different backgrounds. This could be done by improving collaboration between education providers and companies, enhancing continuing training and reskilling and upskilling, and structuring learning courses around certain value chains.
A combination of factors could make it much worse than hikes of 2008 and 2011-2012
1️⃣ This time it is compounded and still unfolding—we witness growing prices for cereals AND fuels AND fertilizers. Worst yet to come. Between 2019 and March 2022, cereal prices already has increased by 48%, fuel prices by 86% and fertiliser prices by 35%. Food, fuel and fertiliser prices could stay high for years if the war in Ukraine protracts and the isolation of Russia’s economy tightens
2️⃣ The poor are still recovering from the COVID-19 crisis, which had the most severe economic impact on the urban poor. Food price inflation is higher than CPI in many countries of the world, hurting the most vulnerable
3️⃣ Governments have little room to manoeuvre, due to shrinking tax base and growing dets debts for the unprecedented protection for households and businesses during the pandemic.
▶ What could be done?
Most impactful measures are increasing food supply and increasing fuel supplies to help bring down fuel and fertiliser (inter alia through resolving logistical bottlenecks and reducing shipping costs). However, it is not clear if countries are willing and ready to implement these measures.
Social protection could provide necessary support, via food or financial aid. These measures require concerted efforts of international institutions, governments, local actors, NGOs and the private sector. International community must help governments, facing tough post-pandemic fiscal circumstances, to mobilize resources for social protection. Combining universal programs with targeted programs could help to make the most of constrained fiscal space. World Bank real-time review of social protection and jobs responses to COVID-19 documented 3,856 social protection and labor measures planned or implemented by 223 economies Advanced big-data-driven technologies, like artificial intelligence and machine learning, could help in better targeting. However, they should be complemented with thick data and human solidarity to ensure proper combination of empowerment and protection.
🥱 Never deliver a hybrid presentation you wouldn’t want to sit through—in-person or online
🐱💻 Hybrid presenting creates unique obstacles to overcome—tech (CHECK YOUR MIC!), taking care of both audiences, considering the impact of your visuals, engaging in networking and socializing, being mindful of your scene and screen moves
💃 Speakers need to combine their in-person skills with their more recently built virtual presenting skills The goal of hybrid presenting is the same as all presentations: form a connection with the audience to move them from point A to point B. But your job as a speaker is undoubtedly harder with hybrid presentations. There are now two audiences you need to connect with at the same time. But the flexibility and opportunity that we gain from the hybrid environment is worth the effort.
COVID-19 can undermine life-long perspectives of young people. Students globally lost eight months of learning and the impact varies widely from staggering 12 months in South Asia and Latin America and Caribbean to modest 4 months in North America and Europe and Central Asia. Recent McKinsey study identifies three archetypes of countries: 🚩 Most affected countries with moderate levels of pre-COVID-19 learning and significant delays in education, where students may be nine to 15 months behind. 🚩 Prepandemic-challenged countries, with very low levels of pre-COVID-19 learning, where losses were daunting but not so dramatic in absolute terms, about three to eight months 🚩 Least affected are high-performing countries, with relatively high levels of pre-COVID-19 performance, where losses were limited to one to five months.
Lower levels of learning translate into lower future earnings potential for students and lower economic productivity for nations (📉 losing 1 percent of global GDP annually, according to McKinsey estimates). By using scenario modelling UNDP came to similar conclusions. The study shows how governments can make choices today that have the greatest potential to boost progress in the future. School systems can respond across multiple horizons to help students get back on track: ⭐Resilience, 🔁Reenrollment, 🔼Recovery, and 💡Reimagining.
Hand and finger gestures amplify the impact of your spoken words by as much as five times. In fact, people will remember more of what you said if you gesture while you speak. This works well for online and hybrid public speaking, as often video shows only upper body. You could use gestures as Amplifiers, Signifiers, and Delineators. 👉 https://rosemaryravinal.com/let-your-hands-do-your-talking/
Can we consider any society developed if the people have a deep sense of unfairness and believe that the ‘system is rigged’? Recent chapter by Avidit Acharya and John E. Roemer in “The Great Upheaval” argues that fairness entails equalizing opportunities rather than equalizing something else.
However, do we measure what matters?
In the end, all inequalities are unequal, but some are more unequal than others. We still use only one indicator—the Gini coefficient of income inequality—to judge them all. This chart illustrates possible approach in measuring equality of opportunity. It shows distributions of income among people, grouped by the levels of education of their two parents. These curves summarize the income opportunities available to its members. Inequality of opportunity for income appears to be a good deal higher in Indonesia than in Germany around a similar time. Measuring right inequalities could help policymakers to shape right policies.
Data visualization has a long history, hundreds of years. Data designers coaxed numbers into telling stories and giving us insight into the world around us. Here are seven lessons learned:
Nowadays we store more than 99% of information in digital form, comparing to just 1% a couple of decades ago. Just 60% of Internet traffic is currently generated by human, the rest is coming from bots, good 15% and bad 25%. This is a new reality, which pose a lot of questions–how we, human, interact with algorithms? with each other using the technologies? what does this mean for human development and human security? This video illustrates new-old interactions–a grandma helping a small robot to cross a street, by holding cars.
During the 20th century Bell Labs was the greatest incubator of innovation. It transformed all aspects of our modern life—the transistor, the integrated circuit, the communications satellite, the cell phone were born here. Why did so many breakthrough inventions come from Bell Labs? The book The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation by Jon Gertner explores the century of Bell Labs in great details.
I find three interwoven elements of Bell Labs story particularly interesting—People, Collaboration, and Economics.
People. The core of Bell Labs is a small group of brilliant men, like Mervin Kelly, Bill Shockley, and Bill Baker, although at its peak Bell Labs employed more than a thousand of PhD. One of the principal criteria for employee selection was enthusiasm—most of the core group was small-town boys, childhood hobbyists, oddballs, doing strange things. This selection and nurturing approach trickled down, “Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill”. Bell Labs employees had a special for playing with stuff and tweaking things—Claude Shannon is a great example here. The book tells an anecdote of Bell Labs’ survey on productivity of its employees. It turned out that a single best predictor for a productive employee was … having lunches with Harry Nyquist. He was known for his talent of asking good questions, a key for innovation and collaboration.
All Bell Labs inventions required Collaboration between very different specialists. Invention of the transistor required collaboration of physicists, who had some idea what they would like to get, and metallurgists, who knew how to do different tricks with metals. Bell Labs intentionally nurtured the culture of collaboration in very different aspects—from broad search for specialists who are doing interesting things to creating physical space for mixing and talking (the approach later used by Pixar as vividly described in Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration by Ed Catmull, Amy Wallace). Bell Labs encouraged risk-taking and was quite tolerant to what would be called inefficiencies by modern managers—pursuing personal projects without immediate and obvious monetization. The reason is understanding of the profound distinction between two types of innovations—racing for obvious and the leap into the unknown. Sometimes ideas are “in the air” and you have to run fast to be first or someone else will do it—the transistor is a good example here. However, sometimes transformation requires a much larger leap, in a less anticipated direction, into the unknown—Shannon’s information theory and communication satellite are two good examples.
How Bell Labs managed to maintain its operations over decades? The right Economics is an answer. First and foremost Bell Labs did not strive for “efficiency” and “profit.” It was cross-subsidized from other profitable businesses of AT&T, and this cross-subsidization was explicitly recognized. AT&T was an official natural monopoly, which allowed it to maintain vertically integrated operations and finance extensive innovation activities . (The price was limitations of company activity to the communication sector only.) In a sense, it resemble a paradox of USSR and USA Internet (as described in great details in How Not to Network a Nation: The Uneasy History of the Soviet Internet by Benjamin Peters)—capitalist USA acted in more socialist manner and got better results. Second, AT&T recognized the power of specialization and vertical integration. Bell Labs was an incubator of innovations. The Western Electric Company, another subsidiary of AT&T, served as the primary equipment manufacturer and was doing technical and manufacturing innovations. This allowed AT&T to have a whole control on innovation—from the idea and prototypes (done by Bell Labs) to scaling it into a marketable, mass producible product (done by The Western Electric Company)—“cheaper or better or both.” This is in sharp contrast with other innovation labs, like Xerox PARC (story told in Dealers of Lightning: Xerox PARC and the Dawn of the Computer Age by Michael A. Hiltzik), which did not manage to go from idea and prototyping to mass production and therefore transformative change. This doesn’t mean all Bell Labs products were successful. For instance, Picturephone was technologically advanced, but too unfamiliar and did not fly.
Overall this is a great book for everyone interested in history, technologies, and innovations.
P.S. This book came to me as a part of a reading list on innovations, although I am not completely sure which one. It could be a reading list from my Leadership Development Program, or from Seth Godin.
