Peter Fisk

Mark Zuckerberg isn’t everyone favourite philosopher, but the drop-out student who spent his Harvard years playing around with FaceMash as a way to find a girl, was recently back at Harvard talking about finding a more inspiring purpose. And he made a lot of sense:

“Today I want to talk about purpose. But I’m not here to give you the standard commencement about finding your purpose. We’re millennials. We’ll try to do that instinctively. Instead, I’m here to tell you finding your purpose isn’t enough. The challenge for our generation is creating a world where everyone has a sense of purpose.

One of my favorite stories is when John F. Kennedy visited the NASA space center, he saw a janitor carrying a broom and he walked over and asked what he was doing. The janitor responded: “Mr. President, I’m helping put a man on the moon.”

Purpose is that sense that we are part of something bigger than ourselves, that we are needed, that we have something better ahead to work for. Purpose is what creates true happiness.”

Roy Spence, a little known guy, who was the creator of much of Southwest Airline’s journey to become one of the legends of customer service, describes purpose simply:

“Purpose is a definitive statement about the difference you are trying to make in the world.”

Of course Simon Sinek, and his “Start with Why” circle, is perhaps the best known descriptor of purpose and why it matters. Here’s his logic:

“All the great and inspiring leaders and organizations in the world, whether it’s Apple or Martin Luther King or the Wright brothers — they all think, act, and communicate the exact same way and it’s the complete opposite to everyone else. All I did was codify it. It’s probably the world’s simplest idea and I call it the Golden Circle. Why? How? What?

This little idea explains why some organizations and some leaders are able to inspire where others are not. Let me define the terms very quickly.

Every single person and organization in the planet knows what they do 100%. Some know how they do it, whether you call it your differentiating proposition or proprietary process or USP. But very very few people and organizations know why they do what they do. And by why I don’t mean to make a profit — that’s a result. It’s always a result. By why I mean, what’s your purpose? What’s your cause? What’s your belief? Why does your organization exist?”

From Purpose to Concept to Strategy … from WHY to HOW to WHAT

The real question most people then struggle with is, is how to turn an inspiring but fairly intangible purpose statement into something which is a meaningful strategy for the business. The key is to turn the aspiration into something practical, her called a strategic concept, before going on to define the practical actions, prioritised and delivered.

Step 1: Define your inspiring purpose … the WHY

The framework starts with purpose. For example, Starbucks’ purpose is “to inspire and nurture the human spirit”. 

As the core of purpose are three questions we need to answer:

1. Who do we serve?
2. What do we do for them?
3. How does this enable them to achieve more, or be more?

Step 2: Interpret this as a strategic concept … the HOW

What is the big idea which will enable your business to deliver this purpose in a distinctive, better way? What is the strategic concept that will enable your inspiring intent to become real?

A concept is the core activity that sits about your day-to-day operations and allows you to deliver the purpose. In creative or brand agency parlance, this would be called the creative concept – the big idea.

For example, at the core of Starbucks are two things: coffee and human connection. Starbucks this concept more simply as the third place.

Step 3: Develop your purpose-driven strategy … the WHAT

A great example of this is the transformation agenda Starbucks created in 2008 to turn the company around. The agenda stated seven big moves:

1. Be the undisputed coffee authority
2. Engage and inspire their partners
3. Ignite the emotional attachment with their customers
4. Expand their global presence-while making each store the heart of the local neighborhood
5. Be a leader in ethical sourcing and environmental impact
6. Create innovative growth platforms worthy of their coffee
7. Deliver a sustainable economic model

Indeed as demonstrated by Starbucks, a good way to articulate strategy is to come up a list of bold moves that will enable you to move dramatically and distinctively towards achieving your purpose.

Another great reference for strategy is Elon Musk’s Master Plan for Tesla. (Part two of their master plan is here.)

Tesla starts with an inspiring purpose, “to accelerate the world’s transition to sustainable energy” (not just to make cool cars, or even to become a global leader in electric cars – that is just part of its internal mission, on the way to a more inspiring purpose).

1. Create a low volume car, which would necessarily be expensive
2. Use that money to develop a medium volume car at a lower price
3. Use that money to create an affordable, high volume car

The Master Plan provides a clear road map (a series of steps) on what needs to be done.

What about mission, vision and goals?

Good question. Does the purpose sit above these statements or replace them?

MVGs are about the business itself – its what it seeks to achieve for itself – whereas purpose is what a business does for the world. Mission is what the business does itself, vision is a description of the future state when success is achieved, and goals are the specific things to achieve on the way. MVGs are insular, self-serving. Purpose is about engaging with the world, to make it better in some way (which might be in a positive way, contributing to society, which could be anything from fighting climate change, to spreading happiness).

Purpose by contrast is about business engaging with the outside world.

It defines what a company contributes to the world, why it exists, and how the world would be a lesser place without it. It is emotionally engaging to the audience – ideally to all stakeholders, employees and investors, as well as consumers – because it is what the business does for them, how it makes their lives better. Because it is more engaging, they pay more for it – be it in terms of price or loyalty, hard work and productivity, capital investment and support.

Profit follows purpose – but it’s the purpose not profit that is the WHY – and a surplus profit can be divided in a fair and forwards-looking way – used both to reward stakeholders for their roles in achieving it, but also invested in doing better, achieving more purpose.

We all need “more female” attributes to seize the opportunities of today’s rapidly changing business world.

Making sense of relentless change and complexity requires us to rise above the data points and short-term priorities, to see a bigger picture – to make sense of a new emerging world. That requires intuition more than logic (intuition is more forwards looking, whilst logic tends to look back).

To add value beyond machines and AI, we need to unlock our humanity, our creativity. That requires us to be more empathetic, to make new connections. Ideas, design, relationships are most valued in today’s business world.

And to solve the big problems of our world, we need to be more thoughtful – to find more responsible, caring and creative, intuitive and inspiring solutions.

You could say “the future is female”

It’s not just about getting to a level playing field in diversity and inclusion, which matters … but even more, its about taking those attributes, those qualities, which are typically “more female” and to embrace them … both for men and women.

We could go into a biological and neurological discussion at this point, but I think the point is clear. Women therefore can have an advantage, whilst for men it might require some unlearning.

The future is not like the future used to be. Being a leader of the future, is not achieved by following the traits of the past success. It’s time to look forwards, together, with a positive mindset, to embrace the opportunities of an incredible new world.

So here are 10 incredible female business leaders, stepping up to disrupt and reinvent our world and our lives:

Kathy Hannun, Cofounder and CEO of Dandelion

Kathy Hannun was at Google X when she became obsessed with geothermal energy for home heating and cooling. It drastically cuts the eco footprint compared with diesel or propane-powered furnaces — but a system typically cost $80,000 or more to install in a private house. Hannun cofounded Dandelion in 2017 to bring down the expense. Already, the company’s innovative equipment means that homeowners can either pay $18,500 up front and recoup the costs over about five years or put no money down and pay $135 a month, less than most diesel heating bills. So far Dandelion has raised $23.5 million and is growing 20 percent month over month; its waitlist is in the thousands. “My goal is to make this the mainstream option,” says Hannun. “And advance the way society heats and cools indoor spaces.”

Cristina Junqueira, Cofounder and VP of Nubank

Cristina Junqueira was working at a traditional bank in Brazil, and in 2013 she scored the largest bonus of her career. She quit immediately. Junqueira realized she wanted to change people’s lives, not just make money. Within months, she helped launch Nubank, a Brazilian fintech company that aims to make banking accessible to everyone via tools like low-interest credit cards, high-interest savings accounts, and an app-based credit system. In the early days, it was all hands on deck for Nubank’s tiny team. “You would call our customer service line and it would ring on my cellphone,” Junqueira says. But today, she’s having the impact she hoped for: Her company is valued at $10 billion, recently announced plans to move into Mexico and Argentina, and is exploring new products like personal loans, investment products, and accounts for small and medium-­size businesses.

Payal Kadakia, Founder and executive chairman of ClassPass

Back in 2010, Payal Kadakia gave herself two weeks to come up with a viable business idea — time enough, she thought, to know whether she was cut out to be an entrepreneur. It worked. That experiment evolved into ClassPass, the subscription-based service that now helps users in 2,500-plus cities in more than 20 countries discover and book exercise classes. This year, Kadakia expanded into corporate wellness with a service that gives employees access to classes with 22,000 studio partners; clients include Google, Facebook, and Morgan Stanley. But the company, which has raised $255 million, is approaching the milestone of 100 million class reservations, a figure that keeps the founder motivated. “Our ultimate success metric is when someone goes to class,” Kadakia says.

Andrea and Robin McBride, Founders of McBride Sisters Wine 

Sometimes a founding story is so good, you just want to bottle it. And these sisters did. Andrea McBride was 12 and living with her foster mom in New Zealand when the phone rang. “Hey, Andrea; it’s your dad,” a man said. He told her he had terminal stomach cancer and she had a big sister named Robin (left) on the opposite side of the world. Andrea set out to find her. It took a few years, but she did. Andrea was 16 and Robin was 25 when the two first met, in New York’s LaGuardia airport. “When I got off the plane,” says Robin, who’d been brought up by her mom in California, “she was standing at the end of the jetway. I thought I was seeing my own reflection.” In 2005, the sisters ended up in California concocting a plan to squeeze into the very male, very white, very old-school wine industry. First they became importers, then distributors, and in 2009 they produced their first vintage. Many followed, including a Black Girl Magic collection, from New Zealand and California. Today the McBride Sisters Wine Collection sells 80,000 cases a year, landing it in the top 3 percent of wineries by size. But the sisters want to see more women there. On March 8, International Women’s Day, they debuted She Can — a New Zealand sauvignon blanc and a California rosé in cans — along with a fund to advance the careers of women in the wine industry. “It’s better than when we started,” says Robin. Andrea finishes the sentence: “But there’s still a lot more work to be done.”

Mariam Naficy, Founder and CEO of Minted

Minted, which transformed over 11 years from selling stationery to being a massive marketplace for indie artists, inked a big deal this summer: Samsung and Method will now license work from Minted’s community, giving newfound exposure to independent designers. “We’re a source for companies that understand the value of one-of-a-kind design but may not have the scale or merchandising bandwidth to develop it internally,” says founder and CEO Mariam Naficy. And Minted doesn’t just have scale; it has crowd buy-in. Back when the company focused solely on greeting cards and wedding invitations, Naficy devised a crowdsourcing model for up-voting the art potential shoppers liked best. Fast-forward to today, and that means big brands can tap into a decade of data on design that inspires both fandom and sales—Naficy even says that by now, Minted can predict which designs will ultimately become best-sellers.

Neha Narkhede, Cofounder and chief product officer of Confluent

Next time you swipe a credit card or call a Lyft, thank Neha Narkhede, who is building what she calls a “central nervous system” for companies’ data. It started while she was working as an engineer at LinkedIn, where she helped create Apache Kafka, an open-source software system that processes the deluge of data flowing through the platform — clicks, messages, and news-feed updates — and makes it available to users in real time. “We said, ‘This is not just a LinkedIn problem; this is part of a broader trend that’s happening in the world where businesses are going to become more digital,’ ” Narkhede says. So she and two colleagues left to start Confluent, a software system that turbocharges Apache Kafka’s capabilities for startups, financial institutions, and Fortune 500 companies. Confluent enables its customers to process trillions of event streams every day, integrating data across apps and platforms and making all that information available centrally to analyze in real time. The service has quickly become an integral tool for businesses looking to leverage their digital footprint, and it shows in Confluent’s growth: The company recently raised $125 million in Series D funding, catapulting it to unicorn status with a $2.5 billion valuation. Next year, Confluent will focus on international business while increasing its 800-person workforce. “The market is as big as what the relational database market will be,” Narkhede says. “That’s on the order of tens of billions of dollars—that’s what we’re looking at in terms of total market potential.”

Melanie Perkins, Cofounder and CEO of Canva 

Canva, the Australia-based graphic design platform, was created in 2013 to help anyone, anywhere — with any level of design knowledge — create and publish beautiful, professional materials. Six years later, CEO Melanie Perkins and her cofounders have made strides. Canva has raised more than $140 million, is valued at $2.5 billion, and has 15 million active monthly users around the globe. “We’re now in 100 languages, and a goal for the year ahead is to bring access to every single market,” Perkins says. “We’ve done less than 1 percent of what we think is possible — we’ve got .56 percent of the world’s population on the platform, but we want to empower the entire world.”

Kendra Scott, Founder and CEO of Kendra Scott

As she designed her first jewelry collection out of her home in 2002, Kendra Scott never dreamed it would become a $1 billion brand. But today, her eponymous company has a unicorn valuation, 100 stores, and shows no signs of slowing down — though Scott’s main focus is about more than baubles. Of the Austin-based brand’s 2,000 employees, more than 90 percent are women, many of whom are mothers. Nursing rooms are commonplace at HQ and distribution centers, Kendra Scott Kids provides a children’s playroom, and once a year Camp Kendra invites in employees’ kids for a day of activities, in which office employees become camp counselors. “If we can support our staff, these women, at this very special time in their lives, we’ll have an employee who is incredibly loyal to our brand,” says Scott. “We believe in their future.” In September, that support expanded beyond the walls of Scott’s company, when she announced the Kendra Scott Women’s Entrepreneurial Leadership Program in partnership with the University of Texas. The programming will feature speaker series and courses on everything from building a business to advocating for equal pay and will be available to University of Texas students. “We want women to be able to access this information,” Scott says.

Reshma Shetty, Cofounder of Ginkgo Bioworks

A biological engineer who can synthesize bacteria to smell like bananas, Reshma Shetty never intended to be an entrepreneur. But as a graduate student at MIT, she became passionate about designing biology-based products the way an architect designs a house. To make her vision a reality, in 2008 she cofounded Ginkgo Bioworks. Eleven years later, Shetty and her 250-person team are known for cutting-­edge biotech and valued at $1.4 billion. Ginkgo’s work has spanned various industries, from healthcare to agriculture, with products like synthetic probiotics that reduce gastrointestinal problems in soldiers and (in progress with Synlogic) medicines that program the body’s cells to treat complex diseases. Earlier this year, Ginkgo spun out a separate company called Motif Ingredients to engineer sustainable alternative proteins that taste like the real thing. “Although we’re going after these radically different markets,” says Shetty, “the common thread is biology.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OeqQz15QehE

Alli Webb, Founder of  Drybar

Drybar founder Alli Webb has a new company, Squeeze, that aims to do for massages what she did for blowouts: Make the experience easy and affordable. The chain launched in March; customers book appointments via an app and can select from a menu of treatments and preferences, from pressure type to areas to avoid. But unlike Drybar (which has 130 locations and 4,000 employees), Squeeze will scale as a franchise, and Webb’s team is creating a two-year blueprint for its future partners, detailing how to greet customers and market locally. “We love the idea of enabling other people to become entrepreneurs themselves,” Webb says.

What are the successful traits?

Fortune Magazine recently asked a range of female leaders about the personality trait they credit for helping launching them into their leadership positions of today:

Ginni Rometty, Chairman, President, and CEO, IBM  … “Be curious. A constant thirst to learn has served me well my entire career, especially in the tech industry. We’ve always hired for curiosity at IBM. We receive 7,000 job applications a day, and our managers and HR teams are geared to look for people who are curious and committed to constantly advancing what they know.”

Gail Boudreaux, President and CEO, Anthem … “My strong focus on leadership has been a large part of my success to date. I believe the ability to build and inspire teams is critical and that individuals and organizations can accomplish extraordinary results when they leverage the power of their collective strength working together.”

Julie Sweet, CEO, Accenture … “Openness: starting with my decision to learn Chinese and live in Taiwan and China in 1987 and 1988, before it was commonplace. I have often pursued paths that were not well-trodden. It has helped me become a continuous learner and to understand that it is often from unexpected sources and places that you learn the most.”

Judith McKenna, President and CEO, Walmart International  … “It must be somewhere between curiosity and always focusing on people. Both are really important, and I really believe that if we always keep our associates, our people, at the heart of everything we do, and build out strong teams, then we’ll continue to make our business successful.”

Amy Hood, EVP and CFO, Microsoft … “I’m pretty gritty. I can work through most things and come out on the other side feeling like I’ve learned a good lesson and I’ll get better.”

Leanne Caret, President and CEO, Defense, Space & Security, and EVP, Boeing … “I love being authentic and letting people see the real me. That hopefully creates an environment where we are all in it together.”

Jennifer Taubert, EVP, Worldwide Chairman, Pharmaceuticals, Johnson & Johnson … “I think two qualities have been critical in my career: optimism and perseverance. Optimism because I believe in stretching and redefining the boundaries of what’s possible. Perseverance because, with determination, you can overcome any obstacle to do the right thing for patients. ”

Michele Buck, President and CEO, Hershey  … “Being a great listener has long been one of my hallmark leadership qualities. I find immense value in seeking diverse perspectives when I’m making an important business decision. I want to hear from people who are deep in the organization, closest to the work, as well as those outside the decision domain who may see things a bit differently. As a leader, it’s important to set direction and impart your knowledge to others; but, you have to balance that with listening to the expertise and point of views of those around you. Intentional listening, and the learning associated with that, has undoubtedly been key to my success. One of the most important lessons I’ve learned is to weigh the perspectives of those around me with my north star. Then, I listen to my gut, which to me isn’t just natural instinct, it’s been built through years of experience, successes, failures, and everything in between.”

Mary Dillon, CEO, Ulta Beauty … “Curiosity and empathy. I told my children as they were growing up to always ask other people about themselves, to be curious to learn about others and to respect their journey. At Ulta Beauty, this is the way we do business. We have a deep curiosity about our guests and their needs, and we treat associates with the respect they deserve. We believe these values are helping us win customer loyalty.”

Marillyn Hewson, Chairman, President, and CEO, Lockheed Martin … “A focus on effective communication—and it all starts with the ability to really listen. Listening to your customers leads to a customer-focused vision. And listening to those you lead creates a climate of understanding and trust. By focusing on consistent and effective communication, leaders can also more quickly identify those times when it is critical to step forward and reach out directly to customers, shareholders, or employees. Simply put, effective communication is the engine for effective leadership and effective decision making at every level.”

Download a summary of my keynote: The Future is Female

Peter Fisk’s new book Business Recoded is out in September 2020.

A number of different diseases, including cancer, heart disease, and dementia, could potentially be treated by slowing ageing. The first wave of a new class of anti-aging drugs have begun human testing. These drugs won’t let you live longer but aim to treat specific ailments by slowing or reversing a fundamental process of ageing.

The drugs are called senolytics—they work by removing certain cells that accumulate as we age. Known as “senescent” cells, they can create low-level inflammation that suppresses normal mechanisms of cellular repair and creates a toxic environment for neighboring cells.

In June, San Francisco–based Unity Biotechnology reported initial results in patients with mild to severe osteoarthritis of the knee. Results from a larger clinical trial are expected in the second half of 2020. The company is also developing similar drugs to treat age-related diseases of the eyes and lungs, among other conditions.  Senolytics are now in human tests, along with a number of other promising approaches  targeting the biological processes that lie at the root of aging and various diseases.

A company called Alkahest injects patients with components found in young people’s blood and says it hopes to halt cognitive and functional decline in patients suffering from mild to moderate Alzheimer’s disease. The company also has drugs for Parkinson’s and dementia in human testing.  And in December, researchers at Drexel University College of Medicine even tried to see if a cream including the immune-suppressing drug rapamycin could slow aging   in human skin. The tests reflect researchers’ expanding efforts to learn if the many diseases associated with getting older—such as heart diseases, arthritis, cancer, and dementia—can be hacked to delay their onset.

Climate analytics

Ten days after Tropical Storm Imelda began flooding neighbourhoods across the Houston area last September, a rapid-response research team announced that climate change almost certainly played a role. The group, World Weather Attribution, had compared high-resolution computer simulations of worlds where climate change did and didn’t occur. In the former, the world we live in, the severe storm was as much as 2.6 times more likely—and up to 28% more intense.

Earlier this decade, scientists were reluctant to link any specific event to climate change. But many more extreme-weather attribution studies have been done in the last few years, and rapidly improving tools and techniques have made them more reliable and convincing.  This has been made possible by a combination of advances. For one, the lengthening record of detailed satellite data is helping us understand natural systems. Also, increased computing power means scientists can create higher-resolution simulations and conduct many more virtual experiments.

These and other improvements have allowed scientists to state with increasing statistical certainty that yes, global warming is often fueling more dangerous weather events.  By disentangling the role of climate change from other factors, the studies are telling us what kinds of risks we need to prepare for, including how much flooding to expect and how severe heat waves will get as global warming becomes worse. If we choose to listen, they can help us understand how to rebuild our cities and infrastructure for a climate-changed world.

Digital money

As the use of physical cash declines, so does the freedom to transact without an intermediary. Meanwhile, digital currency technology could be used to splinter the global financial system.

Last June Facebook unveiled a “global digital currency” called Libra. The idea triggered a backlash and Libra may never launch, at least not in the way it was originally envisioned. But it’s still made a difference: just days after Facebook’s announcement, an official from the People’s Bank of China implied that it would speed the development of its own digital currency in response. Now China is poised to become the first major economy to issue a digital version of its money, which it intends as a replacement for physical cash.

China’s leaders apparently see Libra, meant to be backed by a reserve that will be mostly US dollars, as a threat: it could reinforce America’s disproportionate power over the global financial system, which stems from the dollar’s role as the world’s de facto reserve currency. Some suspect China intends to promote its digital renminbi internationally. Now Facebook’s Libra pitch has become geopolitical. In October, CEO Mark Zuckerberg promised Congress that Libra “will extend America’s financial leadership as well as our democratic values and oversight around the world.” The digital money wars have begun.

Personalised drugs

Genetic medicine tailored to a single patient means hope for people whose ailments were previously uncurable.

Here’s a definition of a hopeless case: a child with a fatal disease so exceedingly rare that not only is there no treatment, there’s not even anyone in a lab coat studying it. “Too rare to care,” goes the saying. That’s about to change, thanks to new classes of drugs that can be tailored to a person’s genes. If an extremely rare disease is caused by a specific DNA mistake—as several thousand are—there’s now at least a fighting chance for a genetic fix.

One such case is that of Mila Makovec, a little girl suffering from a devastating illness caused by a unique genetic mutation, who got a drug manufactured just for her. Her case made the New England Journal of Medicine in October, after doctors moved from a readout of her genetic error to a treatment in just a year. They called the drug milasen, after her. The treatment hasn’t cured Mila. But it seems to have stabilized her condition: it has reduced her seizures, and she has begun to stand and walk with assistance.  Mila’s treatment was possible because creating a gene medicine has never been faster or had a better chance of working. The new medicines might take the form of gene replacement, gene editing, or antisense (the type Mila received), a sort of molecular eraser, which erases or fixes erroneous genetic messages. What the treatments have in common is that they can be programmed, in digital fashion and with digital speed, to correct or compensate for inherited diseases, letter for DNA letter.

How many stories like Mila’s are there? So far, just a handful. But more are on the way. Where researchers would have once seen obstacles and said “I’m sorry,” they now see solutions in DNA and think maybe they can help. The real challenge for “n-of-1” treatments (a reference to the number of people who get the drug) is that they defy just about every accepted notion of how pharmaceuticals should be developed, tested, and sold. Who will pay for these drugs when they help one person, but still take large teams to design and manufacture?

Space internet 

Satellites that can beam a broadband connection to internet terminals. As long as these terminals have a clear view of the sky, they can deliver internet to any nearby devices. SpaceX alone wants to send more than 4.5 times more satellites into orbit this decade than humans have ever launched since Sputnik. These mega-constellations are feasible because we have learned how to build smaller satellites and launch them more cheaply. During the space shuttle era, launching a satellite into space cost roughly $24,800 per pound. A small communications satellite that weighed four tons cost nearly $200 million to fly up.

Today a SpaceX Starlink satellite weighs about 500 pounds (227 kilograms). Reusable architecture and cheaper manufacturing mean we can strap dozens of them onto rockets to greatly lower the cost; a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch today costs about $1,240 per pound. The first 120 Starlink satellites went up last year, and the company planned to launch batches of 60 every two weeks starting in January 2020. OneWeb will launch over 30 satellites later this year. We could soon see thousands of satellites working in tandem to supply internet access for even the poorest and most remote populations on the planet.

But that’s only if things work out. Some researchers are livid because they fear these objects will disrupt astronomy research. Worse is the prospect of a collision that could cascade into a catastrophe of millions of pieces of space debris, making satellite services and future space exploration next to impossible. Starlink’s near-miss with an ESA weather satellite in September was a jolting reminder that the world is woefully unprepared to manage this much orbital traffic. What happens with these mega-constellations this decade will define the future of orbital space.

Tiny AI

AI has a problem: in the quest to build more powerful algorithms, researchers are using ever greater amounts of data and computing power, and relying on centralized cloud services. This not only generates alarming amounts of carbon emissions but also limits the speed and privacy of AI applications.

But a countertrend of tiny AI is changing that. Tech giants and academic researchers are working on new algorithms to shrink existing deep-learning models without losing their capabilities. Meanwhile, an emerging generation of specialized AI chips promises to pack more computational power into tighter physical spaces, and train and run AI on far less energy.

These advances are just starting to become available to consumers. Last May, Google announced that it can now run Google Assistant on users’ phones without sending requests to a remote server. As of iOS 13, Apple runs Siri’s speech recognition capabilities and its QuickType keyboard locally on the iPhone. IBM and Amazon now also offer developer platforms for making and deploying tiny AI.

All this could bring about many benefits. Existing services like voice assistants, autocorrect, and digital cameras will get better and faster without having to ping the cloud every time they need access to a deep-learning model. Tiny AI will also make new applications possible, like mobile-based medical-image analysis or self-driving cars with faster reaction times. Finally, localized AI is better for privacy, since your data no longer needs to leave your device to improve a service or a feature.

But as the benefits of AI become distributed, so will all its challenges. It could become harder to combat surveillance systems or deepfake videos, for example, and discriminatory algorithms could also proliferate. Researchers, engineers, and policymakers need to work together now to develop technical and policy checks on these potential harms.

Quantum computing

Quantum computers store and process data in a way completely differently from the ones we’re all used to. In theory, they could tackle certain classes of problems that even the most powerful classical supercomputer imaginable would take millennia to solve, like breaking today’s cryptographic codes or simulating the precise behavior of molecules to help discover new drugs and materials.

There have been working quantum computers for several years, but it’s only under certain conditions that they outperform classical ones, and in October Google claimed the first such demonstration of “quantum supremacy.” A computer with 53 qubits—the basic unit of quantum computation—did a calculation in a little over three minutes that, by Google’s reckoning, would have taken the world’s biggest supercomputer 10,000 years, or 1.5 billion times as long. IBM challenged Google’s claim, saying the speedup would be a thousandfold at best; even so, it was a milestone, and each additional qubit will make the computer twice as fast.

However, Google’s demo was strictly a proof of concept—the equivalent of doing random sums on a calculator and showing that the answers are right. The goal now is to build machines with enough qubits to solve useful problems. This is a formidable challenge: the more qubits you have, the harder it is to maintain their delicate quantum state. Google’s engineers believe the approach they’re using can get them to somewhere between 100 and 1,000 qubits, which may be enough to do something useful—but nobody is quite sure what.

And beyond that? Machines that can crack today’s cryptography will require millions of qubits; it will probably take decades to get there. But one that can model molecules should be easier to build.

 

“Leading with Purpose in an Age Defined by It” is a great new report from Quartz Insights, and says that nearly 75% of surveyed business leaders agree that purpose is as important as financial performance.

It is rapidly becoming the core driver – idea, philosophy, intent – of many businesses … the reason why people come to work, the reason why customers choose the brand, the reason why investors want to be part of the business.

Not so long ago, we had that vague, subsidiary concept of CSR. A kind of bolt on, a children’s playground to relieve our guilt, an addendum to the annual report. More recently we’ve seen a wave of purpose-washing. Nice statements, which were essentially the same as previous mission statements, claiming that the business has found itself.

But now purpose really matters.

Last year the Business Roundtable took a step closer, when they announced last year that all stakeholders mattered, not just shareholders. But it still felt like they were hedging their bets. Then in January Larry Fink, CEO of BlackRock, the world’s largest investment house, said that he would only continue investing in businesses if they could demonstrate purpose “beyond” profit. And the World Economic Forum added to all of that by declaring the end of shareholder value, and the primacy of purpose, and society.

I think Fink gets it best. The pursuit of shareholder value was never, actually the devil’s work. What it really meant, certainly in a long-term context, was that a business could create more economic value over time if it invested in all its stakeholders, to maximise their engagement and effectiveness. The net value created at the end was a measure of this collective effectiveness – a bigger cake, where everybody could have a bigger slice. Purpose is similar, although the final measure is not in economic value terms, but in the achievement of a bigger goal – that which is defined by the purpose, which might be to bring more joy to the world (Coca Cola), or to save our planet (Patagonia).

Genuine purpose should come from a company’s heart and soul: its people. It’s about your why – why you exist, why the world is better with you than not, why you come to work … It’s your distinctive passion. And it requires a shared passion, aligning organisation and individuals. For company leaders, this means engaging with employees on every level about the things that matter most to them, and using those values as the North Star that guides every decision you make—no matter the size.

Putting purpose into action

The study also shows that 80% of business leaders agree that they have a moral obligation to engage on a social issue when it impacts their employees. For instance, Patagonia has many business decisions over the years (from stopping selling its most profitable item in its early days, metal pegs which mountaineers hammered into rocks, to helping customers to keep and mend their existing clothes, rather than buying new ones).

Practically this means acting with boldness, bravery, and conviction. Whether you’re a small business owner or the executive of a large company, here are four steps you can take to help your organisation chart its purpose and pivot into action.

• Define yourself: Look to the strengths of your current mission statement as a starting point. Be courageous, and be specific. The most resonant purpose strategies are broad enough to inspire, but concrete enough to be impactful. For example, since the company was founded in 1947, Dr. Bronner’s Soaps has been committed to progressive business practices. It gives 10% of its revenue to charities, shares its profits with workers, and tells the story of its values right on its products’ iconic, 3,000-word labels. And as global wealth inequality continues to grow, leaders at Dr. Bronner’s have pledged never to make more than five times what the company’s lowest-paid employees earn.
• Engage and listen to your stakeholders: Communication starts with employees who want to feel part of something bigger. But employees are just the beginning. Discussions about a company’s purpose and values should also incorporate its customers, shareholders, like-minded advocacy groups, and community members. Inditex, the Spanish parent company of fashion brands like Zara and Massimo Dutti, listened to consumer and stakeholder perspectives on the wastefulness of fast fashion. In response, the company announced that beginning with Zara in 2025, all its collections will soon be made from sustainable fabrics. In other words, stakeholders identified a concern, and the company changed the way it does business—and inspired other companies to do the same.
• Align your story and your actions: Make your communication meaningful. A full 81% of those surveyed say a fragmented message is as ineffective as no message at all. Choose a simple, focused, and repeatable point, and make sure you live it out. At WE, we use communications to move people to positive action around the world. We do the same with one another, by supporting employees’ personal philanthropic goals as well as their professional development. Every staff member gets extra paid time off for volunteering, and through the Global Pro Bono program, employees get the opportunity to spend four weeks supporting nonprofits and social enterprises around the world.
• Activate and build a movement: Connecting with the outside world is where the rubber meets the road. In fact, the strongest purpose moments don’t emerge in isolation. Instead, they’re part of expansive social movements dedicated to changing the way the world works for everyone. For example, Mastercard is now making it possible for customers to use their chosen names—that is, names that reflect their true identity—on credit cards. It’s a practical shift that matters particularly to people in the LGBTQIA+ community. It also reflects a much larger commitment to inclusion and acceptance, in both the company and the broader community outside it.

The Quartz report shows that now, more than ever, the public expects brands to take a stand, and back up its values with meaningful action. It also shows that purpose can be a brand’s lifesaver, bolstering customer loyalty through good times and bad. Finally, and most important: it shows that brand purpose is a group commitment. It doesn’t swoop down from leadership or shareholders. It rises organically, and it lifts us all, to do better.

5 inspiring books on purpose

This Could Be Our Future: A Manifesto for a More Generous World, by Yancey Strickler

Businesses have sought to maximize profits for so long that it’s hard to imagine another reason for companies to exist. But Kickstarter founder Yancey Strickler makes the cogent argument that we can, and must, reprioritize if we want a stronger civil society than the one we have now—marked by crumbling infrastructure, the dominance of chain stores, and the rise of offshore tax havens. Strickler isn’t opposed to money, or even wealth. If businesses were optimized for the community or sustainability, he writes, “the rich would still be rich, just not as rich,” while the average worker and average citizen would be on more solid footing.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind, by Raghuram Rajan

Shortlisted for the 2019 Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year award, The Third Pillar provides a detailed accounting of the imbalances in capitalistic societies. The FT calls it “a new departure into grand social history, which in its breadth often echoes big-picture theorists such as Barrington Moore and Francis Fukuyama and their attempts to tease apart the long-term tensions between capitalism and democracy.”

Changing the World Without Losing Your Mind: Leadership Lessons From Three Decades of Social Entrepreneurship by Alex Counts

By his early 30s, Grameen Foundation CEO Alex Counts had fulfilled his dream of becoming an accomplished nonprofit leader—and was, as he tells it, “unhealthy and unhappy to the core.” What he has learned about life and work in the two decades since is the subject of his gamely titled book, written for “a new generation of leaders dedicated to social change and environmental justice,” including those who are already jaded and those who are blissfully unaware of how easy it is, in the nonprofit world especially, to get that way.

The Enlightened Capitalists: Cautionary Tales of Business Pioneers Who Tried to Do Well by Doing Good, by James O’Toole

Is there hope for the virtuous corporation? Today, thanks to the leadership of Paul Polman, Unilever is closely associated with the conscious capitalism movement. But so was the company’s namesake, William Lever, the British soap magnate who was deeply concerned with his workers’ welfare at home (though considerably less so on his plantations in Africa). Lever eventually lost control of the business, and his more enlightened practices didn’t survive the transition—not an uncommon fate for founders of virtuous companies, as James O’Toole, professor emeritus at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business, explains with vivid examples of historical and contemporary capitalists who tried to give back not through philanthropy but through their business practices.

The Optimist’s Telescope: Thinking Ahead in a Reckless Age by Bina Venkataraman

“Whenever I tried to convince business executives that they should prepare for droughts and heat waves, I armed myself with reliable projections of the future,” writes Bina Venkataraman, a former climate-change advisor to the Obama White House. “But corporate leaders … struggled to see themselves and their companies in the forecast scenarios.” It’s not just public companies that are driven by shortsightedness, though. Our inattention to long-term interests is a universal affliction, affecting our health, our relationships, and our environment. Venkataraman offers clear, engaging explanations of why we keep letting ourselves go off-track, and how even short-term incentives can be better designed to align with our long-term priorities.

Time Magazine chose Bob Iger as their Businessperson of the Year 2019. Here is an extract from their profile:

“Not since somebody figured out that you could attach two black plastic disks to a skull cap and make everyone look like Mickey Mouse has a pair of ears sent such a buzz through a media executive. The new set were green, wing-shaped and attached to a baby space alien. The instant Disney CEO Bob Iger saw them, his heart leapt.

“As soon as those ears popped up from under the blanket, and the eyes, I knew,” says Iger, recalling when he first saw footage of Disney’s newest bankable piece of intellectual property, known to the world as Baby Yoda. He likens the feeling to when he was running ABC’s prime-time TV division and 16-year-old Leonardo DiCaprio showed up on Growing Pains. The next moves were obvious: start production on little green dolls and theme-park rides and lunch boxes, then throw open the vaults and clear space for more cash.

But Iger is the kind of guy who, if given the marshmallow test, would not only decline to eat the marshmallow, but persuade everyone else to sell him theirs and corner the market on S’mores. So he made a different call: no Baby Yoda merch yet. The cuddly alien was the heart of the new Star Wars–themed series The Mandalorian. That show was the anchor of Disney’s new streaming service Disney+, and Iger would not spoil the first episode’s big reveal.

As history will show, the auricles delivered. Disney+ signed up 10 million people by the day after its Nov. 12 launch. It is not yet a threat to the big tech companies that dominate the stream: Netflix has 158.3 million subscribers, Amazon Prime has 101 million, and Google’s YouTube has about 2 billion users a month. But if streaming is the future of entertainment, Disney—the ultimate legacy player—now has a credible vessel in which to get there.

Iger’s tenure as the leader of the world’s most lucrative dream factory has been one long CEO highlight reel. But 2019 was an apex year, when many of his carefully incubated eggs hatched. Creativity is a messy affair, technology is an expensive, glitchy one, and business plans, like military campaigns, rarely survive the first battle. Yet in 2019, Iger managed to blend all three into one epic, deal-packed 12 months. And in a year when the tide has shifted against Big Business, Big Media and Big Tech, Iger has transformed his enormous media company into a gargantuan media and tech business while ensuring that the Walt Disney Co.’s products remain widely beloved. As other corporate chiefs face steepening criticism, the worst thing he’s accused of is being a promising presidential candidate. He has rebuffed the idea. Why bother? In the post-information age, mythmakers carry more weight than lawmakers. In many ways, Iger is the Western culture’s Secretary of Stories, with the power to choose what narratives are given the most resources.

“I think the Disney+ launch has been amazing,” says Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg, who was on the company’s board from 2010 to 2018. “It’s a big risk, but Bob’s really good at understanding the landscape further out as well as executing a strategy. It’s rare to be able to do both.”

“This has been probably one of the most productive years we’ve had as a company in the 15 years that I’ve been in this job,” says Iger, 68, who lives in L.A., but is in his native New York to host an East Coast board meeting. “This time last year, we had not closed the deal for Fox,” he says, referring to the $71 billion acquisition of most of Rupert Murdoch’s entertainment assets. “We had not opened up two Star Wars Lands, we had not launched Disney+. We had not closed the deal for control of Hulu.” Iger was also not yet a best-selling author. His seven-figure earnings from his memoir, The Ride of a Lifetime, are going toward journalism scholarships.

Iger managed all those moving parts while still making moving pictures. Even before Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker arrives, Walt Disney Studios has already released six of the eight most lucrative movies of 2019, and broken the $10 billion global box office barrier. Avengers: Endgame is now the highest-grossing movie of all time, selling $2.8 billion worth of tickets globally since it was released in April. Investors are thrilled; the stock is up 34% this year.

The entertainment business isn’t just about money, though. When Disney generates a successful franchise, the characters and myths it creates occupy the culture to a degree that they can amplify or dampen people’s understanding of who they are and what they stand for. Movies like Black Panther and Frozen take up so much of the national attention span that the communities and identities those films portray become less other, more central.

Of course, not everyone celebrates Iger’s choices. Many bemoan Disney’s blanding effect on the culture—including director Martin Scorsese, who in November wrote in an excoriating New York Timesop-ed that movies from Disney’s Marvel studio lacked “revelation, mystery or genuine emotional danger.” He claimed that the focus on franchises—a key Iger strategy—was contributing to a situation that “was brutal and inhospitable to art.”

Iger, famous for his Mandalorian-like imperturbability, calls Scorsese’s comments “nasty” and “not fair to the people who are making the movies,” but brushes them off. “If Marty Scorsese wants to be in the business of taking artistic risk, all power to him,” he says. “It doesn’t mean that what we’re doing isn’t art.” In true Hollywood fashion, Iger says his people and Marty’s people are arranging a get-together.

Whenever he’s accused of taking no risks, Iger points to Black Panther,which he considers one of his top five career achievements. “I expected Bob’s [advice] to be more conservative, but it was actually the opposite,” says Panther director Ryan Coogler. “He wanted us to be more aggressive and ambitious.” Iger encouraged him to build out the theme of transgenerational trauma as it relates to race. “He wasn’t afraid from a cultural standpoint or a business standpoint.”

Nearly every story about Iger’s tenure at Disney contains a variant of the sentence This is his biggest gamble yet. In 2006, he made a $7.4 billion deal to buy Pixar from a guy who hated Disney. Then he bought Marvel, a company built on the mercurial fantasies of adolescent males, then Lucasfilm, when the Star Wars stories seemed burned out. And this March, he persuaded the mulish Murdoch to sell him nearly all his marshmallows too.

Disney+, however, makes those other bets look penny-ante. Iger had slowly and somewhat stealthily bought BAMTech, the company Major League Baseball used to stream games, which provided the technological back end. But he knew the only way to bring people to a new streaming service is with shows they can’t miss. “There was a meeting. In the Disney boardroom,” says Iger, whose way of telling stories is as consistent and methodical as his schedule. Heads of the company’s creative shops were told to come with pitches for the new service. “I said, ‘We’re not creating another separate studio. You will all be the suppliers. No. 1 priority.’”

Of all the suggestions he heard that day, it soon emerged that only The Mandalorian would make it in time. It—and by extension Baby Yoda—would have to carry the whole launch. Iger was right to keep that black-eyed sweet pea a secret, because the culture wasn’t going to wait until gift season. The Internet was swiftly flooded with Baby Yoda–bilia, including knitted hats, baby items, love songs, DIY Christmas ornaments and, of course, memes. So many memes. Iger sent friends his favorite, a mash-up of cosmological narratives featuring the Pope holding Baby Yoda like a communion wafer.

In some circles, Iger is considered only marginally less alien than the creature he greenlighted. He has worked for the same company for 45 years, through 20 jobs and 14 bosses, outlasting scores of rivals, apparently without making any major enemies. “You will never hear, ‘Bob Iger, he’s such a son of a bitch,’” Gayle King—not even on his payroll!—said last year. When he finally got a shot at the top spot, however, there were doubts; the interview process was so long and humiliating he ended up at the doctor’s office with an anxiety attack. The $65.6 million he earned last year seems to have eased but not erased the memory.

Of course, Iger may have bet wrong. Disney has already spent $3 billion on the service and plans to spend billions more on a venture that may never turn a cent. The Star Wars and Avengers narratives are reaching their outer atmospheres. Hong Kong Disneyland is almost empty amid the ongoing protests. And he has still not named a successor.

But for now, for just this moment, Iger is unassailable. He’s transformed his company from a stuffy media doyen into a sexy cultural force. He can glide to retirement in 2021 on the fumes of that triumph. Except it’s not his style. When asked which IP he would buy if in some fantasy world he could: Harry Potter, Gandalf or James Bond, Iger smiles. “We’re not looking to buy anything right now,” he says. “But I’ve always been a huge James Bond fan.”

In writing my next book, Business Recoded, I’ve explored many fascinating stories of our changing business world, discovered some incredible organisations, and interviewed some truly inspiring leaders. I’ve also come across quite a few quirks of the system – effects and paradoxes – which, whether they are true or not, make you think. Here are a few:

• 90/9/1 Rule: 90% of social network users read content, 9% contribute a little content, 1% of users contribute almost all the content. Therefore most of the content on social media only represents a very few people.
• Abilene Paradox: A group decides to do something that no one in the group wants to do because everyone mistakenly assumes they’re the only ones who object to the idea and they don’t want to rock the boat by speaking up.
• Actor-Observer Asymmetry: We judge others based solely on their actions, but when judging ourselves we have an internal dialogue that justifies our mistakes and bad decisions.
• Anscombe’s Quartet: Four sets of numbers that look identical on paper (mean average, variance, correlation, etc.) but look completely different when graphed. Describes a situation where exact calculations don’t offer a good representation of how the world works.
• Appeal to Consequences: Arguing that a hypothesis must be true (or false) because the outcome is something you like (or dislike). The classic example is arguing that climate change isn’t real because combating climate change will hurt the economy.
• Apophenia: A tendency to perceive correlations between unrelated things, because your mind can only deal with tiny sample sizes and assuming things are correlated creates easy/comforting explanations of how the world works.
• Aumann’s Agreement Theorem: If you understand your opponent’s beliefs you cannot agree to disagree. If you agree to disagree it’s because one side doesn’t understand the other side’s view.
• Backfiring Effect: A supercharged version of confirmation bias where being presented with evidence that goes against your beliefs makes you double down on your initial beliefs because you feel you’re being attacked.
• Base Rates: The success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try.
• Base-Rate Neglect: Assuming the success rate of everyone who’s done what you’re about to try doesn’t apply to you, caused by overestimating the extent to which you do things differently than everyone else.
• Behavioral Inevitability: “History never repeats itself; man always does.” – Voltaire
• Berkson’s Paradox: Strong correlations can fall apart when combined with a larger population. Among hospital patients, motorcycle crash victims wearing helmets are more likely to be seriously injured than those not wearing helmets. But that’s because most crash victims saved by helmets did not need to become hospital patients, and those without helmets are more likely to die before becoming a hospital patient.
• Bizarreness Effect: Crazy things are easier to remember than common things, providing a distorted sense of “normal.”
• Boomerang Effect: Trying to persuade someone to do one thing can make them more likely to do the opposite, because the act of persuasion can feel like someone stealing your freedom and doing the opposite makes you feel like you’re taking your freedom back.
• Bounded Rationality: People can’t be fully rational because your brain is a hormone machine, not an Excel spreadsheet.
• Braess’s Paradox: Adding more roads can make traffic worse because new shortcuts become popular and overcrowded.
• Buridan’s Ass: A thirsty donkey is placed exactly midway between two pails of water. It dies because it can’t make a rational decision about which one to choose. A form of decision paralysis.
• Chronological Snobbery: “The assumption that whatever has gone out of date is on that account discredited. You must find why it went out of date. Was it ever refuted (and if so by whom, where, and how conclusively) or did it merely die away as fashions do? If the latter, this tells us nothing about its truth or falsehood. From seeing this, one passes to the realization that our own age is also ‘a period,’ and certainly has, like all periods, its own characteristic illusions.” – C.S. Lewis
• Clustering Illusions: Falsely assuming that the inevitable bunching of random results in a large sample indicates a trend.
• Cobra Effect: Attempting to solve a problem makes that problem worse. Comes from an Indian story about a city infested with snakes offering a bounty for every dead cobra, which caused entrepreneurs to start breeding cobras for slaughter.
• Collective Narcissism: Exaggerating the importance and influence of your social group (country, industry, company, department, etc.).
• Compassion Fade: People have more compassion for small groups of victims than larger groups, because the smaller the group the easier it is to identify individual victims.
• Courtesy Bias: Giving opinions that are likely to offend people the least, rather than what you actually believe.
• Cumulative advantage: Social status snowballs in either direction because people like associating with successful people, so doors are opened for them, and avoid associating with unsuccessful people, for whom doors are closed.
• Declinism: Perpetually viewing society as in decline, because you’re afflicted by the Pollyanna Principle and you forget how much things sucked in the past.
• Denomination Effect: One hundred $1 bills feels like less money than one $100 bill. Also explains stock splits – buying 10 shares for $10 each feels cheaper than one share for $100.
• Depressive Realism: Depressed people have a more accurate view of the world because they’re more realistic about how risky and fragile life is. The opposite of “blissfully unaware.”
• Dunning-Kruger Effect: Knowing the limits of your intelligence requires a certain level of intelligence, so some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are.
• Emotional Competence: The ability to recognize others’ emotions and respond to them productively. Harder and rarer than it sounds.
• Emotional Contagion: One person’s emotions trigger the same emotions in other people, because evolution has selected for empathizing with those in your social group whose actions you rely on.
• Empathy Gap: Underestimating how you’ll behave when you’re “hot” (angry/aroused/rushed), caused by the inability to accurately foresee how your body’s physical response to situations (dopamine, adrenaline, etc.) will influence decision-making.
• Fact-Check Scarcity Principle: This article is called 100 Little Ideas but there are fewer than 100 ideas. 99% of readers won’t notice because they’re not checking, and most of those who notice won’t say anything. Don’t believe everything you read.
• False-Consensus Effect: Overestimating how widely held your own beliefs are, caused by the difficulty of imagining the experiences of other people.
• False Uniqueness Effect: Assuming your skills are unique when they’re not. Comes from conflating “I’m good at this” with “Others are bad at this.”
• Feedback Loops: Falling stock prices scare people, which cause them to sell, which makes prices fall, which scares more people, which causes more people to sell, and so on. Works both ways.
• Fluency Heuristic: Ideas that can be explained simply are more likely to be believed than those that are complex, even if the simple-sounding ideas are nonsense. It occurs because ideas that are easy to grasp are hard to distinguish from ideas you’re familiar with.
• Focusing Effect: Overemphasizing factors that seem important but exist as part of a complex system. People from the Midwest assume Californians are happier because the weather is better, but they’re not because Californians also deal with traffic, bad bosses, unhappy marriages, etc, which more than offset the happiness boost from sunny skies.
• Foundational Species: A single thing that plays an outsized role in supporting an ecosystem, whose loss would pull down many others with it. In nature: kelp, algae, and coral. In business: The Federal Reserve and Amazon.
• Founder’s Syndrome: When a CEO is so emotionally invested in a company that they can’t effectively delegate decisions.
• Fredkin’s Paradox: Confronted with two equally good options, you struggle to decide, even though your decision doesn’t matter because both options are equally good. The more equal the options, the harder the decision.
• Frequency Bias: Noticing an idea everywhere you look as soon as it’s brought to your attention in a way that makes you overestimate its prevalence.
• Friendship Paradox: On average, people have fewer friends than their friends have. Occurs because people with an abnormally high number of friends are more likely to be one of your friends. It’s a fundamental part of social network dynamics and makes most people feel less popular than they are.
• Gambler’s Ruin: Has many meanings, the most important of which is that playing a negative-probability game persistently enough guarantees going broke.
• Golem Effect: Performance declines when supervisors/teachers have low expectations of your abilities.
• Google Scholar Effect: Scientific research depends on citing other research, and the research that gets cited the most is whatever shows up in the top results of Google Scholar searches, regardless of its contribution to the field.
• Group Attribution Error: Incorrectly assuming that the views of a group member reflect those of the whole group.
• Hanlon’s Razor: “Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.”
• Hard-Easy Effect: Hard tasks promote overconfidence because the rewards are high and fun to dream about; easy tasks promote underconfidence because they’re boring and easy to put off.
• Hawthorne Effect: Being watched/studied changes how people behave, making it difficult to conduct social studies that accurately reflect the real world.
• Hedonic Treadmill: Expectations rise with results, so nothing feels as good as you’d imagine for as long as you’d expect.
• Historical Wisdom: “The dead outnumber the living 14 to 1, and we ignore the accumulated experience of such a huge majority of mankind at our peril.” – Niall Ferguson
• Hormesis: Something that hurts you in a high dose can be good for you in small doses. (Weight on your bones, drinking red wine, etc.)
• Impostor Syndrome: Fear of being exposed as less talented than people think you are, often because talent is owed to cumulative advantage rather than actual effort or skill.
• In-Group Favoritism: Giving preference to people from your social group regardless of their objective qualifications.
• Inversion: Avoiding problems can be more important than scoring wins.
• Ironic Process Theory: Going out of your way to suppress thoughts makes those thoughts more prominent in your mind.
• Knightian Uncertainty: Risk that can’t be measured; admitting that you don’t know what you don’t know.
• Ludic Fallacy: Falsely associated simulations with real life. Nassim Taleb: “Organized competitive fighting trains the athlete to focus on the game and, in order not to dissipate his concentration, to ignore the possibility of what is not specifically allowed by the rules, such as kicks to the groin, a surprise knife, et cetera. So those who win the gold medal might be precisely those who will be most vulnerable in real life.”
• Luxury Paradox: The more expensive something is the less likely you are to use it, so the relationship between price and utility is an inverted U. Ferraris sit in garages; Hondas get driven.
• Meat Paradox: Dogs are family, pigs are food. Some animals classified as food are wrongly perceived to have lower intelligence than those classified as pets. An example of morality depending on utility.
• Middle Ground Fallacy: Falsely assuming that splitting the difference between two polar opposite views is a healthy compromise. If one person says vaccines cause autism and another person says they don’t, it’s not right to compromise and say vaccines sometimes cause autism.
• Moderating Relationship: The correlation between two variables depends on a third, seemingly unrelated variable. The quality of a marriage may be dependent on a spouse’s work project that’s causing stress.
• McNamara Fallacy: A belief that rational decisions can be made with quantitative measures alone, when in fact the things you can’t measure are often the most consequential. Named after Defense Secretary McNamara, who tried to quantify every aspect of the Vietnam War.
• Moral Luck: Praising someone for a good deed they didn’t have full control over. “Avoid calling heroes those who had no other choice.” – Taleb.
• Neglect of Probability: Arguing that Nate Silver was wrong when he said Hillary Clinton has a 70% chance of winning, and using Donald Trump’s victory as your proof. Good predictions are based on probabilities, but the assessment of predictions are always binary, right or wrong.
• Non-Ergodic: When group probabilities don’t apply to singular events. If 100 people play Russian Roulette once, the odds of dying might be, say, 10%. But if one person plays Russian Roulette 100 times, the odds are dying are practically 100%.
• Nonlinearity: Outputs aren’t always proportional to inputs, so the world is a barrage of massive wins and horrible losses that surprise people.
• Normalcy Bias: Underestimating the odds of disaster because it’s comforting to assume things will keep functioning the way they’ve always functioned.
• Ostrich Effect: Avoiding negative information that might challenge views that you desperately want to be right.
• Pareto Principle: The majority of outcomes are driven by a minority of events.
• Perfect Solution Fallacy: Comparing reality with an idealized alternative. Prevalent in any field governed by uncertainty.
• Peter Principle: Good workers will continue to be promoted until they end up in a role they’re bad at.
• Plain Folks Fallacy: People of authority acquiring trust by presenting themselves as Average Joe’s, when in fact their authority proves they are different from everyone else.
• Planck’s Principle: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
• Poisoning the Well: Presenting irrelevant adverse information about someone in a way that makes everything else that person says seem untrustworthy. “Before you hear my opponent’s healthcare plan, let me remind you that he got a DUI in college.”
• Pollyanna Principle: It’s easier to remember happy memories than bad ones.
• Positive Illusions: Excessively rosy views about the decisions you’ve made to maintain self-esteem in a world where everyone makes bad decisions all the time.
• Principle of Least Effort: When seeking information, effort declines as soon as the minimum acceptable result is reached.
• Rebound Effect: New symptoms, or supercharged old symptoms, emerge when medicine or other protections are withdrawn.
• Reflexivity: When cause and effect are the same. People think Tesla will sell a lot of cars, so Tesla stock goes up, which lets Tesla raise a bunch of new capital, which helps Tesla sell a lot of cars.
• Ringelmann Effect: Members of a group become lazier as the size of their group increases. Based on the assumption that “someone else is probably taking care of that.”
• Second Half of the Chessboard: Put one grain of rice on the first chessboard square, two on the next, four on the next, then eight, then sixteen, etc, doubling the amount of rice on each square. When you’ve covered half the chessboard’s squares you’re dealing with an amount of rice that can fit in your lap; in the second half you quickly get to a pile that will consume an entire city. That’s how compounding works: slowly, then ferociously.
• Self-Handicapping: Avoiding effort because you don’t want to deal with the emotional pain of that effort failing.
• Semmelweis Reflex: Automatically rejecting evidence that contradicts your tribe’s established norms. Named after a Hungarian doctor who discovered that patients treated by doctors who wash their hands suffer fewer infections, but struggled to convince other doctors that his finding was true.
• Skill Compensation: People who are exceptionally good at one thing tend to be exceptionally poor at another.
• Sturgeon’s Law: “90% of everything is crap.” The obvious inverse of the Pareto Principle, but hard to accept in practice.
• System Justification Theory: Inefficient systems will be defended and maintained if they serve the needs of people who benefit from them – individual incentives can sustain systemic stupidity.
• Texas Sharpshooter Fallacy: Goals set retroactively after an activity, like shooting a blank wall and then drawing a bullseye around the holes you left, or picking a benchmark after you’ve invested.
• Three Men Make a Tiger: People will believe anything if enough people tell them it’s true. It comes from a Chinese proverb that if one person tells you there’s a tiger roaming around your neighborhood, you can assume they’re lying. If two people tell you, you begin to wonder. If three say it’s true, you’re convinced there’s a tiger in your neighborhood and you panic.
• Tribal Affiliation: Beliefs can be swayed by identity and a desire to fit in over rational analysis. There is little correlation between climate change denial and scientific literacy. But there is a strong correlation between climate change denial and political affiliation.
• Weasel Words: Phrases that appear to have meaning but convey nothing tangible. “Growth was solid last quarter,” or “Many people believe.”
• Woozle Effect: “A reliable way to make people believe in falsehoods is frequent repetition, because familiarity is not easily distinguished from truth.” – Daniel Kahneman.

Running: it’s not what you think it is.

In 1934 a young woman named Florence Illot surpassed expectations and defied social norms by taking on a challenge and running across a famous bridge in London.

This film celebrates the way Florence ‘gave it a go’ and explores five other women’s relationships with running in London today and how it has become an integral part of all their lives. We are taken on a journey of how these women have re-coded what running really means to them, both individually and as a collective, before we witness them all come together to take on the challenge that Florence set all those years ago. The film is a true collection of the ever-growing London running community, and all it brings to the women who are part of it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VYAB9rWSWP4

Running is being recoded in real time by runners who are ripping it apart and sticking it back together. Runners who defy convention. Respect tradition. Who believe there is no right way to run, as long as you run.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dIQWU8FoJw0

Running is being recoded by runners who respect tradition, but defy convention. Meet the Trash Runners from Shanghai, a running crew that started making a change by picking up trash in the streets and ended up challenging the whole consumption culture in their community.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o3Ksc-2sVLI

Two of the most innovative brands in the universe come together for a new era of innovation in space to empower athletes on Earth. Featuring Kid Cudi, Shaunae Miller-Uibo and Noah Lyles.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kUon4SthcDc

In the wake of record-breaking times from runners wearing Nike’s Vaporfly shoes, and new regulations from the sport’s governing body, Adidas and other brands are racing to roll out new carbon-enhanced shoes ahead of the Tokyo Olympics.

The idea that businesses should look beyond the balance sheet and examine their impact on society has become increasingly mainstream. Everywhere we hear about companies increasingly not just accepting more social and environmental responsibility, but being structured around that as the defining purpose.

New philosophies and legal structures keep emerging. Most significantly is the fusion between making money and doing good. That’s important. Even the most conscious charities still need to make money to pay their core staff and fund their projects. But increasingly we see fully commercial brands embracing higher causes, which is great because the power of business, brands and consumerism is a potent force which can be channeled to change the world.

So what are the main types of organisation structures, or business models?

B Corp

Certification | For Profit
B Corps are “certified by the nonprofit B Lab to meet rigorous standards of social and environmental performance, accountability, and transparency.” To apply for B Corp status, an organization must score at least 80 out of 200 on the B Impact Assessment. The Assessment measures the positive impact a company has on key stakeholders including its workers, suppliers, local community and the environment.

More: B Corporation Website | What Are B Corps?

Benefit Corporation

Legal Structure | For Profit
Benefit corporations exist to make a profit AND make a positive environmental or social impact. It’s a self-selected legal classification that gives companies the freedom to work towards a positive impact without facing lawsuits from investors concerned only with monetary dividends. Benefit corporations must release an annual benefit report in which they assess their own progress toward their social and environmental goals. This structure is not nationally recognized but so far 26 states and the District of Columbia have passed legislation recognizing the benefit corporation as a legal business entity.

More: Benefit Corp Information Center | FAQ

Conscious Business Enterprises / Conscious Capitalism

Concept | For Profit
Conscious businesses operate with the awareness that their actions can either benefit or harm others, then aim to minimize the harm and maximize the benefit. They work towards a specific purpose and along the way try to foster “peace and happiness in the individual, respect and solidarity in the community, and mission accomplishment in the organization” (Fred Kofman, from Conscious Business).

More: Triple Pundit | Defining Conscious Capitalism

Cooperative

Legal Structure | For Profit / Nonprofit
Cooperatives are owned by those who staff them or by those they serve. Members, or user-owners, distribute profits and earnings amongst themselves. Some cooperatives are incorporated while others are not. The laws surrounding cooperatives vary between states, but all adopt the seven cooperative principles:
1. Voluntary and open membership
2. Democratic member control
3. Members’ economic participation
4. Autonomy and independence
5. Education, training, and information
6. Cooperation among cooperatives
7. Concern for community

More: National Cooperative Business Association | 7 Cooperative Principles
U.S. Small Business Administration | Cooperatives

Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR)

Concept | For Profit
A contemporary definition of CSR is when a company voluntarily engages in “actions that appear to further some social good” beyond the financial interests of the company and beyond actions required by law (source referenced below). The concept encourages companies to take responsibility for their actions and the impact they have on employees, the environment, consumers and others. In many ways, the idea of CSR laid the foundation for other types of socially responsible organizations to catch on and grow.

More: United Nations Industrial Development Organization | What is CSR?

Creating Shared Value (CSV)

Concept | For Profit
This business approach posits a link between the competitiveness of a company and the health of the communities around it. Companies that incorporate “doing good” into their business plans maximize value for themselves and those around them. They can accomplish good by reconceiving existing products and markets to meet social needs, consuming social goods as efficiently and productively as possible, and investing outside of their own business to resolve obstacles limiting their growth potential.

More: Harvard Business Review | Creating Shared Value

Green Business

Certification or Concept | For-profit / Nonprofit
This term can be applied in an informal sense to describe an organization operating in an environmentally conscious way OR can be used formally to mean a business with one of the many different “green” certifications.

Certifications can be sector-specific, like the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) certification for fiber sourcing or geographically specific, like the Montgomery County, Maryland, Green Business Certification Program. In the U.S. organizations like Green America and The Green Business Bureau offer widely recognized certifications and resources for green businesses.

More: Green Business Network | What’s a Green Business

Hybrid Organization

Legal Structure | For-profit/ Nonprofit
Hybrid organizations combine values and approaches from the public sector, the private sector and the voluntary sector to meet a specific objective. Often, hybrid models link a for-profit company and a nonprofit counterpart, with the idea being that the revenue generated by the company can fund the initiatives of the nonprofit. For example, the Mozilla Foundation is responsible for developing the open-source browser Firefox, while the Mozilla Corporation negotiates revenue-sharing contracts with Mozilla’s search partners. The term can also be used to refer loosely to any organization working for a profit and a purpose.

More:  Stanford Social Innovation Review | In Search of the Hybrid Ideal
The New York Times | Hybrid Model for Nonprofits Hits Snags

Low-profit Limited Liability Company (L3C)

Legal Structure | For Profit
An Low-profit Limited Liability Company is a for-profit social enterprise with a primary aim of achieving a charitable mission. To attract investments from private foundations, L3Cs are designed to meet the requirements of a program related investment (PRI) from the start. L3Cs are free to distribute profits to members/owners. Currently, the model is legally recognized in only 10 states but 26 others have written authorization legislation that has not yet been introduced.

More: Triple Pundit | The L3C: A More Creative Capitalism

Triple Bottom Line Model

Concept | For Profit
Practitioners of the triple bottom line model aim to use their business operations to create positive value in the domains of people, planet and profit. For example, a clothing company might use sustainable materials like bamboo and pay those who manufacture its clothing fair wages so that it does right by the planet and its people while making a profit.

More: Indiana Business Review | The Triple Bottom Line: What Is It and How Does it Work?

Nonprofit

Legal Structure | Nonprofit
To be a nonprofit, an organization must use its surplus revenues to achieve its mission (for-profit organizations distribute surplus profits to their shareholders). A nonprofit’s surplus revenues can go towards expansion, planning, and administration. There are several types of nonprofit organizations including:

1. Public Charities – The most prevalent type of nonprofit, public charities provide free and low-cost services to those in need. They’re funded by the government, individuals, corporations and foundations.
2. Foundations – Families, communities or businesses establish foundations to sponsor programs and events and distribute funding to other nonprofits.
3. Social Advocacy Organizations – These membership-based organizations form to advance a specific belief or achieve specific objectives. Donations and membership dues fund their outreach and advocacy efforts.
4. Professional and Trade Associations – These membership-based organizations provide professionals in a specific niche with programs and services to support their professional performance and development.

More: Houston Chronicle | Small Business | Different Types of Nonprofit Organizations

Nonprofit with Earned Income

Legal Structure | Nonprofit With Profit
Whereas most nonprofits rely on donations, some incorporate a source of income to help diversify and bolster their income. For example, the Girl Scouts of the USA sell cookies and the profits go back into the organization to further its mission.

More: Inc. | The Social Entrepreneurship Spectrum: Nonprofits With Earned Income

Social Business

Concept | For Profit
As defined by the first to coin the concept “Social Business,” Muhammad Yunus, a social business is a cause-driven business whose owners operate it to achieve social objectives rather than to realize profit. In its strictest sense, Yunus states that “the investors/owners can gradually recoup the money invested, but cannot take any dividend beyond that point.” Its profits should sustain and grow the business’ positive impact on people or the environment.

So all social businesses are social enterprises, but not all social enterprises are social businesses. Weird.

More: Yunus Centre | Social Business

Social Enterprise

Concept | For Profit / Nonprofit
Social enterprises are organizations that apply commercial strategies to create positive outcomes for people and the environment. Many different kinds of organizations fall into this category including for-profits, nonprofits, cooperatives, social businesses and charities.

More: Social Enterprise Alliance | What’s A Social Enterprise?

Social Entrepreneurship

Concept | For Profit
Social entrepreneurship is an attempt to use business techniques to “act as the change agents for society, seizing opportunities others miss to improve systems, invent new approaches, and create solutions to change social for the better.” A social venture is an undertaking by a social entrepreneur that attempts to provide systemic solutions to achieve a social objective.

More: Ashoka | Social Entrepreneur
Schwab Foundation for Social Entrepreneurship | What is a social entrepreneur?

Sustainable Business

Concept | For Profit
Although “sustainable business” literally means a business that can sustain its own existence, the term is used to describe businesses that work to minimize their negative impact on the environment, community, society and economy. Businesses of this kind serve the triple bottom line. By definition, they consider their impact on the environment in their business decisions and have integrated the environment’s well-being into their business operations. It used to be that sustainable business meant “green business” but the definition of sustainable business and what it’s meant to sustain has expanded rapidly over the past decade to include social and economic concerns as well as environmental.

More: The University of Vermont | What is the definition of Sustainability?
Financial Times | Definition of Business Sustainability