Curious Minds at Work

Innovators often invent the future and some do so by rethinking the past. For example, innovative historical researchers not only help us understand what happened yesterday, they improve how we respond to those issues today.

Ibram Kendi is one of those researchers. In his book, Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America, he uncovers the history of racist ideas in America. Winner of the 2016 National Book Award, his research reveals that racist policies fuel ignorance and hate, rather than the other way around. His findings challenge what many of us were taught to believe about racism in America today and the strategies we use to address it.

Highlights from our conversation include:

How racist ideas stem from racist policies that reinforce power structures

History shows that 200+ years of educating and persuading away racism has been less impactful than eliminating racist policies

How uplift suasion has worked against blacks by making them believe they are responsible for the racist ideas of others

Why there is a very real mutual interest in working against racism, sexism, homophobia, and poverty to eliminate one and all of these isms

How eliminating racist policies and disparities are key to eliminating racist ideas

The fact that racist ideas connote racial hierarchy while anti-racist ideas connote racial equality

How misleading statistics and unscientific approaches reinforce negative stereotypes around predominantly black neighborhoods

How the academic achievement gap is a racist idea

Three perspectives on our ongoing historical debate on race - segregationism, anti-racism, assimilation - and what they mean for blacks

How W.E.B DuBois helped us recognize that black striving for suasion and uplift maintains false notions of black inferiority

How Angela Davis taught us about the complexities of our identities in terms of gender, race, class, sex, age, etc

How scientific racism served to reinforce notions of black inferiority

How even after scientific racism was disproven by biologists and geneticists those in power wanted to fixate on any tiny percentage of difference to reinforce superiority

How the debates we are having today about race are not new and are informed by a long history of racist policies in the US that allow those in power to argue that blacks are inferior

How the US government sought to use deportation to evict freed slaves

Episode Links

@DrIbram

http://www.ibram.org/

Jefferson Davis

Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy ONeil

How the Academic Achievement Gap is a Racist Idea by Ibram Kendi

Cotton Mather

Thomas Jefferson

William Lloyd Garrison

W. E. B. DuBois

Double consciousness

Angela Davis

Intersectionality

Bill Clinton

Blindspot: Hidden Biases of Good People by Mahzarin Banaji and Anthony Greenwald

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Employee engagement is at an all-time low, but why? Francesca Gino, an expert on employee engagement and productivity, advises that if we do only one thing to fix it, we should encourage our employees to stop conforming and be themselves. When she and members of her research team introduced small interventions that encouraged people to be more authentic, the results were dramatic.

Francesca is a Professor at Harvard Business School and author of the recent Harvard Business Review article, Fostering Rebel Talent at Work. She has won numerous awards for her work in psychology and management, and her research has been featured in publications like The Economist, The New York Times, and Scientific American. She is also author of the book, Sidetracked.

Highlights from our conversation include:

Why being ourselves at work increases engagement, creativity, and productivity

How authenticity at work increases employee engagement and retention

How opportunities to reflect on our strengths and unique qualities as early as onboarding increase our engagement and desire to stay on

Why engagement goes up when we ask employees to share strengths during onboarding

Concrete ways to encourage new employees to add to organizational culture

How reflecting on who we are increases happiness and engagement

Simple ways we can be authentic at work without waiting for permission

The importance of asking why we do things this way

How an award-winning chef helps his employees be authentic at work

How it takes courage to be authentic and why it breeds success

How leaders can model non-conformity for their employees

What leaders can say to encourage employees to voice dissent

How leaders can make clear when conformity is the rule

The one quality a high-powered search firm seeks in candidates above all others

How curious people can be better decision makers and creatives

Why asking people to read a variety of books may hold the key to fostering creativity

How her own experience coming to the U.S. from Italy led her to the research she does

That rebel talent is something we can learn to embrace and cultivate

How leaders can start small to help their employees be themselves at work

Episode Links

@francescagino

http://francescagino.com

360-degree feedback

HBR

The Conversational Firm by Catherine Turco

Massimo Bottura and Osteria Francescana

elBulli

Mellody Hobson and Ariel Investment

Egon Zehnder

Pixar and Ed Catmull

IDEO

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Self-driving cars are just around the corner. Are you ready?

With the advent of machine learning and related tech, autonomous cars are more technologically mature than most of us think. Yet old-school policies and regulations are lagging behind, making it difficult for large scale adoption to take place. Essentially, driverless tech has become a people, rather than a technology, problem.

To help us sort out the complicated landscape on our horizon, Hod Lipson and Melba Kurman wrote the book, Driverless: Intelligent Cars and the Road Ahead. Lipson, a roboticist at Columbia University who specializes in artificial intelligence and digital manufacturing, and Kurman, an expert on the impact of technology on the economy and our daily lives, lay out the advances in technology that got us here and the benefits and challenges that lie ahead.

Highlights from our interview include:

The staggering number of lives self-driving cars will save

How the maturity of driverless tech has outpaced updates to policies and regulations

How traditional models of car insurance do not hold up to what autonomous cars require

How a safety standard comparing driverless tech to humans is key

How driverless tech can reduce noise and idling pollution

Ways parking spaces and garages can be repurposed with fewer cars on the road

The fact that city planners are focusing on public transportation and neglecting driverless tech and its impact on transportation budgets

The important safety challenge of an incremental versus an all-out shift to driverless tech

How driverless tech is now able to out-perceive humans at the wheel

The role DARPA played in advancing driverless accelerating driverless tech

How a shift from rules-based to machine learning birthed driverless car tech

How sensors and software feed information to driverless cars

How a combination of sensors and software help driverless tech overcome individual vulnerabilities in tech

How gaming software held the key to advancing driverless tech

The role ImageNet played in advancing image perception needed for driverless cars

The fact that deep learning includes machines learning what we may not have words for

Why we need to be talking about the impact of driverless tech on jobs

How driverless tech can reduce isolation and increase mobility for the elderly and visually impaired

How networked driverless cars can amass thousands of lifetimes of experience very quickly as they learn from one another in ways humans cannot

How the shift to self-driving cars is less about the tech and more about the human issues of policies and regulations

How driverless tech will usher in new businesses we cannot even imagine or predict

Episode Links

Creative Machines Lab at Columbia University

DARPA Grand Challenge

The Grid by Gretchen Bakke

Lidar

GPUs

ImageNet

Deep learning

Qualia

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

If you struggle with exercise, Michelle Segar has a secret for you: Stop blaming yourself! Blame the system!

After years of studying the science of motivation, Michelle Segar, Ph.D., Director of SHARP -- the Sport, Health, and Activity research and policy center at the University of Michigan -- has created a framework for rethinking exercise that swaps out prescription for meaning. Filled with practical tips and strategies, Michelle’s bestselling book, No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness, is informed by years of putting these findings into practice with people just like you.

Some of the things we discuss in this interview:

How systems determine our success in sustaining physical activity

Why exercise is about so much more than weight loss

Why finding the right whys make all the difference in our health and wellness

How reflecting on how we feel when we move can help us sustain activity

Why relying on willpower is such a short-sighted strategy

The important role of emotions and decision making in activity for life

Why meaning trumps should every time when it comes to changing our behaviors

How we approach eating following a workout we enjoy versus a workout like work

How exercise recommendations became so prescriptive

Fewer than 1 percent of American adults know how much exercise is recommended

How small of a role logical and rational behavior play in our choosing to exercise

Why we need a new kind of fitness prescription based on how we live and feel

How we help others when we prioritize our self care

How a go-to activity resource prevents us from wasting time and energy

Why reflecting on the immediate benefits of physical exercise fuels us long term

The importance of finding exercise we love

Getting past the idea that movement only counts when we sustain it for periods of time

How awareness of our current situation empowers us to take ownership for what we want it to be

Why negotiation skills can reap big benefits in helping us create time for physical activity

Episode Links

@MichelleSegar

http://michellesegar.com/

Paulo Freire

Dan Ariely

Behavioral economics

Reward Substitution

Self-determination theory

No Sweat Resolutions Quiz

2015 USA Best Book Awards

SHARP at the University of Michigan

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Have you ever felt powerless to improve the lives of those less fortunate than you?

Mick Ebeling believes that the key to helping many is to start by helping just one. He shares details and examples of this in his book, Not Impossible, The Art and Joy of Doing What Couldn’t be Done. Mick explains that through this philosophy, we not only solve an immediate problem, but we also learn more about what else we can do.

Thought leader, speaker, and founder of Not Impossible, Mick and his team are crowdsourcing solutions through tech to help people around the globe. Along the way, he is helping us to see how powerful each one of us is to create change in the world.

Here are some of the things that came up in our conversation:

How it all started when Mick connected with LA graffiti artist Tony Quan

The value he places on tech to meet human and social needs

The power of committing first and then figuring it out - where it leads

The important role diverse team members play in solving real-world problems

How taking the time to see others in your world can lead to incredible change

After 7 years with ALS Tony got to draw and communicate again with the Eyewriter

What happened when Tony could no longer blink? He used brain waves.

The inspiring story of 3D printing and Project Daniel

The story behind the powerful quote  to preach always and when necessary, use words

How Mick wound up taking charge on printing out 3D limbs

What we learn and the impact we can have when we help start by helping one person

How he got to his philosophy of helping one to help many

Why his organization strives to keep innovative tech prices low

How emotion plays a key role in determining which projects to take on

The role of inspiring stories in picking projects and spreading the words

How we do not need expertise to effect change in the world

Ask why something needs to happen rather than how - why that is key

Every single thing that surrounds us today was once impossible

How not knowing what you cannot do is so freeing

Episode Links

@MickEbeling

www.notimpossible.com

Mick Ebeling TED Talk

Tony Tempt One Quan

Time Magazine Top 25 Inventions

EyeWriter

Cameron Rodriguez

Optical character technology

Open source

The BrainWriter

Consumer EEG Devices

Project Daniel

Dr. Tom Catena

Richard Van As

Maker Faire

Gait Trainer

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Algorithms make millions of decisions about us every day. For example, they determine our insurance premiums, whether we get a mortgage, and how we perform on the job.

Yet, what is more alarming is that data scientists also write the code that fires good teachers, drives up the cost of college degrees and lets criminals evade detection. Their mathematical models are biased in ways that wreak deep and lasting havoc on people, especially the poor.

Cathy O’Neil explains all this and more in her book, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. Cathy earned a Ph.D. in mathematics from Harvard, taught at Barnard College, and worked in the private sector as a data scientist. She shares her ideas on the blog mathbabe.org and appears weekly on the Slate Money podcast.

Here are some of the things that came up in our conversation:

The shame she felt as a data scientist working for a hedge fund during the financial crisis

How most of us trust and fear math to the point where we stop asking questions

How a faulty algorithm cost a high-performing teacher her job

How value-added models of evaluation miss the mark

How a mathematical model is nothing more than an automated set of rules

The fact that every mathematical model has built-in blindspots

What is hard to measure typically does not get included in an algorithm

The cost to colleges and applications of leaving price out of college ranking algorithms

Crime prediction models can fail because of incomplete data

The big error in the findings of A National at Risk report and how we still pay for it

How poverty lies at the heart of the achievement gap

What allows big data to profile people efficiently and effectively

Where we may be headed with individual insurance costs because of big data

Why we need rules to ensure fairness when it comes to health insurance algorithms

Data scientists have become de facto policy makers and that is a problem

The set of questions all data scientists should be asking

The fact that FB serves up an echo chamber of emotional content to hook us

How data is just a tool to automate a system that we, as humans, must weigh in on

Why healthy algorithms need feedback loops

Why we have a problem when we cannot improve a model or reveal it as flawed

Why we need to stop blindly trusting algorithms

Questions we should be asking to demand accountability of algorithm designers

Episode Links

@mathbabedotorg

https://mathbabe.org/

Sarah Wysocki

U.S. News & World Report college ranking system

PredPol

Rise of the Robots by Martin Ford

A Nation at Risk

The Achievement Gap

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

What is the hidden impact of constant demands on our attention? How does it affect how we think, how we act, and how we live?

We have clickbait on our mobile devices and computer screens, ads on buses, and commercials on radio and TV. But as Tim Wu, author and Professor at Columbia University Law School points out, this is a fairly recent development that has turned into a constant monetization of our attention.   

Tim is the author of three books: Who Controls the Internet?, The Master Switch, and most recently, The Attention Merchants: The Epic Scramble to Get Inside Our Heads. He has written for the New Yorker, the Washington Post, Forbes, and Slate magazine. He points out that this constant barrage of messaging actually shapes who we are, often without our realizing it.

Highlights from our conversation include:

How does what we are exposed to determine what we decide?

The connection between early war propaganda and the rise of advertising

How the science of advertising was built on engineering demand

Why early suffragettes were hired to sell cigarettes

How the Paris poster period led to an early revolt against the attention merchants

How Consumer Reports grew out of frustration with ads

The original remote control took the shape of a gun to blow away commercials

Bringing TVs into our homes meant attention merchants now had more access

1950s provided a captive prime time TV programming audience for advertisers

How advertising convinces us that to be individuals we need to buy things

How novelty and unpredictability makes things addictive

How idealistic tech founders work against own values in reliance on ads

Tech innovation of today focused more on getting inside our minds and featuring ads

Why harvesting captures so well how our attention is sought and used

How such a tiny sector of the economy has such a big impact on us and how we live

How spending time with others is actually a revolt against advertising

Where are the sacred spaces in our lives?

What is the role of public virtue in decision making today?

Episode Links

Tim Wu

@superwuster

William James

Benjamin Day

Herbert Kitchener

George Washington Hill

French Poster Period

Singletasking by Devora Zack

Timothy Leary

Mad Men

Coca-Cola Commercial

Charlie Brown Christmas Special

Space Invaders

You’ve Got Mail

Addiction by Design by Natasha Dow Schull

Buzzfeed

Netflix

Temenos

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Is it possible to lead with full transparency? Can openness be the cornerstone of a large, fast-growing tech organization?

These are just some of the questions that Catherine Turco answered when she spent 10 months observing all aspects of a fast-growing, high-tech company determined to build a new form of management. The result was something she calls The Conversational Firm. While she points out that it is not an easy or predictable path for leaders to choose, it is one with powerful benefits for the organization and its employees.

Catherine Turco is the author of the book, The Conversational Firm: Rethinking Bureaucracy in the Age of Social Media, and an Associate Professor of Organization Studies at MIT. An ethnographer and economic sociologist, her work has appeared in the American Sociological Review and the American Journal of Sociology.

In this interview, we discuss:

What happens when openness in products gets applied to organizational culture

What it means to apply principles of holacracy to an organization

What an ethnographer learned after spending 10 months immersed in a tech company

What it means to be a conversational firm

How open communication and hierarchical decision making can exist side by side

How leaders sharing company information can rally employees to offer solutions

The power of collective problem solving through radical information sharing

Why trust makes all the difference for leaders and employees

The important role design plays in crafting a healthy corporate culture

How an open culture is self-reinforcing

How openness encourages employees to see themselves as problem solvers

How openness increases employee engagement

Why new approaches to company culture require new images of leadership

Building a different kind of organization requires intention and focus

Making the shift from punitive to educative approaches to management and leadership

How the public nature of social media is helping companies get past thoughtless policies

How the pros can outweigh the cons of an open work space

Why the influx of tech in any org makes it easier to rethink traditional hierarchies

Why harnessing the collective wisdom of employees ups meaning and engagement

Why we need new models of leadership where leaders want to listen

The important role thoughtful organizational culture plays for everyone

Episode Links

Catherine Turco

Holacracy

TINYpulse

Silo Effect by Gillian Tett

Dilbert

Adria Richards

Sendgrid

PyCon

Hipchat

Slack

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Gratitude has a dramatic impact on well-being and success, yet many of us are not aware of this research.

In this groundbreaking book, The Gratitude Diaries: How a Year Looking on the Bright Side Can Transform Your Life, Janice Kaplan explains the science behind the power of gratitude. The author of twelve books, including The New York Times bestselling memoir, I will See you Again, Janice was an award-winning producer at ABC-TV Good Morning America, Executive Producer of the TV Guide Television Group, and Editor-in-Chief of Parade Magazine.

In this episode, Janice explains the surprising, counterintuitive connection between gratitude and happiness. She also shares simple steps we can take today to increase the amount of gratitude we express and how doing it can change your life.

Here are some things that came up in our conversation:

how a mindset of gratitude gives us control over our own happiness

simple steps you can take to express gratitude right now with family and friends

the mental and physical health benefits of practicing gratitude

90 percent believe gratitude makes us happier yet under 50 percent express it

Our attitude toward life events determines how they impact us

Choosing gratitude means gaining control and not waiting for happiness to arrive

Gratitude is as simple as finding one thing each day to be grateful for

When we appreciate others and show gratitude, they flourish

Gratitude changes our brain

Gratitude helps us sleep better, and lowers stress and blood pressure

Experiences and interactions with others makes us happier than buying stuff

Prioritizing gratitude helps us pay more attention

Recognizing how fortunate we are helps us be more generous

81 percent say they would work harder for a grateful boss

90 percent believe grateful bosses are more successful

Being appreciated is highly motivating

Ambition and gratitude play nicely together - can achieve and be appreciative

Gratitude can get us out of the comparison game

We are built to find redeeming value in difficult life events

It is not happiness that makes us grateful but rather gratitude that makes us happy

Ancient Greek and Roman philosophers figured out gratitude a long time ago

Share a photo of something you are grateful for

Send a text of gratitude

Episode Links

Parade Magazine

John Templeton Foundation

National Gratitude Survey

TSA

Habituation

Massachusetts General Hospital

Tom Gilovich

Paul Piff

Monopoly game

Daniel Gilbert

David Steindl Rast

Essentialism by Greg McKeown

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes - your ratings make all the difference. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!

Everyone benefits from understanding great design. Whether you make products, program apps, or provide services, design plays a critical role in how effectively you accomplish your goals. And if you work in the field of design, there has never been a better time to showcase your skills.

In this thought-provoking interview, John Maeda talks about all of this and more. An award-winning designer who was described as a bellwether for the design industry by Wired Magazine, John sits at the crossroads of business, design, and technology.. His TED talks have been viewed by millions, and his books have been translated into dozens of languages.

John began his career Professor and Head of Research at The Media Lab at MIT. He then served as President of the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), authored a number of books, and then left academia to work as Design Partner for venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins. He now works as Global Head of Computational Design and Inclusion at open-source tech firm, Automattic.

John shares what he has learned along the way. Insights from our interview include:

How the arduous practice of engineering informs his perspective on design

How he was raised not to know what he could not be

How curiosity is about having an openness to now knowing

How much of what he saw in Silicon Valley was reminiscent of MIT

How resilience can increase with curiosity

How each challenge he has chosen stretches him

How creatives often lack confidence - a normal occurrence for them

How a brilliant professor taught him to say I do not know

The three kinds of design that exist right now

How digital design is constantly changing, immature

How design thinking is a powerful strategy for understanding users

How schools can benefit from real-world practice

Why stepping out of academia was important for his understanding of the world

Why the addictive aspect of tech is not a problem for him

How he is always looking for new people to learn from

Why he wishes we were talking less about beauty in design and more about effectiveness

How he wishes design were more about who we can serve rather than trends

How he is asking how design can be more inclusive

How we can get caught up in making things in our own image through design

The fact that design tends to come to the foreground only once the tech matures

The challenges of leading and working with people in design

How he is learning to work in a 100 percent remote tech company

Episode Links

John Maeda

@JohnMaeda

MIT Media Lab

Rhode Island School of Design

Kleiner Perkins

Automattic

Rudolf the Red-nosed Reindeer

Design Report 2016

Walker and Company, Bevel Brand

Grindr

Jackie Xu

Justin Sayarath

The Inevitable by Kevin Kelly

Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling

Matt Mullenweg of Automattic

Paul Graham of Y Combinator

CRISPR

If you enjoy the podcast, please rate and review it on iTunes. For automatic delivery of new episodes, be sure to subscribe. As always, thanks for listening!