Making Sense of Choices
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The 10 Best Business Decisions of 2013. Slate: Apple’s retail stores are already insanely successful. They don’t need a retail chief who can squeeze extra dollars out of them; they need one who can build a lot more—especially in Asia—where Burberry has opened many more shops than Apple without compromising the brand’s value. Adding a woman to the executive team can’t hurt, either.
- We Need to Talk about TED. The Guardian: Think about it: an actual scientist who produces actual knowledge should be more like a journalist who recycles fake insights! This is beyond popularisation. This is taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing. [...] Instead of dumbing-down the future, we need to raise the level of general understanding to the level of complexity of the systems in which we are embedded and which are embedded in us.
Making Tech Tick
- Welcome to the Age of the Upgrade. The Verge: Technology is not a novelty — it is the only way forward. And as the chocolatey shell of the technological fringe has slid ever closer to the gooey, nougat center of the mainstream, it has never been more clear that the only way we progress — as nations, as humans — is through the mastery and exploitation of technology. New upgrades for a new age.
- A High-Tech Makeover For The Payphone. Fast Company: Stepping into a booth, a user could literally look across the city, adopting the eyes and ears of any other booth on the network. Is there a line outside your favorite pastry shop in Brooklyn? Check near your work in Manhattan before getting on the subway. That might seem like a shallow example--and it is--but the fact that the network could learn over time if people actually acted with these sorts of behaviors is an exciting prospect--like bringing big social data from Google and Facebook, then leveraging that within the city’s physical infrastructure.
Making it Simpler
- How to give your kids everything but a sense of entitlement. Quartz: And so, I turned to the best tools I have to make my kids understand: toys. Kids do not know how big or little your paycheck is. Kids do not understand what income tax or health insurance deductibles are either. However, they do know how much a Nintendo DS game cartridge costs. They know how much a Wii costs. Or a slice of pizza or a bottle of Gatorade. This is their vocabulary—their understanding of values in our material world. We can work with that. And to get our kids to understand the meaning of gratitude, we must.
- Why This Young Girl Is a Masterful Storyteller in Sign Language. Slate: You don't have to know anything about sign language to be blown away by the sheer force of personality coming through in Shaylee's performance. But with a little knowledge of how ASL works, you can also be amazed by the complexity of her linguistic and storytelling skills.
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Valeria is an experienced listener. She designs service and product experiences to help businesses rediscover the value of promises and its effects on relationships and culture. She is also frequent speaker at conferences and companies on a variety of topics. Book her to speak here.