#duncan simester

[stoweboyd]

Work Futures Daily - Retreating to the Restroom

People are doing their work in the restroom, to get away from the noise and lack of privacy in open offices

2018-04-09 Beacon NY - The Pew Research Center for Internet and Technology have published a new report on The Future of Well-Being in a Tech-Saturated World, by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie.

The report is a must read.

I am one of the several dozen respondents they polled in the report. One of my concerns is the negative impacts of overwork:

Stowe Boyd, futurist, publisher and editor-in-chief of Work Futures, said, “Well-being and digital life seem so intertangled because of the breakdown between personal and public life … that digital tools have amplified. One significant aspect of public life is our relationship to work. … We need to wake up to the proximate cause of the drive for well-being, which is the trap of overwork and the forced march away from living private lives.”

I have been working on a long post on well-being and overwork, which develops these ideas.

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On Automation in Europe

Liz Alderman reports on the growing density of robots in Eastern Europe, as rising employment and deep resistance to immigration leads to growing labor shortages:

Eastern Europe’s factories are already well automated. New robot installations in the Czech Republic rose 40 percent between 2010 and 2015, according to the International Federation of Robotics. Today there are around 101 robots for every 10,000 workers. And more machines are coming as companies try to improve productivity, tilting them toward levels in countries like Germany, which averages 309 robots per 10,000 workers, the most in Europe.

[...]

Businesses say letting in more foreign workers would help. But the conservative government has pledged to limit immigration, and recently set strict caps on foreign work visas. There are longer-term trends at play, as well. Families aren’t having children fast enough to replace people heading into retirement. Automation, one argument goes, could compensate. Skoda, the nation’s biggest automaker, said last month that it would “significantly accelerate” automation to face demographic changes and wage pressures.

When business is booming and companies can't hire fast enough to keep up with demand automation is seen as a necessary means to keep pace, but if there's a downturn they won't turn off the machines and go back to human labor. That's why I maintain that robot density is one element of the work uncertainty index.

Quote of the Day

Save your old ideas. Don’t let them die. | Dave Linabury, Why do most ideas die at brainstorming?

Education Bots

Jeffrey Young discusses the use of chatbots as teaching assistants at Georgia Tech:

Ashok K. Goel, a professor of computer science and cognitive science, and his team have refined perhaps the first robot teaching assistant, dubbed Jill Watson. Here’s the scenario: Last year in an online course on artificial intelligence with 400 students, two chatbots joined 13 human TAs to answer student questions about the course and its content. Students were told that software robots were in the mix, and they were challenged to identify which of the voices they were interacting with were human and which were machine.

The robot TAs were given the names Stacy Sisko and Ian Braun. One bot was designed to be a bit more personable than the other: if a student mentioned she was from Chicago, Stacy Sisko would make a comment about the city. Ian Braun was all business, and weighed in on fewer student questions (he was an older version of the software that the researchers keep refining).

At the end of the semester about half of the students correctly guessed that Stacy was merely computer code. Only ten percent correctly identified Ian as a bot. And ten percent mistakenly thought that two of the human TAs were chatbots.

I wonder what humans have to do to seem bottish?

On Restrooms in the Workplace

A departure for me, but I agree with the central premise of Why Restrooms Matter In The Workplace by Jonah Bleckner and Melissa Marsh of PLASTARC:

In contrast to the lofty declarations of mission statements that are both easy to craft and then to ignore, investments in spaces are seen as more transparent reflections of managers’ actual perspective. In this sense, the design and upkeep of a restroom plays a crucial role in shaping the kind of professional relationship that is formed between managers, employees, and clients.

One study shows that the organization that provides a bathroom that is thoughtfully designed and features materials that wear well will be more positively evaluated than those that don’t. In this light, poorly designed and managed spaces reflect poorly on the individuals and larger organization that provide them. Perhaps the most salient example of this is in the restaurant industry, where customers invoke the state of the restroom as evidence to substantiate their good or bad experience. This realization has reemphasized the importance of designing and managing a space like the restroom from the perspective of the user.

And here's a seldom-mentioned factoid:

Studies have shown that many employees are actually retreating to toilet stalls to work. In these private restroom refuges, people are free of the distractions of open offices and feel secure enough to let their minds wander. It is therefore important that bathrooms have good Wi-Fi access and that shelves are available for idle laptops or phones.

Oh, man. That's the harshest condemnation of open offices I've heard this year.

On Thinking

Duncan Simester confronts a painful truth:

Many executives in big companies attained their positions by excelling at getting things done. Unfortunately, a bias for doing rather than thinking can leave these executives ill-equipped for their new roles.

The secret to making time to think: delegation. And a bias for action leads us away from delegation, too. So, we need to make too difficult changes in our behavior to make serioius time for thinking.

On Universal Basic Income

Luke Martinelli of the University of Bath in the UK, characterizes the state of opposition to UBI like so:

Rather than claiming UBI is unaffordable per se, a more apt characterisation of opposition is that an affordable UBI would be inadequate, and an adequate UBI would be unaffordable.

His research paper digs into the many policy collisions with existing economic supports for the UK population:

We conclude that basic income policy design is subject to a three-way trade-off between the important goals of meeting need, controlling cost, and reducing the negative effects of means-testing; partial schemes are better equipped to ensure acceptable distributional outcomes, but fail to achieve many of UBI’s broader goals – including drastic reductions in bureaucratic complexity and the minimisation of poverty and unemployment traps – as effectively as full schemes.

But there are huge challenges to political implementation, as has always been the case in welfare reform, and while there are some similarities between UK and US labor markets and welfare systems, it is not the case that a close reading of Martinelli leads to a deep understanding of US and EU policies, although he does spend some time discussing the difference with Europeans approaches.

At the core, there is a fundamental divergence in the attitudes of workers and non-workers toward welfare systems, and he points out that public support for welfare in the UK has declined in recent decades, which is also true in the US. And therefore,

These factors suggests that, to the extent that any form of basic income is politically feasible in the UK, residual schemes aimed at reducing poverty and unemployment traps and supporting the working poor – as opposed to more generous redistributive schemes – are more likely to achieve political traction.

It seems that UBI is a long way off. We may need to have a long list of other societal changes before it becomes feasible, if ever.

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[rtlgcalls]

How 5 Brands Use WhatsApp For Marketing

How 5 Brands Use WhatsApp For Marketing

In 2019, WhatsApp reached 2 billion global users and solidified itself as the most popular mobile messaging app worldwide. See Original Article

Latest Google Patents of Interest – February 25, 2020 via @theGypsy

Real Time Lead Gen 150 E 10th St Bloomsburg, PA 17815 (570) 316-4775 https://www.realtimeleadgen.com/ https://goo.gl/maps/YGcoiFaEN5D2 http://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-wYIDpCc3a1dNqUv7Mw00w Latest Google Patents of Interest – February 25, 2020 via @theGypsy Here are a few interesting Google patents that have been granted this week.The post Latest Google Patents of Interest – February 25, 2020 via @theGypsy appeared first on Search Engine Journal.See Original Article Powered by 31 Must-Know YouTube Statistics (+ Insights!) for 2020 You’re […] The post Latest GoSee Original Article

Why Google Search Console & Google Analytics Data Never Matches via @https://twitter.com/iPullRank

That data disparity between Google Search Console and Google Analytics is actually by design. Let’s dig into the details.The post Why Google Search Console & Google Analytics Data Never Matches via @https://twitter.com/iPullRank appeared first on Search Engine Journal. See Original Article

Anderson, Lin, Simester, and Tucker Receive 2020 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award for “Harbingers of Failure”

Eric Anderson, Song Lin, Duncan Simester, and Catherine Tucker have been selected to receive the 2020 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award for their article “Harbingers of Failure,” which appeared in the October 2015 issue (Vol. 52, No. 5) of the Journal of Marketing Research (JMR). The Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award honors the JMR article published five years earlier that has […] The post Anderson, Lin, Simester, and Tucker Receive 2020 Weitz-Winer-O’Dell Award for “Harbingers of Failure” appeared first on American Marketing Association. See Original Article

Justin Hess

Real Time Lead Gen

How 5 Brands Use WhatsApp For Marketing Real Time Lead Gen Resources

[humanengineers]

Why Great New Products Fail

Why Great New Products Fail

Source |Sloanreview.mit.edu   |  BY:Duncan Simester

Many innovative new products don’t succeed in the marketplace. One common reason: Companies don’t focus enough on understanding how customers evaluate products and make purchase decisions.

A lot of great new products fail — and companies often wonder why. Although the companies were careful to listen to their customers, the products still…