Technology and The Future

Five Links: Technology and The Future

• Business Failure: Key To Growth
  Quick review of a study that validates the idea that serial entrepreneurs are more likely to build successful businesses. Prior business failure is an indicator of future business success. The principle should be a part of succession planning. The fact that it isn’t explains why so many succession plans actually succeed at predicting succession.
• Visual Math Gone Wrong
  Starting right now, HR workers and executives should be focusing on expanding their grasp of data visualization (and other aspects of contemporary statistics). Communicating with the right graphs that effectively show the right stuff is a survival skill for anyone who wants progressive responsibility. This article steps through the reasons that a set of charts don’t work.
• Everything Marketing: How Growth Hackers Redefine Game
  “Before he became the most brilliant and famous man in the ad business, David Ogilvy sold vacuum cleaners door to door. Because of that, he never forgot that advertising is just a slightly more scalable form of creating demand than door to door sales. But the rest of us, decades away from a world of traveling salesmen and mail order catalogs, are removed from this fundamental reality. We forget the function behind the form and miss out on new opportunities because we can’t see what’s in front of us. At the core, marketing is lead generation. Ads drive awareness…to drive sales. PR and publicity drive attention…to drive sales. Social media drives communication…to drive sales. Marketing, too many people forget, is not an end unto itself. It is simply getting customers. And by the transitive property, anything that gets customers is marketing.”
• How We Think About Technology
  A loving introduction to an amazing free book from the Atlantic. It’s 300 pages of their best tech stuff from the last year.
• Reverse network effects: Why scale may be the biggest threat facing today’s social networks
  One would expect that the bigger the network, the more value users derive from it. However, as networks scale, the value for users may drop for several reasons:
  1. Connection: New users joining the online community may lower the quality of interactions and increase noise/spam through unsolicited connection requests.
  2. Content: The network may fail to manage the abundance of content created on it and may fail to scale the curation of content created and the personalization of the content served to users.
  3. Clout: The network may get inadvertently biased towards early users and promote them over users who join later.

   

Events, Interesting Happenings and New Resources

• HRExaminer Radio Industry News and Commentary.
  First Show: Friday, Jan 4 2PM EST – 11AM Pacific
• Skills Gaps: Understanding Talent Shortages and What They Mean
  This webinar (recording) covers the underpinnings of the Skills Gap. It’s part 1 of a series. Parts 2 and 3 available in 2013.
• Social Recruiting Strategies Conference
  (San Francisco, Jan 30-31, 2013) John Sumser keynote on the history and future of social recruiting
• HRTech Europe: Spring Warmup
  (London, March 19-20, 2013) Sumser on Where Ideas Come From and the Big Data Showcase
• Learning Analytics Summer Institute
  (Stanford, Palo Alto July 1-5, 2013) This looks like the right place to be if you’re interested in Big Data for Learning.