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Ophthalmologist Anthony Vipin Das is currently working on a new toy for the blind, FITTLE, with Tania Jain, a designer from National Institute of Design, Gandhinagar. The toy will help blind children learn to read Braille while getting a sense of the shape of the world around them. We asked him to tell us all about it. Below, his essay on what this toy is … and how it came about.

For blind children, learning Braille is an integral part of how they interface with the world, and most current haptic technology for the blind focuses on Braille. However, teaching Braille at a young age is definitely a challenge. For example, a child who needs to be taught the word “fish” in Braille has no idea what a real fish looks like. He feels four Braille letters that stand for F-I-S-H, and cannot even try to visualise how a fish looks. I feel that learning of Braille can be made a lot more fun if it’s taught in an interactive way.

Tania Jain approached me with this idea at a DIY workshop “Engineering the Eye” that I co-organized with the Camera Culture Group of Ramesh Raskar from the MIT Media Lab. Her concept involves breaking down objects into as many blocks as there are letters in the word. So, the word “fish” is constructed by joining together four puzzle blocks, which have the letters F-I-S-H on them, each embossed in Braille. When the visually challenged kid fits together the blocks by feeling and matching the right shapes, he can read the word “fish” embossed in Braille, as well as feel around the contours of the entire block, which is shaped like a fish. In this way, it becomes easy for the kid to understand shapes of various objects — and it can be taught by a parent or a teacher. The possibilities are endless.

A look at the FITTLE puzzle for the word ‘fish.’

This new toy, which we call FITTLE (“fit the puzzle”), helps children learn individual letters of Braille, construct words, and understand the form of objects, all through a playful game. Essentially, we are changing the way that blind children at a young age are going to perceive the world around them.

We wish to help spread this idea as far and wide as possible. With current technology, FITTLE can be downloaded through open-source platforms and the pieces can be 3D printed by anyone who wishes to do so. We are in the process of creating the first alphabet series, as well as a graded curriculum where the child can progress to different levels according to age at LV Prasad Eye Institute, India.

We are excited at how these toys can radically change the learning process of Braille and the way children will feel form. Moving forward, Tania and the FITTLE team want to experiment with different materials that would feel like the original object’s texture — like rubber to give the feel of a real fish — for kids to understand even better.

It’s been an amazing experience to mentor the team so far, and we are really looking forward to reaching every blind child with FITTLE to help them perceive and understand the world around them in a playful way!

Read more at FITTLE’s website, which just went live »

Watch the West Wing Week here.

Korean War Veterans: Speaking from the National Mall, President Obama honored veterans and commemorated the 60th anniversary of the end of the Korean War on Saturday. The President praised the men and women for their sacrifices, saying,

“Veterans of the Korean War — in the spring of your youth you learned how short and precious life can be. And because of you, millions of people can keep on living it, in freedom and in peace. Your lives are an inspiration. Your service will never be forgotten. You have the thanks of a grateful nation. And your shining deeds will live — now and forever.”

Voting Rights: Following last month’s Supreme Court decision overturning the Voting Rights Act, President Obama met with civil rights leaders and elected officials on Monday. While at the White House, the President expressed his disappointment in the ruling and the group discussed ways to ensure every American has the right to vote.

San Francisco Giants: The San Francisco Giants visited the White House on Monday to celebrate their 2012 World Series championship. President Obama congratulated the team on their win and highlighted the steps they’re taking toward improving their neighborhoods by stressing the importance of healthy eating and supporting the LGBT community.

read more

Insight from the interwebs the weeks of July 22 and 29:

A poignant, funny, slightly heartbreaking story of a woman who doesn’t realize for many years that she has anosmia, no sense of smell. [The Millions]

How do you get credible, nongovernment information about daily life out of North Korea? [Al Jazeera]

How Geoff Dyer went from consistently glum-looking chum to smiling idiot. [The Guardian]

When can (and can’t) you trust a data scientist? [Monkey Cage]

Martin Scorsese on the language of cinema. [The NY Review of Books]

The American Medical Association mandates that doctors cannot “refuse to care for patients based on any ‘invidious’ discriminatory criteria like race or ethnicity.” But what happens when a patient is racist? [The New York Times Well Blog]

This audio-visualization of Wikipedia sounds out edits to the site in real-time.

Beardyman: The polyphonic meIn the spirit of today’s euphonious talk from Beardyman, and our companion piece of the weirdest sounds to grace the TED stage, celebrate all-things-music with this incredible audiation of Wikipedia.

The world’s largest crowd-sourced encyclopedia got a little more melodious this week, when Stephen LaPorte and Mahmoud Hashemi of Hatnote turned the cacophony of information on the site into a serenely harmonious concert in real-time. Inspired by a recent TED Radio Hour episode on collaboration, they wanted to try out the ideas for themselves.

The audiation captures the energetic whir of the wiki as it tracks edits to the site. Bells ring when information is added, and strings strum when content is subtracted. The deep echo of an orchestra sounds out with each new user who signs up for the site.

Listen to Wikipedia (L2W) encourages users to compare the differences between revisions to individual articles and to welcome new users to the site by writing them a message. The audiation is available in 11 unique languages, including Bahasa Indonesia, and tracks human users and autobots alike.

This week, during a computer security conference in Las Vegas, researchers Chris Valasek and Charlie Miller demonstrated how easily they could hack into the systems of moving cars using just a laptop computer. Illustrating that modern devices are worryingly vulnerable to hacking, Valasek and Miller showed their ability to jerk seatbelts, turn wheels and influence car breaks — all from afar.

Todd Humphreys: How to fool a GPSWith this news, the TEDx team was reminded of Todd Humphrey’s talk “How to fool a GPS,” given at TEDxAustin last year, in which he warned that cutting-edge technology also made ships, airplanes and even time vulnerable to hijacking. Read more about the connection on the TEDx blog »

In these developments, we can see the relevance and influence of TEDx events, dozens of which happen around the world every week. From these events, the TEDx team chooses four stellar presentations to highlight each week, showing just a few of the incredible ideas from the diverse TEDx community. This week’s talks range from morality and memory manipulation to dissertation-writing-iPhones.

Pills that improve morality: Julian Savulescu at TEDxBarcelona
At TEDxBarcelona, Julian Savulescu proposes that we can use drugs not only to improve our cognitive and physical capabilities, but also our moral dispositions. He suggests that it is imperative that we investigate this option of genetically engineering our moral dispositions in order to better problems — like terrorism and nuclear warfare — that we have created for ourselves.

How to manually change a memory: Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu at TEDxBoston
Steve Ramirez and Xu Liu explain their experiments to control and manipulate memory. The pair shoot laser beams into the brains of living mice to activate switches that control particular memories. In a funny and perhaps unnerving talk from TEDxBoston, Ramirez and Xu address both the scientific and potential ethical questions related to their research.

The three myths of terrorism: Raghu Raman at TEDxMehrauli
This is the question that Raghu Rahman asks in his talk from TEDxMahrauli. By outlining three myths of terrorism and exposing the small changes that acts of terror force to be implemented within government and security, Raman shows that everyone’s answer to this question should be yes.

The computer teaches you: Philip Parker at TEDxSeattle
Philip Parker suggests a solution for the difficult job of supplying expensively produced literature to developing countries — algorithms. At TEDxSeattle, Parker shows that the creation of algorithms to build formulaic texts such as crossword puzzles, dictionaries, poetry and educational video games can provide education in any language to underserved communities. This technology will, in the future, be able to improve agriculture in poor regions by giving details on soil and weather conditions and enable academics to use their iPhones to write dissertations for them.

Other great features on the TEDx blog this week:

• Dr. Jim Olson: Making tumors glow to stop cancer
• Professor Jessica Green: Good germs make healthy buildings
• A TEDx language playlist: 5 TEDX Talks in Japanese
• TEDxMelbourne talk inspires urban rejuvenation in Melbourne 

An interview with Julian Birkinshaw and Jordan Cohen, coauthors of the forthcoming article “Make Time for the Work that Matters.”

Download this podcast

A written transcript will be available by August 9.

Chemists have unexpectedly made two differently colored crystals – one orange, the other blue – from one chemical in the same flask while studying a special kind of molecular connection called an agostic bond. The discovery, reported in Angewandte Chemie International Edition on July 29, is providing new insights into important industrial chemical reactions such as those that occur while making plastics and fuels.

“We were studying agostic bonds in a project to make liquid fuels like methanol from carbon dioxide to replace fuels we get from oil,” said chemist Morris Bullock at the Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. “We knew the molecule we were making would have an agostic bond, but we had no idea there’d be two flavors of these metal complexes.”

While chemists have studied these bonds in chemicals in liquid form, no one had crystallized one chemical with multiple forms of its agostic bonds. And no one expected different forms to give rise to different colors.

Bonds come in many varieties in molecules. They string atoms together, sometimes forming a trunk and branches of atoms like a tree. But the trunk and branches of chemicals often fold up into a more compact shape, requiring additional weaker bonds to hold the shape in place. An agostic bond is one of these additional bonds, a shape-holder. They occur between a metal and a distant carbon-hydrogen bond along some chain, folding the chain back to the metal and pinning it there.

First discovered in the 1980s, agostic bonds frequently occur in catalysts because catalysts usually contain metals. This work will help researchers get a better handle on some catalytic reactions found in common industrial processes such as making plastic or fuels.

Heart of the Matter

The metal in a catalyst is usually the reactive heart of the molecule. Bullock and postdoctoral chemist Edwin van der Eide knew an agostic bond in their catalyst would help protect the reactive metal from working at the wrong time: The carbon-hydrogen bond blocks the reactive metal until conditions are right, which in turn would help the scientists better control the catalytic reactions. So van der Eide set about producing and crystallizing catalysts that contain a metal atom — in this case, molybdenum.

In the lab, van der Eide’s flask of chemicals held a molybdenum-containing molecule that turned the solution violet. He added another liquid to coax the molybdenum complex to crystallize, just as salt crystallizes from seawater to form flakes at the seashore. Some crystals formed at the bottom of the flask and others formed near the top of the violet solution.

Oddly, the crystals were two different colors.

Orange crystals formed at the bottom of the flask and blue above. If van der Eide dissolved either the orange or blue crystals in a fresh flask of the original solvent, the violet color returned, with the same properties as the original violet solution. These results suggested that either molecule in the two colored solids could give rise to both structures in liquid, where they easily change back and forth.

The researchers examined the differently colored crystals to determine their structures. The molecule forms a shape like a piano stool: a ringed section forms a stool seat on top of the molybdenum atom, with multiple legs connecting to the molybdenum at the bottom.

One of the legs, however, is longer than the others and contains a chain of three carbon atoms, each with at least one protruding hydrogen. The team found that the long leg was involved in the agostic bonds, with the middle carbon atom involved in the orange crystals and an end carbon involved in the blue crystals.

PNNL’s Ping Yang at EMSL, DOE’s Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus, took to EMSL’s supercomputer Chinook to perform theoretical calculations on the orange and blue structures. Chemically, the two structures were almost equally likely to form, with the blue one having a slight edge. The analysis also revealed why the crystals were different colors, which is due to subtleties within the structures.

This work was supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science.

Reference: Edwin F. van der Eide, Ping Yang, and R. Morris Bullock. Isolation of Two Agostic Isomers of an Organometallic Cation: Different Structures and Colors, Angewandte Chemie. July 29, 2013, DOI 10.1002/anie.201305032.

The Department of Energy’s Office of Science is the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States and is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time.

The look is always the same: A seasoned marketer is cajoled into watching their first Vine video. Six seconds pass and it’s over. The marketer gazes quizzically at the smiling young person that brought the video to his attention.

“That’s it?”

Like any emerging platform, Vine (the short-form video app owned by Twitter) requires a recalibration for users to understand a new context within a new format. And for marketers who are used to their 15 second online pre-rolls, it’s especially important for them to recognize that this burgeoning technology could one day deliver more value for them than YouTube. If a 60-second video is a dinner date, then Vine is the opening flirt across a crowded bar.

First, let’s dissect the anatomy of the flirt: The wink, the blown kiss from a loved one. These familiar tactics are short-form moments that over-index with joy. At Virgin Mobile, we call these surprise and delight moments the “Virgin Touch.” Our goal is to shower the customer with tons of little, metaphorical kisses, hoping that a few stick. Virgin flirts constantly with hopes that some of these moments are shared, which in turn adds to the mythology of our brand.

Now look at Vine. It’s a platform invented to maximize joy in six seconds. People who post on Vine — or “Viners” — tend to be 15- to 30-year-olds who have perfected the art of telling a good story in the shortest amount of time possible. Viners may use a series of techniques to make you smile. Some, like Nicholas Megalis (the top Viner at 1.9M followers at the time I write this) use catchy jingles or songs. Others, like Meagan Cignoli, use stop-motion animation. Rudy Mancuso is the king of “looping” — the ability to manipulate your six seconds to create an endless loop (Vine videos auto-repeat after they end). Then there’s Brandon Calvillo, an emerging Viner (and one of my personal favorites) currently hijacking our Virgin Mobile Vine account, who has invented a new technique inserting pop song lyrics as punchlines to mundane everyday situations. He’s been especially clever with this technique when it came to commenting on our recently announced Virgin Mobile FreeFest.

Vine was brought to my attention by Gary Vaynerchuk, the internet maven who himself started his career as a YouTube wine celebrity. He had the bold idea, along with his co-founder Jerome Jarre (also a celebrity Viner) to start a new company called Grape Story that would solely represent Vine stars (similar to how CAA represents actors) and connect them with brands. At the time, he was putting the final touches on his new book, Jab Jab Jab Right Hook, which focuses on the multiple touches a brand needs to do to break through and win a prospect.

What we at Virgin saw as kisses, Gary saw as punches. Both hope for the same result: a constant barrage of conversation with an engaged prospect about their values, culture, and sensibilities. Gary walked me through the explosive growth of Vine, which was approaching a tipping point after surging to 13 million users in the first four months after launch. Having seen a similar trajectory at Buzzfeed 18 months earlier, we decided to help him launch his new business. Virgin Mobile was the first brand that would partner with Grape Story on Vine and would attract top-tier talent to help bring awareness to our brand.

At its core, Vine is about “rubbernecking” — distracting your attention for a mere instant with hopes for a payoff. For some it’s an attractive passing stranger. For others it’s a car accident at the end of a long traffic jam. Either way, for a brand to break through on the platform, you need to reduce your message or brand essence to a simple beat, and then set up for the payoff of that beat. All in six seconds. Though this may sound daunting, there are considerable benefits. Vine videos automatically repeat after they play, so your moment’s frequency will deliver roughly three times for a given user (if they enjoy the video, that is).

Within three weeks of launching our Vine relationship with Grape Story, we gained over 30,000 followers (and trending to hit 100,000 followers in a month or so). The lion’s share of these followers were from a contest we called #happyaccidents, where Viners were encouraged to post videos of their phones distracting them from everyday life. Subsequent to this contest, we created “Resident Viners” — similar to resident DJs at hot clubs — where an emerging Viner would guest-Vine from our account for a few weeks, help build our base, then leave.

Currently, we’re still testing the mechanics of the platform to understand what are the most reliable breakthrough methods. Based on our findings experimenting with the platform thus far, Vine feels ideal for what I call “Product Placement 2.0” — that is, a place where the brand or product can act as a character in the piece rather than just set dressing. Rudy Mancuso was successful at integrating Ritz crackers in this fashion.

At times, Viners have experimented to be more subtle with our branding. And at other times, less so. As the most influential Viners engage with our page, we start to see other junior Viners creatively interpret our brand in the form of contest entries. These moments are the “kisses” we most enjoy. “Brand Flirting” at its finest.

So how does Vine fit into your existing marketing ecosystem?

To make sense of it all, it’s best to first temper expectations. Vine, at this moment, is not a brand that will increase sales. But its role in the ecosystem is no different than the traditional out-of-home assets you may have used in traditional campaigns. Think of a good, branded Vine video as the passing bus that carries a clever summer blockbuster film ad on it. And the true value of the medium is in its low cost. A typical sponsorship of a Vine video can run a mere few thousand dollars, yet it can gain tens of thousands of “likes” or “re-Vines”. Marketers with lower marketing budgets can capitalize on this as one of many tactics to break through in a cluttered space with fickle Millennials.

Vine, of course, isn’t the only platform out there for short-form video. Instagram recently announced their entry into the market. Though the jury is still out on which platform will win over brands, it’s clear that both platforms will address different objectives for advertisers. Instagram videos will most likely feel more like pre-roll ads and look to formally begin a customer relationship with the prospect. Vine will focus more on brand voice and whimsy.

Viners have the unique ability to tell a breakthrough story in six seconds and can build an organic following because of this skill. According to our friends at Grape Story, there is no famous Viner that gained fame in another platform prior to joining Vine. Engaging fans in such short time is a talent. Brands can learn plenty from those who’ve mastered the art of digital flirting.

We’ve all seen it. CIOs who do great things in leading IT soon gain extra responsibilities. By helping business leaders to improve their businesses, the CIO becomes an obvious candidate to fill any open role that involves technology, process, or strong governance. Some CIOs become CIO-Plus-COO or CIO-Plus-Head of Shared Services. Others gain new responsibilities in strategy, M&A integration, or innovation. Still others move on to business roles including CEO. In the book, The Real Business of IT: How CIOs Create and Communicate Value, Richard Hunter and I coined the phrase CIO-Plus. In the four years since our book was published, the CIO-Plus idea has gained real traction, and there are numerous stories and cases studies on the phenomenon.

But there is another leadership role that has arisen in many organizations in recent years: the Chief Digital Officer (CDO). In many companies, “digital” is a cacophony of disconnected, inconsistent, and sometimes incompatible activities. One company had three simultaneous mobile marketing initiatives, conducted by different groups, using different tools and vendors. Other companies have multiple employee collaboration platforms with different rules and technologies. The problem is exacerbated as business units do their own things digitally, or as companies hire vendors who can only do things their own way. If your company has wildly different digital marketing activities for each brand or region, you know what I mean.

The CDO’s job is to turn the digital cacophony into a symphony. It’s OK to experiment with new businesses and tools, but experimentation must be coupled with building scalable, efficient capabilities. The CDO creates a unifying digital vision, energizes the company around digital possibilities, coordinates digital activities, helps to rethink products and processes for the digital age, and sometimes provides critical tools or resources. That’s why Starbucks — an early leader in all things digital — hired a CDO last year. And it’s why many other companies are naming CDOs before they get too far along the digital road.

The title CDO may or may not become permanent in your company. But the responsibilities of the CDO will be required. You may appoint a temporary CDO to get your house in order, or you may develop other ways to get the job done. Whatever approach you choose, you need to create appropriate levels of digital technology synergy, brand integration, investment coordination, skill development, vendor management, and innovation over the long term.

Is CDO the next step for the aspiring CIO-Plus? The answer is not obvious, but it’s well worth considering. Many of the CDO’s roles are challenges that great CIOs have already mastered in their own domains. But some, such as brand synergy, are new to the CIO. Diverse companies are responding to the digital leadership challenge in different and dynamic ways.

Although relatively few CIOs have an official CDO title, roughly 20% of CIOs in Gartner’s latest survey said they played the role. At Codelco, the world’s largest copper mining company, CIO Marco Orellana is helping to fundamentally transform the process of mining and selling through digital technologies such as real-time coordination, analytics, and autonomous vehicles. At Asian Paints, Manish Choksi managed the difficult step of centralizing and standardizing processes across a loosely-coupled set of regional units. Now, as CIO and Chief of Corporate Strategy, he leads the digital transformation of manufacturing, selling, and customer service.

In some companies, the CIO and CDO are deliberately separate roles. The CIO of an apparel company participates in digital decisions and supports digital initiatives while keeping the company’s traditional IT unit running smoothly. He is not seen as a potential CDO, but the company values his skills in a strong supporting role. Meanwhile, Starbucks’ CDO Adam Brotman and CIO Curt Garner work very closely as a team to drive digital strategy and execution.

Then again, executives in some companies feel their CIO does not have what it takes to be part of the digital conversation. The CIO of a business-services provider had little role in digital at all; the CEO asked him to focus only on legacy IT systems while a newly-hired CDO managed digital activities. Two years later, the company moved all IT functions under the CDO, and the CIO moved to a new firm.

So, should your CIO take on digital responsibilities? Here are some questions you can ask yourself:

• Is your CIO great at the CIO role? Is IT clearly running well? Are IT costs and agility what you want them to be? If your answer to these questions is “no,” then you probably want your CIO to focus on fixing IT, not expanding beyond IT.
• Is your CIO ready for a CIO-Plus role? Do you see your CIO as a senior executive colleague or just a leader of the technology function? Has he successfully managed non-technical roles such as merger integration, process management, or shared services? Is your senior team smarter when your CIO is in the room?
• Does your CIO have digital expertise? Can she talk the language of social media or mobile or analytics, and can she help you understand? Does she understand the digital threats and opportunities your company faces — from inside and outside its industry? Can she create a compelling digital vision for the firm?
• Will your CIO command respect across the enterprise? The CDO role can require even more political savvy and communication skills than the CIO role does. Is your CIO up to the task of driving change across a strong-willed senior executive team? Can she engage a busy workforce to turn digital vision into reality?

In an increasingly digitizing business world, most companies need better digital leadership and coordination. You need to create a compelling digital vision, coordinate digital investments, drive appropriate synergies, build a clean technology platform, and foster innovation. You need to energize a busy workforce and generate shared understanding in your senior executive team.

If your CIO is good, look to him for help. Strong CIOs have already tackled some of the tough challenges of digital leadership. They understand the importance of governance and policy. They know the intricacies of managing across organizational units. They tend to be highly connected with senior executives, having helped them achieve their objectives over the years. They know the current business and the future opportunities technology can create. Plus, in any big company, it’s difficult — if not impossible — to build great digital capabilities without linking to your existing IT capabilities and people.

So, should your CIO be CDO? You need to get the digital leadership job done, whether through a new C-level title or other methods. If you have a great CIO, give her some digital responsibility. You may not choose to make her your digital leader. But the skills and relationships of a great CIO will be an asset to any digital leadership team.

Reinventing Corporate IT
An HBR Insight Center

• Platforms Are the New Foundation of Corporate IT
• The Future of Corporate IT Looks a Lot Like Google
• Today’s CIO Needs to Be the Chief Innovation Officer
• The Real Power of Enterprise Social Media Platforms

Prepublication Now Available

Obesity poses one of the greatest public health challenges of the 21st century, creating serious health, economic, and social consequences for individuals and society. Despite acceleration in efforts to characterize, comprehend, and act on this problem, including implementation of preventive interventions, further understanding is needed on the progress and effectiveness of these interventions.

Evaluating Obesity Prevention Efforts develops a concise and actionable plan for measuring the nation’s progress in obesity prevention efforts–specifically, the success of policy and environmental strategies recommended in the 2012 IOM report Accelerating Progress in Obesity Prevention: Solving the Weight of the Nation. This book offers a framework that will provide guidance for systematic and routine planning, implementation, and evaluation of the advancement of obesity prevention efforts. This framework is for specific use with the goals and strategies from the 2012 report and can be used to assess the progress made in every community and throughout the country, with the ultimate goal of reducing the obesity epidemic. It offers potentially valuable guidance in improving the quality and effect of the actions being implemented.

The recommendations of Evaluating Obesity Prevention Efforts focus on efforts to increase the likelihood that actions taken to prevent obesity will be evaluated, that their progress in accelerating the prevention of obesity will be monitored, and that the most promising practices will be widely disseminated.

[Read the full report]

Topics: Food and Nutrition | Health and Medicine

Remember that classic New Yorker cartoon with Rover sitting in front of a computer? The caption read, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Well, on the web, no one knows you’re a senior vice president either. That’s why every leader is going to have to learn how to get things done in a world where authority is the reciprocal of followership.

As traditional hierarchies get supplanted by networked, or “social” organizations, leadership will become less a function of “where you sit,” than of “what you can do.” Any company that strives to build a leadership advantage will need more than a celebrity CEO and a corporate university that serves up tasty educational morsels to the “high potentials.” It will need an organizational model that gives everyone the chance to lead if they’re capable; and a talent development model that helps everyone to become capable.

What does it take to dramatically enlarge the leadership capacity of an organization — and equip all of its people to lead without formal authority?

Those are the questions behind the Leaders Everywhere Challenge, the second leg of the Harvard Business Review/McKinsey M-Prize for Management Innovation. And today we’re proud to announce the eighteen finalists. This is a robust collection of real-world case studies and courageous experiments in rethinking the work of leadership, redistributing power, and unleashing 21st century leadership skills. Here they are in alphabetical order:

Biggest-Ever Day of Collective Action to Improve Healthcare That Started With a Tweet
Story by Helen Bevan, Damian Roland, Jackie Lynton, Pollyanna Jones

Using Micro-Learning to Boost Influence Skills in Emergent Leaders
Story by Mark Clare

Reweaving Corporate DNA: Building a Culture of Design Thinking at Citrix
Story by Catherine Courage

Teaming at GE Aviation
Story by Rasheedah Jones

The System of Leadership
Hack by Monique Jordan

Total Volunteer Force for the U.S. Military
Hack by Timothy Kane

A Tale of Two Captains: Making the Case for the Universal Applicability of Leaders Everywhere
Story by Charlie Kim and David Marquet

Don’t Remove Their Igloos!
Story by Peter King

Co-Presidents: Distributed Leadership at The Nerdery
Story by Mark Malmberg

The Power of Employees to Overcome the Bank Crisis
Story by Valerie Martens

The 4-Hat Hack: How a Micro Change in Your Employee Portal Can Yield Mega Results in Leadership
Hack by Joel Modestus

Rap a Tap, Tap Tap, Join TITAN and You Are the Leader
Story by Lalgudi Ramanathan Natarajan and Sumant Sood

What Goes Into Building a CEO Factory?
Story by Stephen Remedios

Empowering Intrapreneurs within the Federal Government at NASA
Story by Kevin Rosenquist

Integrity, Rationality and Collegiality: Ingredients for Greatness
Story by Marcus Ryu

Who Do People Report to Here?
Story by Richard Sheridan

Project 10X: Growing the DNA for 21st Century Leadership in Organizations
Hack by Max Shkud and Bill Veltrop

Quit Email and Start Leading
Hack by Kim Spinder

Please explore the finalist stories and hacks and add your comments and ratings — they’ll make a difference as finalists update and build on their entries for final judging. We’ll announce the winners of the Leaders Everywhere Challenge the week of August 19th.

A young manager accosted me the other day. “I’ve been reading all about leadership, have implemented several ideas, and think I’m doing a good job at leading my team. How will I know when I’ve crossed over from being a manager to a leader?” he wanted to know.

I didn’t have a ready answer and it’s a complicated issue, so we decided to talk the next day. I thought long and hard, and came up with three tests that will help you decide if you’ve made the shift from managing people to leading them.

Counting value vs Creating value. You’re probably counting value, not adding it, if you’re managing people. Only managers count value; some even reduce value by disabling those who add value. If a diamond cutter is asked to report every 15 minutes how many stones he has cut, by distracting him, his boss is subtracting value.

By contrast, leaders focuses on creating value, saying: “I’d like you to handle A while I deal with B.” He or she generates value over and above that which the team creates, and is as much a value-creator as his or her followers are. Leading by example and leading by enabling people are the hallmarks of action-based leadership.

Circles of influence vs Circles of power. Just as managers have subordinates and leaders have followers, managers create circles of power while leaders create circles of influence.

The quickest way to figure out which of the two you’re doing is to count the number of people outside your reporting hierarchy who come to you for advice. The more that do, the more likely it is that you are perceived to be a leader.

Leading people vs Managing work. Management consists of controlling a group or a set of entities to accomplish a goal. Leadership refers to an individual’s ability to influence, motivate, and enable others to contribute toward organizational success. Influence and inspiration separate leaders from managers, not power and control.

In India, M.K. Gandhi inspired millions of people to fight for their rights, and he walked shoulder to shoulder with them so India could achieve independence in 1947. His vision became everyone’s dream and ensured that the country’s push for independence was unstoppable. The world needs leaders like him who can think beyond problems, have a vision, and inspire people to convert challenges into opportunities, a step at a time.

I encouraged my colleague to put this theory to the test by inviting his team-mates for chats. When they stop discussing the tasks at hand — and talk about vision, purpose, and aspirations instead, that’s when you will know you have become a leader.

Agree?

While more work remains to be done, today’s employment report provides further confirmation that the U.S. economy is continuing to recover from the worst downturn since the Great Depression. It is critical that we remain focused on pursuing policies to speed job creation and expand the middle class, as we continue to dig our way out of the deep hole that was caused by the severe recession that began in December 2007. 

Today’s report from the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) indicates that the unemployment rate declined from 7.6 percent to 7.4 percent in July, reaching its lowest level since December 2008. The unemployment rate for African Americans fell from 13.7 percent to 12.6 percent, also its lowest level since December 2008. The unemployment rate for women fell from 7.3 percent to 7.0 percent, its lowest level since January 2009, and from 7.8 percent to 7.7 percent for men.

The establishment survey showed that private sector employers added 161,000 jobs last month (see chart below). Total non-farm payroll employment rose by 162,000 jobs in July. The economy has now added private sector jobs for 41 consecutive months, and a total of 7.3 million jobs have been added over that period. So far this year, 1.4 million private sector jobs have been added.

With the recovery entering its fifth year, we need to build on the progress we have made so far and now is not the time for Washington to impose self-inflicted wounds.  The across-the-board budget cuts known as the sequester continue to be a drag on the economy now and in the future.  The Administration continues to urge Congress to replace the sequester with balanced deficit reduction, and promote the investments our economy needs to put more Americans back to work, such as by rebuilding our roads and bridges.

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Back in 1983, in a Harvard Business Review article, Peter Kralijc called for the procurement function to take on a larger and more strategic role in managing the supply chain. Thirty years on, sales people in most large companies are still being trained in ways to actually bypass procurement folks in their customer companies. This is not evidence of people taking the function seriously. What went wrong?

To find out, we conducted a survey with close to 200 procurement executives, in Asia and in Europe. We found pretty conclusively that procurement managers are their own worst enemy, both with external suppliers and within the company, with internal customers and other stakeholders.

Let’s begin with supplier relationships. Nearly half our respondents claim they spend time with suppliers asking them for updates on the markets and new business suggestions. This is not great, perhaps, but it certainly sounds encouraging.

Poke a little deeper, though, and you’ll find the picture looks less rosy. As the chart below shows, only about a third of managers are actually bringing any supplier intelligence into their organizations by advocating for suppliers and facilitating new connections for them, which is what you would expect someone managing the supply chain to do. Just 20% claim to be communicating business insights shared by those customers; only 17% could even tell us in what segment their supplier put their company. No wonder suppliers don’t want to spend time with these folks.

Let’s turn to what’s going on inside the company. As the second graphic shows, many procurement managers are trying to demonstrate internally that they have strategic value. They’re gathering intelligence systematically about the company’s stakeholders and communicating their successes. But it isn’t getting much further than that. Less than 30% of the time do we see procurement managers customizing value propositions for internal customers and stakeholders, tracking satisfaction levels and setting targets for satisfaction.

If this sample is representative, then we can hardly be surprised if many c-suiters think that procurement is a backwater. And we can hardly expect young high-flyers in most industries to see it as a career path of choice.

Looking ahead, procurement managers will have to change the way they approach suppliers and business peers; being a strategic business partner means so much more than negotiating a discount.

Nobel Prize winners live an average of 1.6 years longer than nominees who aren’t selected, a finding that’s consistent with a causal link between status and longer lifespan, say Matthew D. Rablen and Andrew J. Oswald of the University of Warwick in the UK. The mechanism for the link is unclear, but it may have to do with higher-status individuals’ greater control over their work lives. Lack of control in the workplace is associated with stress, and high levels of stress hormones damage immunological processes.

China’s era of spectacular economic growth is coming to an end. That’s a popular theme at the moment, with any number of culprits cited — an overleveraged financial system, pollution, too little consumer spending, corruption, anti-corruption campaigns, and of course bad driving. It’s reached the point that the Chinese government’s International Press Center felt compelled to gather a group of reporters in Beijing earlier this week just so that Justin Yifu Lin, the former World Bank chief economist who is now a professor at Peking University and a government adviser, could tell them that he’s “reasonably confident the Chinese government has the ability to maintain a 7.5% to 8% growth rate.”

Here’s the thing: a 7.5% to 8% GDP growth rate already is a significant slowdown from the nearly 10% annual pace at which China’s economy had been growing until last year. And while all the economic issues cited above are real, the big issue confronting the Chinese economy is something simpler and more encouraging. The country is on the cusp of succeeding in its epic quest to break into the ranks of the world’s affluent nations. When that happens, growth tends to slow.

That’s been the finding of economists Barry Eichengreen of UC Berkeley, Donghyun Park of the Asian Development Bank in Manila, and Kwanjo Shin of Korea University in Seoul in two recent studies of growth slowdowns in emerging markets around the world. In the first, published in Asian Economic Papers last year, they reported a marked tendency toward slower economic growth when per capita incomes reach around $17,000 a year (in 2005 prices). In a newer working paper with more-complete data, they revise that to report two inflection points, one in the $10,000-$11,000 range and another around $15,000-$16,0000.

China, with a per capita GDP of $7,827 in 2011 (in 2005 dollars, according to the latest edition of the Penn World Tables), is getting close to that first landmark. It also has a couple of other characteristics that Eichengreen, Park, and Shin have found to be identified with growth slowdowns — an aging population and an economy that has favored investment over consumption. Basically, it’s due. Or, as Eichengreen put it in an email when I asked him about it:

Financial systems, deleveraging, and environment and political problems all differ across countries, but all fast growing, late developing countries slow down once the low hanging fruit has been picked. China can add several percentage points of growth a year by shifting 20 million workers from rural underemployment to urban employment, but once the pool of underemployed labor is drained it’s, well, drained. If you’re a technological latecomer, you can grow fast by importing foreign technology, but once you’ve succeeded in that you have to start investing in and developing your own, which is a harder task.

Remember, these difficulties are the fruits of success. At 7.5% annual growth, China would cross the $10,000 per capita threshhold in 2015, and $15,000 in 2020. Well before then it would pass into the ranks of the world’s “high income” nations, according to the World Bank’s classification.

Not that stuff couldn’t go wrong along the way. Eichengreen and Shin are co-authors (with Dwight H. Perkins, an emeritus professor at Harvard Kennedy School) of the 2012 book From Miracle to Maturity: The Growth of the Korean Economy (no, I haven’t read it, but you of course should), and Eichengreen sees important parallels in the Korean experience:

Korean governments attempted to resist the inevitable slowdown. Their legitimacy derived from delivering growth, and there was the external threat from North Korea that caused them to further prize economic strength. Our estimates there show a break-point in growth potential in 1989. But Korea sought to keep the old growth rates going by boosting investment. That worked for about 7 or 8 years, but no longer. And they ended up with a financial crisis in 1997-8. The Chinese have studied this history too, which is part of the explanation for why they are prepared to accept the current lower growth rate and, not incidentally, are in the process of clamping down on financial excesses.

None of this means there aren’t big risks inherent in such a slowdown for the Chinese government (which, unlike South Korea’s in the late 1980s is showing no signs transitioning towards democracy) and for the global economy (for which a Chinese slowdown will have an impact that earlier slowdowns in Korea and the other Asian tigers did not). But it is important to remember that for an emerging market, slowing down can mean you’ve arrived.

This week, the Vice President and Dr. Biden wrapped up a trip to India and Singapore, the President announced a bargain for middle class jobs, welcomed the Huskies and the Giants, the American Legion, Girls & Boys Nation, the President of Yemen, and civil rights leaders to the White House, and marked the 60th anniversary of the Korean War Armistice.

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While I was testifying before the Senate Environmental Public Works Committee on the social cost of carbon last month, Howard Shelanski was testifying to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on the exact same topic. As Shelanski was …