What if your job didn’t control your life? Brazilian CEO Ricardo Semler practices a radical form of corporate democracy, rethinking everything from board meetings to how workers report their vacation days (they don’t have to). It’s a vision that rewards the wisdom of workers, promotes work-life balance — and leads to some deep insight on what work, and life, is really all about. Bonus question: What if schools were like this too?
Making toast doesn’t sound very complicated — until someone asks you to draw the process, step by step. Tom Wujec loves asking people and teams to draw how they make toast, because the process reveals unexpected truths about how we can solve our biggest, most complicated problems at work. Learn how to run this exercise yourself, and hear Wujec’s surprising insights from watching thousands of people draw toast.
Artists Jeroen Koolhaas and Dre Urhahn create community art by painting entire neighborhoods, and involving those who live there — from the favelas of Rio to the streets of North Philadelphia. What’s made their projects succeed? In this funny and inspiring talk, the artists explain their art-first approach — and the importance of a neighborhood barbecue.
As founder of the Ig Nobel awards, Marc Abrahams explores the world’s most improbable research. In this thought-provoking (and occasionally side-splitting) talk, he tells stories of truly weird science — and makes the case that silliness is critical to boosting public interest in science.
I bought the package to view these sessions online and as I continue to work my way through them, I am so impressed and encouraged. I can’t share the videos, but did want to provide a list of the speakers, their topics, and links to their sites:
In 2008, shortly after Bill Gates stepped down from his executive role at Microsoft, he often awoke in his 66,000-square-foot home on the eastern bank of Lake Washington and walked downstairs to his private gym in a baggy T-shirt, shorts, sneakers and black socks yanked up to the midcalf. Then, during an hour on the treadmill, Gates, a self-described nerd, would pass the time by watching DVDs from the Teaching Company’s “Great Courses” series. On some mornings, he would learn about geology or meteorology; on others, it would be oceanography or U.S. history.
People don’t really think of starvation when they’re about to toss a perfectly fine batch of vegetables into the trash after dinner. Furthermore, people don’t think about all of the food being wasted when they sort through their refrigerators. Perhaps what’s even more frightening, is the fact that no one thinks about the fact that “spoiled” fruits and vegetables found at supermarkets can be used to create juices and supplements. Instead, they just go unused and wasted. However, Intermarché, a French supermarket chain might’ve found the answer to stop things like that from happening. Instead of tossing out spoiled-looking fruits and vegetables people refuse to buy at supermarkets, the company decided to transform these batches into soups and fruit juices. The end result? Everyone bought the juices and soups! Check out the video above for a closer look!
Published on Jul 1, 2014″For two or three generations, we’ve almost completely ignored the supply side” of health care, warns Robert Graboyes, an economist who specializes in health care issues. That’s especially a big problem now that Obamacare is coming online. The whole point of the program, after all, is to increase demand for medical services. Yet even President Obama and his supporters acknowledge the plan does next to nothing to generate more doctors and more medical innovations.Graboyes, a senior research analyst at George Mason’s Mercatus Center, sat down with Reason TV’s Nick Gillespie to outline immediate ways to grow the number of hospitals, doctors, and nurses to serve millions of newly insured patients.Even more important is the need to increase the pace of the transformative medical innovation that has always extended lifespans and raised the quality of life, says Graboyes. At the dawn of “molecular medicine,” in which drugs are targeted to specific individuals, the FDA’s backward-looking and hyper-expensive approval process is more destructive than ever. Medicare’s byzantine cost-codes freeze into place yesteryear’s solutions. At the state level, “certificate of need” laws make it tougher than ever to expand or build new health care facilities.We’ve got to “look for every obstruction to the supply and get rid of it,” says Graboyes.Produced by Todd Krainin. Cameras by Ford Fischer and Josh Swain.About 9 minutes.
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