Stature: A good friend and colleague asked me if I would be willing to guest lecture at his local university fully employed MBA class. The topic of the talk was to be leadership. I agreed, and we set the date. I signed into the virtual meeting early to make sure we had the technology issues under control. While we were …
Artificial Intelligence (AI): Based on what I observe in the business world, AI is going to continue being in our collective consciousness for some time to come. Many thought this was going to be a fad—and with reason. The promise of AI drastically changing our world has been around for several decades. However, we in the technology world have not …
On a More Even Keel: A recent report, Automation and Artificial Intelligence: How Machines are Affecting People and Places, puts things in a better perspective than we might have held starting several years ago. Gone is the panic over “all jobs going away.” Moreover, gone is the blasé attitude that no loss of jobs will occur. From the report: “Now, …
Critical Thinking: I’m struggling a bit with my thoughts on how to prepare people, especially our young people, for the work world ahead of us. Indeed, some necessary skills will be required. But which ones? It is next to impossible to predict what “jobs” will exist, let alone what skills will be needed. Surely, we will be required to work …
Past Worry — Jobs: Long before it was an everyday discussion topic, I and my colleague, David Salahi, were speaking and writing about how technology had the potential to displace many (all?) jobs. Primarily, the purpose of speaking and writing was to generate discussion! What were humans going to do to make a living? How were they going to find …
Skills I found some interesting information from the US Census Bureau. It seems that, according to their 2015 data, about 88% of adults have at least a high school diploma. For the purposes of this report, the adult population comprises those 25 years old and older. “We have already eliminated all jobs several times in human history,” said Kurzweil, pointing …
Millennials Not long ago, I was reading one of the many, many articles about Millennials. It was stated that Millennials will change their careers at least four times during their work lives. That seemed pretty significant to me. Until I thought about my own career path. While my corporate career was always in semiconductor businesses, I reinvented myself many times …
Climate Change Now there’s an interesting topic! Of course, there are at least two camps on the climate change thing. One is that the climate is changing and that mankind is causing or at least exacerbating the change. A second camp is that yes, the climate is changing but it’s a natural phenomenon and mankind is not only not causing …
Robots or Cobots? As many of you know, long before the mainstream business press jumped on the topic, I was fretting over the possibility of a major change in our economy. That change is, in my mind, driven by a lack of jobs due to automation. So will we lose the jobs or will we simply have many newer jobs …
Greed and Pitchforks I was listening to podcasts as I was traveling around southern California in my car. I almost skipped the next playlist podcast when I heard the topic was The Seven Deadly Sins. They hooked me before I could safely move to the next podcast. I’m glad that I listened. According to the standard list, the seven deadly sins …