Most Popular Editorials: These countries spend the most on research and development

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These countries spend the most on research and development Investment in research and development (R&D) is the lifeblood of many private sector organizations, helping bring new products and services to market. It's also important to national economies and plays a crucial role in GDP growth. As we recover from the pandemic, R&D will play a key role in underpinning private sector growth and job creation, Christine Lagarde, President of the European Central Bank, said at the opening of the World Economic Forum's Pioneers of Change summit. The World Bank analyzed the most recent available data on which countries spend the largest proportion of GDP on R&D activities. While the data predates the pandemic, it helps shine a light on how funding research can bolster economic competitiveness. The top five are: Israel, South Korea, Switzerland, Sweden and Japan. Continued here

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Don't kill bureaucracy, use it Bureaucracies are the scaffolding needed to implement new ideas at scale. Just remember to dismantle them when the work is done. Earlier this year, an intriguing tweet from Tom Peters popped up on my phone. "Virtually all the popular improvement ideas - Continuous Improvement, 6-Sigma, MBO [management by objectives], Agile, Brainstorming, Strategic Planning, PPBS [planning, programming, budgeting systems], ZBB [zero-based budgeting] - develop hardening of the arteries, lose their youthful glow, and become one more burdensome, life-sucking bureaucratic practice," he wrote. This may sound glib to you. But like many of Peters's observations, it's got a strong foundation in reality. If you've been around for a while, you know that all sorts of business programs ossify after a few years. It happened with total quality management (TQM) and business process reengineering back in the 1990s. It's happening with D&I (diversity and inclusion) and holacracy now. Continued here

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23% of Earth's natural habitats could be gone by 2100, study finds Climate change and global food demand could drive a startling loss of up to 23 percent of all natural habitat ranges in the next 80 years, according to new findings published in Nature Communications. Habitat loss could accelerate to a level that brings about rapid extinctions of already vulnerable species. Shrinking ranges for mammals, amphibians and birds already account for an 18 percent loss of previous natural ranges, the study found, with a jump expected to reach 23 percent by this century's end. Global food demand currently fuels agricultural sectors to increase land use, moving into habitats previously untouched. What results - deforestation - leaves more carbon dioxide in the air, increasing greenhouse gas emissions, the main driver of climate change. In the U.S. alone, agriculture-related emissions measure 11.6 percent of the world's greenhouse gas emissions, which include carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide. Continued here

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Covid-19 Briefing materials from McKinsey: Global health and crisis response A new year is here, but COVID-19's latest surge feels so very last year—not to mention the year before that. To kick off 2022, McKinsey looked at issues that many people thought would have started to resolve as the virus died down, but which instead require renewed engagement. Topping our list this week are employee burnout and hits to tourism. But there is positive news as well: reports on the state of mobility and pharmaceuticals reflect that pandemic-inspired changes are leading some industries in new directions.Compared with nonparents, employed parents are more likely to miss days of work because they are experiencing symptoms of burnout (exhibit). Companies need to understand what the compound pressures of employment and parenting during a pandemic are doing to these workers and consider a list of interventions to counteract their experience of burning the candle at both ends. Continued here

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What Went Wrong With IBM's Watson The A.I. project was supposed to change the state of cancer treatment. Here's what happened instead.What if artificial intelligence can't cure cancer after all? That's the message of a big Wall Street Journal post-mortem on Watson, the IBM project that was supposed to turn IBM's computing prowess into a scalable program that could deliver state-of-the-art personalized cancer treatment protocols to millions of patients around the world. Watson in general, and its oncology application in particular, has been receiving a lot of skeptical coverage of late; STAT published a major investigation last year, reporting that Watson was nowhere near being able to live up to IBM's promises. After that article came out, the IBM hype machine started toning things down a bit. But while a lot of the problems with Watson are medical or technical, they're deeply financial, too. Continued here

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Many Strategies Fail Because They're Not Actually Strategies Many strategy execution processes fail because "new strategies" are often not strategies at all. A real strategy involves a clear set of choices that define what the firm is going to do and what it's not going to do. Many strategies fail to get implemented because they do not represent such a set of clear choices. And many so-called strategies are in fact goals. "We want to be the number one or number two in all the markets in which we operate" is one of those. It does not tell you what you are going to do; all it does is tell you what you hope the outcome will be. But you'll still need a strategy to achieve it. Another reason why many implementation efforts fail is that executives see it as a pure top-down, two-step process: "The strategy is made; now we implement it." That's unlikely to work. A successful strategy execution process is seldom a one-way trickle-down cascade of decisions. Continued here

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Here's how a smart field-to-fork network could revolutionise our food system In May the EU revealed its new Field to Fork strategy, a comprehensive plan to overhaul food production at every stage to make it more resilient and environmentally friendly. Its success would make the EU a global leader in sustainability, helping to protect its food supply from threats such as climate change and pandemics. For that to happen, however, we need to see an even more fundamental change: a conversion of the current, fragmented tangle of food supply chains into a coherent and traceable supply network. The Field to Fork strategy sets out a number of targets that it wants to achieve by 2030 - notably, to cut the use of pesticides by 50%, fertilisers by 20% and antimicrobials in farmed animals by 50%. On top of this, it wants organic farming to account for a quarter of farmed land within its borders and is calling on member states to cut, monitor and report on food wastage levels across the supply chain. This would ensure good quality food reaches more people at fair prices and in a more efficient way. Continued here

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The Dalai Lama's flight from Lhasa and his perilous journey to India: 'A dizzying, frightening blur' Right after the Great Prayer Festival on 9 March, Brigadier Fu, who was in charge of the (Chinese) PLA troops in Lhasa, invited the Dalai Lama for a theatrical performance at their headquarters. He instructed Phuntsok Tashi Taklha, the Dalai Lama's brother-in-law, who was his chief of security, that His Holiness should come without protection and in secret. The young Tendzin Choegyal (Ngari Rinpoche), studying at Drepung monastery, was also invited. This highly irregular request caused great worry. The news spread like wildfire and on 10 March, large crowds gathered outside the Norbulingka palace to prevent the Dalai Lama from going, suspecting it was a ruse by the Chinese to hold him hostage or worse, harm him. By midday, the huge crowd of thirty thousand grew restive. Continued here

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Entrepreneurship Frameworks That Work The romantic ideal of the entrepreneur as either the kid with the lemonade stand or the college dropout working from a Silicon Valley garage is real, but that's not the whole story. Entrepreneurs are also mums puzzling through how to pay the bills, and dads working to feed their kids. What all forms of entrepreneurship have in common is a tonne of hard work. Using a proven framework is a great way to take your first steps towards becoming an entrepreneur. In my new book Survive & Thrive: Entrepreneurship Frameworks That Work, I lay out 12 frameworks for at least 16 entrepreneurial paths, including social ventures, science and technology, corporate, government and more. These frameworks are interrelated yet distinct. You might start down one path and realise that there is more to what you want or can do. Continued here

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'This is revolutionary': new online bookshop unites indies to rival Amazon It is being described as a "revolutionary moment in the history of bookselling": a socially conscious alternative to Amazon that allows readers to buy books online while supporting their local independent bookseller. And after a hugely successful launch in the US, it is open in the UK from today. Bookshop was dreamed up by the writer and co-founder of Literary Hub, Andy Hunter. It allows independent bookshops to create their own virtual shopfront on the site, with the stores receiving the full profit margin - 30% of the cover price - from each sale. All customer service and shipping are handled by Bookshop and its distributor partners, with titles offered at a small discount and delivered within two to three days. "It's been a wild ride," said Hunter, who launched the site in the US in January. "Five weeks into what we thought was going to be a six-month period of refining and improving and making small changes, Covid-19 hit and then suddenly we were doing massive business." Continued here

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How Startups Benefit From Collaborating With Large Corporations Innovation is no longer something that companies should strive for but something that\'s become necessary for survival. That said, it\'s long been difficult for big businesses to keep pace with the innovation of smaller businesses and more nimble startups. As a result, corporations are fiercely working to find ways to encourage innovation, for example through innovation labs, building disruptive cultures, or hiring chief innovation officers. While these shifts have helped and have enabled big companies to establish cultures of innovation, there's one increasingly popular way that many companies have found to encourage innovation: collaborations with startups. When done correctly, these collaborations can be mutually beneficial and can help both parties develop, gain a competitive advantage, and ensure long-term success. Continued here

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Bill Ackman's 'single best trade of all time' turned $27 million into $2.6 billion -- now he's trying it again 'I hope we lose money on this next hedge.' That's billionaire investor Bill Ackman talking at a digital conference to private equity investors and investment bankers this week about his latest wager on what he believes will be a rough stretch for American corporations due to the economic hit from the coronavirus pandemic. The trade, according to the Financial Times, is virtually the same as the $27-million bet he placed eight months ago, which earned him a whopping $2.6 billion and was hailed in an op-ed in the New York Times as perhaps "the single best trade of all time." Continued here

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Get 1% Better Every Day: The Kaizen Way to Self-Improvement It's happened to all of us. You have a "come to Jesus" moment and decide you need to make changes in your life. Maybe you need to drop a few pounds (or more), want to pay off some debt, or desperately long to quit wasting time on the internet. So you start planning and scheming. You take to your journal and write out a bold strategy on how you're going to tackle your quest for self-improvement. You set big, hairy SMART goals with firm deadlines. You download the apps and buy the gear that will help you reach your objectives. You feel that telltale rush that comes with believing you're turning over a new leaf, and indeed, the first few days go great. "This time," you tell yourself, "this time is different." But then ... Continued here

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Why the 'paradox mindset' is the key to success Although paradoxes often trip us up, embracing contradictory ideas may actually be the secret to creativity and leadership. Working life often involves the push and pull of various contradictory demands. Doctors and nurses need to provide highest quality healthcare at the lowest cost; musicians want to maintain their artistic integrity while also making a sack full of cash. A teacher has to impose toughdiscipline for the good of the class - being "cruel to be kind". Being dragged in two different directions, simultaneously, should only create tension and stress. And yet some exciting and highly counter-intuitive research suggests that these conflicts can often work in our favour. Over a series of studies, psychologists and organisational scientists have found that people who learn to embrace, rather than reject, opposing demands show greater creativity, flexibility and productivity. The dual constraints actually enhance their performance. The researchers call this a "paradox mindset" - and there never be a better time to start cultivating it. Continued here

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An Economist's Guide to the World in 2050 Largely driven by the rise of China and India, the emerging-market share of global GDP is also soaring. In 2000, emerging markets accounted for about a fifth of global output. In 2042, they're set to overtake advanced economies as the biggest contributors to global GDP - and by 2050, they will contribute almost 60% of the total. More viscerally felt will be the shift in relative power between countries. In 2033, according to our projections, India will overtake an age-hobbled Japan to become the world's third biggest economy. In 2035, China will outstrip the U.S. to become the biggest. By 2050, Indonesia may have moved into the big league. Three of the world's biggest economies will be Asian emerging markets. Continued here

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The diabolical genius of the baby advice industry Human beings are born too soon. Within hours of arriving in the world, a baby antelope can clamber up to a wobbly standing position; a day-old zebra foal can run from hyenas; a sea-turtle, newly hatched in the sand, knows how to find its way to the ocean. Newborn humans, on the other hand, can't hold up their own heads without someone to help them. They can't even burp without assistance. Place a baby human on its stomach at one day old - or even three months old, the age at which lion cubs may be starting to learn to hunt - and it's stranded in position until you decide to turn it over, or a sabre-toothed tiger strolls into the cave to claim it. The reason for this ineptitude is well-known: our huge brains, which make us the cleverest mammals on the planet, wouldn't fit through the birth canal if they developed more fully in the womb. (Recently, cognitive scientists have speculated that babies may actually be getting more useless as evolution proceeds; if natural selection favours ever bigger brains, you'd expect humans to be born with more and more developing left to do.) Continued here

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Why Businesses No Longer Have to Choose Between Heart, Head and Wallet "The business of business is improving the state of the world," states Salesforce's chairman and CEO Marc Benioff. Benioff's worldview is shaped by the concept of "stakeholder capitalism" - the idea that companies have an obligation to give back to society and make a positive impact. That worldview has certainly paid off. In August, Salesforce posted a quarterly profit that well exceeded Wall Street's estimates. But Benioff said he's "most proud" of the role Salesforce is playing in helping public schools deal with Covid-19. Indeed, as the world faces its worst health crisis in more than a century, the time has come for us to take a step back and seriously reflect on the role businesses play in society at large. In August 2019, the Business Roundtable, for the first time in 41 years, redefined the purpose of a corporation. Instead of insisting that public corporations exist primarily to serve shareholders, 181 CEOs joined the Roundtable's statement that corporations exist to benefit all stakeholders - customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders. Continued here

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The Great Covid-Driven Teamwork Divide For most teams, the pandemic either brought colleagues closer or drove them increasingly apart. There are three key reasons why.What makes a team more than the sum of its parts? Its cohesion or connectedness, which allows for pooling of individual members' strengths and compensates for their weaknesses. Accordingly, Google's landmark Project Aristotle study found that the single most important driver of team performance was not the skills, intelligence or personality of a team's members, but rather the quality of the team's interactions and whether members felt psychologically safe. The Covid-19 pandemic is perhaps the greatest threat to team connectedness we have ever seen. Colleagues who were mostly co-located - often literally within arm's reach of one another - have been forced to disperse across cities, even countries. As we saw this occurring, we fretted for the future of these teams. Would close working relationships built up over months if not years simply be scattered to the four winds? To capture the effects in real time, we launched a survey back in June about how teams were being impacted by Covid. More than 500 professionals around the world responded. The findings surprised us. Continued here

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The rise of the 'half-tourist' who combines work with a change of scene Covid-19 has accelerated the decline of the office, but not everyone wants to work from home. We look at travel firms catering to the growing number of nomadic workersDestinations hit by the global halt in travel have already started to target nomadic workers to make up for the loss of tourist income. Barbados was one of the first to launch a "digital nomad" visa, in July. Since then, a wave of other countries have announced similar programmes, including Estonia, Georgia and Croatia. Most recently, Anguilla launched a visa scheme inviting visitors to live and work on the island for 12 months, "swapping grey skies and jumpers for tropical blues and daily temperatures reaching for the 30s". Carolyn Brown, 58, is a first-time remote worker now considering make it longer term. After closing her office in London during lockdown, she swapped her south-west London flat for an apartment in Santorini, where she starts her day with a swim and spends nights with friends in tavernas. "I went out for a week's holiday but decided to extend it. It's the first time I can do everything online, so why not? With the time difference I usually start at around 6am but I don't mind getting up early when I get to watch the sun rise over a hilltop monastery." Continued here

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The C.E.O. Who Promised There Would Be No Layoffs In 10 years running Mastercard, Ajay Banga has favored a forward-looking approach.When the pandemic hit, Mastercard's chief executive, Ajay Banga, made a promise to the company's 19,000 employees: There would be no layoffs as a result of the economic destruction wrought by the virus. It was a decision he could afford to make. During his 10 years as chief executive, Mr. Banga vastly expanded the company's reach. Revenues roughly tripled, and profits quadrupled. Mr. Banga says he didn't achieve these results simply by managing for the short term. When he took over in 2010, he told investors that he would not be giving quarterly earnings guidance. Instead, he offered investors a rolling forecast of where Mastercard would be in three years, and set to work striking new partnerships around the globe. The strategy worked. Mastercard stock has soared by more than 1,000 percent during his tenure, outperforming competitors Visa and American Express. Continued here

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The World's Most Influential Values, In One Graphic While it may not be surprising that family emerges as the most important value globally, it's interesting to note that a number of other 'connectedness' values - such as relationships and belonging - emerged in the top 10. Values of loyalty, and religion/spirituality ranked #6, and #7, respectively. At the same time, security-related values, including financial and employment security, score highly around the world. From a business and leadership context, values are interesting in that they can guide how people and consumers make their decisions. As people interact with the world, different experiences can 'engage' their most closely-held values. Continued here

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How Perfectionists Can Get Out of Their Own Way Like any extreme trait, perfectionism can be a double-edged sword. Having high standards and being hardworking can help someone stand out in a crowded field, and their tenacity can help them improve their skills over time. And, to an extent, being very conscientious can help avoid errors. The benefits I've mentioned, and a fear that any flaw will result in catastrophe, can keep people hooked on their perfectionist mindset. However, there are also significant downsides to attempting mistake-free performance. If you're struggling to let go of some of your perfectionistic tendencies, or managing someone who is, it can be helpful to remember the ways perfectionists can self-sabotage in the workplace. I'll discuss five below. You'll notice a general theme of the person losing sight of the big picture. Continued here

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How to Reimagine the Second Half of Your Career I bounced around several jobs during the dotcom bubble - they were turbulent times, but I was very lucky. I came from a middle-class home in the New Jersey suburbs, had supportive parents and a good education. I always managed to land the next gig. I worked at AOL for a few years, and I learned a lot there about being a designer. I progressed to building a design team with a company on the West Coast called Webtrends, which at the time was the leader of web analytics providers. And then I found my way to New York City where I landed a job leading and building a design team at TheLadders, an online executive job search firm. But as I faced my 35th birthday, I found myself panicking. I was struggling to envision what the second half of my career would look like when it came to seniority, salary, fulfillment, you name it. Where do I go from here? After all, the farther up the ladder you go, the fewer positions there are - it's just the nature of the corporate beast. There are very few C-level, chief design officer jobs. Continued here

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The Weird Strategy Dr. Seuss Used to Create His Greatest Work In 1960, two men made a bet. There was only $50 on the line, but millions of people would feel the impact of this little wager. The first man, Bennett Cerf, was the founder of the publishing firm, Random House. The second man was named Theo Geisel, but you probably know him as Dr. Seuss. Cerf proposed the bet and challenged that Dr. Seuss would not be able to write an entertaining children's book using only 50 different words. Dr. Seuss took the bet and won. The result was a little book called Green Eggs and Ham. Since publication, Green Eggs and Ham has sold more than 200 million copies, making it the most popular of Seuss's works and one of the best-selling children's books in history. Continued here

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What it's like to get locked out of Google indefinitely When he received the notification from Google he couldn't quite believe it. Cleroth, a game developer who asked not to use his real name, woke up to see a message that all his Google accounts were disabled due to "serious violation of Google policies."His first reaction was that something must have malfunctioned on his phone. Then he went to his computer and opened up Chrome, Google's internet browser. He was signed out. He tried to access Gmail, his main email account, which was also locked. "Everything was disconnected," he told Business Insider. Then he went to his computer and opened up Chrome, Google's internet browser. He was signed out. He tried to access Gmail, his main email account, which was also locked. "Everything was disconnected," he told Business Insider. Cleroth had some options he could pursue: One was the option to try and recover his Google data - which gave him hope. But he didn't go too far into the process because there was also an option to appeal the ban. He sent in an appeal. He received a response the next day: Google had determined he had broken their terms of service, though they didn't explain exactly what had happened, and his account wouldn't be reinstated. (Google has been approached for comment on this story.) Continued here

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A radical new technique lets AI learn with practically no data "Less than one"-shot learning can teach a model to identify more objects than the number of examples it is trained on.Machine learning typically requires tons of examples. To get an AI model to recognize a horse, you need to show it thousands of images of horses. This is what makes the technology computationally expensive - and very different from human learning. A child often needs to see just a few examples of an object, or even only one, before being able to recognize it for life. In fact, children sometimes don't need any examples to identify something. Shown photos of a horse and a rhino, and told a unicorn is something in between, they can recognize the mythical creature in a picture book the first time they see it. Now a new paper from the University of Waterloo in Ontario suggests that AI models should also be able to do this - a process the researchers call "less than one"-shot, or LO-shot, learning. In other words, an AI model should be able to accurately recognize more objects than the number of examples it was trained on. That could be a big deal for a field that has grown increasingly expensive and inaccessible as the data sets used become ever larger. Continued here

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How to Hold Remote Workers Accountable Without Micromanaging Good managers don't actually care what folks do with their time. They care if the job gets done.In March, a viral leaked email from a Wall Street Journal manager instructed newly remote workers to keep managers informed if they're "taking a break, conducting an interview, in a meeting, or will otherwise be unavailable for a while." This is how you ruin remote work. Managers might as well ask to be informed every time an employee takes a bio break, eats a Snickers bar, ties their shoes, sneezes, scratches their elbow, or tidies their desk. I understand where the impulse comes from. Millions of people are working remotely for the first time, and managers are trying to adjust. Most are used to seeing their direct reports in person throughout the day, and think this gives them an idea of what exactly folks are doing with their time. But here's the thing. Good managers don't actually care what folks do with their time. They care if they get their job done or not. Continued here

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All Your Most Paranoid Transfer of Power Questions, Answered The article is from July, but gets into a fair amount of detail (including historical precedents) on what happens when the transfer of power in the US elections is not smoothCan Donald Trump continue as president even if he loses the election in November? Trump's refusal to say that he would accept the results of the election during an interview with Chris Wallace of Fox News comes as the president continues to fearmonger about the use of vote by mail in the 2020 election and raise questions about its legitimacy. This rhetoric is not new from Trump. He falsely claimed in 2016 that Ted Cruz "stole" the Iowa caucuses and refused to commit in advance to accepting the result of the general election against Hillary Clinton. Now that he's in the White House, can Trump thwart the will of the American electorate if he loses in November? Let's look at what's actually possible - and what isn't. Continued here

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Brain Scans Reveal Why "Night Owls" Have It Rough in a 9-to-5 Society The 9-to-5 workday originated with American labor unions in the 1800s, and today, the eight-hour workday is the norm. But however normalized the schedule, it is directly opposed to something more powerful: biology. In a new study, scientists report that people whose internal body clocks tell them to go to bed late, but are then forced to wake up early, have a lower resting brain connectivity in the regions of the brain linked to consciousness. Scientists shared their findings Friday in the journal SLEEP, with the article, "Circadian phenotype impacts the brain's resting state functional connectivity, attentional performance and sleepiness." Continued here

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Why The Global Economy Is Recovering Faster Than Expected While many business leaders have seen these dynamics unfold in real time, they seek to understand the drivers that explain it in order to better see the path ahead. Charting recoveries remains exceptionally difficult (if not as difficult as predicting recessions), but there is value in thinking about the types of recession, their drivers, and impact - as well as about the idiosyncrasies that will shape the remaining recovery path. There are three dimensions of economic recessions which - when taken together - can help frame the dynamics of recovery. The Covid recession displays distinctive characteristics within this framework that help explain much of what has been on display: Continued here

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Restoring craft to work -- A replacement to corporate purpose The innate desire to do a job well has greater motivational force than any corporate purpose. You've probably heard these stories before. There's the proud janitor at NASA who tells President Kennedy that he isn't just sweeping up; he is helping put a man on the moon. And the gung-ho stonemason who tells architect Christopher Wren that he isn't just hammering rock; he is building a cathedral to God's glory. The stories are popular, even though they probably never happened. And they get told and retold to support the power of purpose. It's the subtext that bothers me. Invariably, the moral of these stories is that employers (a label that literally defines the rest of us as something to be used) need to provide employees with a purpose. This suggests that many jobs are, in and of themselves, meaningless. It also implies that people don't care about the work they do - that they are wastrels. Continued here

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These are the World Economic Forum's Technology Pioneers of 2020 The World Economic Forum today announced its 2020 Technology Pioneers, future headline-makers addressing global issues with cutting-edge technology. From artificial intelligence (AI) to carbon capture, this year's cohort is using innovations to protect climate, improve healthcare and much more, helping us to reset society and build towards a better future. "This year's class of Technology Pioneers are improving society and advancing their industries around the world," said Susan Nesbitt, Head of the Global Innovators Community, World Economic Forum. "These are the companies that think differently and stand out as potential game-changers. We're looking forward to the role they'll play in shaping the future of their industries." Of the 100 firms selected, over one-quarter are female-led, more than double the industry average. These firms also come from diverse regions that stretch beyond traditional tech hubs, with companies using innovative technology in novel ways all around the world. Continued here

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What's Keeping CEOs Up At Night About Working Remotely? The Wall Street Journal asked 19 CEOs for their perspective on remote work and whether it was working for them. We asked 500. With the help of our parent company, Chief Executive Group, we questioned 500 CEOs on their biggest challenges in managing the sudden, Covid-enforced transition to remote work. We were so bowled over by the volume, breadth and depth of responses that we launched an entire website www.remotework360.com to help navigate the uncertainties of remote, and also distilled the responses into an insightful whitepaper: "Remote Work; The CEO Perspective." You can download a free copy here, and read on for a key summary: Continued here

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If Strategy Is So Important, Why Don't We Make Time for It? Almost every leader wants to make more time for strategic thinking. In one survey of 10,000 senior leaders, 97% of them said that being strategic was the leadership behavior most important to their organization's success. And yet in another study, a full 96% of the leaders surveyed said they lacked the time for strategic thinking. It's important to remember that strategic thinking doesn't necessarily require large amounts of time; it's not about taking endless sabbaticals or going on leadership retreats. As productivity expert David Allen says, "You don't need time to have a good idea, you need space... It takes zero time to have an innovative idea or to make a decision, but if you don't have psychic space, those things are not necessarily impossible, but they're suboptimal." Continued here

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This study of 1.6 million chess moves found the age we hit our cognitive peak More than 24,000 chess games played in professional tournaments over 125 years have been analyzed by scientists to measure how age affects cognitive ability. They conclude that humans reach their cognitive peak around the age of 35 and begin to decline after the age of 45. And our cognitive abilities today exceed those of our ancestors. "Performance reveals a hump-shaped pattern over the life cycle," report the authors in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Individual performance increases sharply until the early 20s and then reaches a plateau, with a peak around 35 years and a sustained decline at higher ages." Continued here

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How Human Genome Sequencing Went From $1 Billion A Pop To Under $1,000 In October 1990, a group of international researchers set a bold goal: to create a map of the DNA code that makes up the human genome. Each person has two sets of 3 billion bases, represented by the letters A, T, G and C, which are the unique set of instructions that guide their cells throughout life. "Without a doubt, this is the most important, most wondrous map ever produced by humankind," former President Bill Clinton proclaimed in a speech about the Human Genome Project. The final map and sequence was completed in 2003. "The first genome cost us about a billion dollars," says Dr. Eric Green, who worked on the project since its inception and has been the director of the National Human Genome Research Institute for more than a decade. "Now when we sequence a person's genome, it's less than $1000, so that's a million-fold reduction." Continued here

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How Apple Is Organized for Innovation Early on, Steve Jobs came to embrace the idea that managers at Apple should be experts in their area of management. In a 1984 interview he said, "We went through that stage in Apple where we went out and thought, Oh, we\'re gonna be a big company, let\'s hire professional management. We went out and hired a bunch of professional management. It didn\'t work at all... They knew how to manage, but they didn\'t know how to do anything. If you\'re a great person, why do you want to work for somebody you can\'t learn anything from? And you know what\'s interesting? You know who the best managers are? They are the great individual contributors who never, ever want to be a manager but decide they have to be... because no one else is going to... do as good a job." Continued here

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Billionaire CEO Sara Blakely Says These 7 Words Are the Best Career Advice She Ever Got Sometimes the simplest things are the most profound. Sara Blakely founded Spanx in her late 20s. The company made $4 million in sales in its first year and $10 million in its second year. In 2012, Forbes named Blakely the youngest self-made woman billionaire in the world. She is clearly massively successful. Yet when asked what the best advice she ever received was, she doesn't talk about success. Instead, she talks about how, as a child, her father would sit her down at the dining room table and ask her the same question: "What did you fail at this week?" He didn't want to know how many As she'd gotten. He wasn't interested in how many girl scout cookies she'd sold, how many goals she'd scored on her soccer team, or whether she'd gotten a perfect score on her math test. No, he wanted to know what she had failed at. And when she told him, do you know what his reaction was? He high-fived her. Continued here

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From self-propelled mailboxes to mail-via-missile: A century of attempts at inventing drone delivery Drone delivery might sound new, but it's been in the works for 100 years. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Google's Wing delivery drones have supplied Virginia residents with toilet paper and medicine, while some grocers have turned to drones to fulfill unprecedented demand for grocery deliveries. Late this summer, Amazon moved a crucial step closer to offering consumers drone deliveries in half an hour or less when the tech giant secured a Part 135 air carrier certificate from the Federal Aviation Administration, allowing it to operate commercial drone flights. Likewise, Walmart has partnered with drone companies DroneUp and Zipline to make contactless deliveries of COVID-19 testing kits to customers in Nevada and New York. We at Flytrex also partnered with the retail giant to explore, as Walmart put it, "how drones can deliver items in a way that's convenient, safe, and - you guessed it - fast." Continued here

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This cargo ship cuts emissions 90% using an old-fashioned trick: Sails Using sails to transport goods? An idea so old it's new again. The tens of thousands of cargo ships that travel the world's oceans - carrying everything from jeans and smartphones to cars and bananas - collectively emit more CO2 than most countries. A new ship called the Oceanbird, in development now, is designed to help: With huge, wing-like sails, it runs on wind power, but will be able to cross the Atlantic in less than two weeks, only a few days longer than a ship running on fossil fuels. For the shipping industry, which is racing to figure out how to cut emissions in line with the goals of the Paris climate agreement, the design has advantages compared to other potential solutions. Unlike cars, ships can't easily shift to electric power, since the massive size of a cargo ship means that it would need to be filled with batteries to run, leaving little room for cargo. Ships can run on liquified natural gas, but that would only partially reduce emissions. Ammonia fuel doesn't pollute as it burns but is polluting to produce. Wind energy can avoid all those challenges. Continued here