Does Your Boss Care About You?

Think Different

More specifically, does your boss, or company as a whole, care about your state of mind? About your levels of motivation and engagement?

I can only assume, from both personal experiences and from numerous recent studies into the high levels of disengagement and demotivation of employees in businesses, that the answer is generally a resounding “No!”.

Abdication, Absolution and Blame

I’ve often felt that organisations I’ve worked with don’t give a damn about their folks’ state of mind – mine included. Moreover, it seems a widespread condition to regard an employee’s motivation and level of engagement as something each employee is entirely responsible for, on their own. And thus that disengaged employees are themselves to blame for their state of disengagement. With the likely and direct remedy of simply letting them go (firing them or, more passively – and more commonly – waiting until…

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Meganews – a new magazine publishing model ?

Ricoh Production Print Blog

Recently in Stockholm we launched perhaps the ultimate Print on Demand Publishing solution.  Meganews is a revolutionary new concept which brings magazines to consumers.

The Meganews concept

Meganews is an unmanned newspaper vending machine with internet access that prints, in real-time, a copy of the magazine you have selected. You purchase your magazine ​​through screens on the kiosk and pay by credit card. It only takes two minutes from making your purchase until a freshly printed magazine drops down the hatch.

At launch, consumers can choose from over 200 magazines and journals.

Partnerships

The Swedish journalist and TV profile Lars Adaktusson, his brother Hans and their company Mega News Sweden came up with the idea. Behind the software, the card terminal and the screens is the technology consultant company Sweco.

The industry design company LA + B has designed the news stand.

Last but not least  Ricoh’s digital colour cutsheet technology…

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The MLK Imperative in an Era of “No Excuses”

dr. p.l. (paul) thomas

My father was a hard-ass, €”a Southern version of the Red Forman-type made popular in That 70’s Show. I grew up, then, in a “no excuses” environment rooted in the 1950s work ethic my father personified. [1]*

Mine was a working-class background: My paternal grandfather (for whom I was named) ran the small-town gas station where I grew up, and my maternal grandfather worked in the yarn mills in the hills of North Carolina.

Way before the “no excuses” ideology consumed the education reform movement of the 21st century, “no excuses” ruled my childhood and teen years. My behavior at home and school? No excuses. My academic achievement? No excuses.

Two important realizations, however, stem from that childhood and young adulthood of mine.

First, most of my academic, scholarly, and personal success occurred in spite of (not because of) that “no excuses” upbringing.

And second, in retrospect I recognize…

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Mobilize 2013: Making the case for a shared bandwidth future

Gigaom

Let’s face it: Most of us in the U.S. live in world revolving around two broadband poles. We have access to cheap, plentiful bandwidth at home, and we have access to cheap, plentiful bandwidth at work. But everywhere in between broadband access is often limited, expensive or not available at all.

Yet at any given locale in any populated area of the U.S. there can be dozens if not hundreds of potential connections around us, such as Wi-Fi, Bluetooth or cellular networks. We don’t tap into all of those potential connections because we don’t “own” them. They belong to the homes or businesses running those Wi-Fi routers, to the device owner hiding his Bluetooth link, or to the mobile carriers operating networks you don’t subscribe to. We live in a world with enormous amounts of potential bandwidth, but also one with strictly enforced constraints on who can use it.

“We’ve been…

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BPM vs. BPMS: How To Think Big and Act Small

The Surprisingly Large Energy Footprint of the Digital Economy [UPDATE]

The Social Dimension of Dialectical Truth: Hegel’s Idea of Objective Spirit, Angelica Nuzzo

Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective

Author Information: Angelica Nuzzo, Graduate Center and Brooklyn College, CUNY, anuzzo@gc.cuny.edu

Nuzzo, Angelica. 2013. “The Social Dimension of Dialectical Truth: Hegel’s Idea of Objective Spirit.” Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 2 (8): 10-25.

The PDF of the article gives specific page numbers. Shortlink: http://wp.me/p1Bfg0-RG

Please refer to:

• Fuller, Steve 2012. “Social Epistemology: A Quarter Century Itinerary.”Social Epistemology 26 (3-4): 267-283.
• Special Issue 2: On the Future Direction of Social Epistemology.

Abstract

In this essay I argue for the claim that Hegel’s dialectical idea of truth, which is articulated in its pure forms in the Logic as the process of comprehension of partial positions of truth in an ultimate systematic unity, is socially and historically constituted within the structures of what Hegel calls “spirit.” I start by bringing to the fore those controversial issues of the Goldman-Fuller debate on which Hegel has important suggestions to make. In placing Hegel…

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Timothy Bonadies

In The World is Flat (2007), Friedman described the ‘Triple Convergence,’ or a confluence of three systemic changes that created a new economic and technological environment. These changes, which generally included the emergence of new players in the world economy, the opening of new world markets, and the development of new processes and habits for collaboration, enabled companies and individuals to approach knowledge management and business processes from a horizontal perspective. This perspective, which redefined knowledge as a community, rather than exclusive property, was made possible by the development, use, and widespread adoption of communications technologies, data storage devices, and other internet-related technological advancements. According to Friedman, the ‘Convergence’ lessened the importance of systemic control and increased the need for companies and individuals to expand access to knowledge, consider outcomes and effects instead of hierarchical power relationships, and develop new tools and technologies to increase collaboration (2007).

Within this environment…

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Transition Consciousness

Having realised that the first chapter of Henri Bortoft’s new work Taking Appearance Seriously  – The Dynamic Way of Seeing in Goethe and European Thought is available to read on line via Floris Books, I thought I would take this opportunity to explain why I think this chapter alone is well worth reading.

This chapter is quite remarkable in that it introduces us to the major themes that would occupy Bortoft for the majority of his lifetime, and so I thought that I would summarise just part of the chapter here, while highlighting not only the book but some other interesting and related reading too.

Henri began developing his critique of General Systems Theory in the 1970s, and in his first major book The Wholeness of Nature he devotes the first part to his conception of authentic and counterfeit wholes, which is a dynamic way of seeing the whole…

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