Curating the Internet: Business, leadership, and management micro-summaries for October 5, 2019

remlaps-lite (76)in #rsslog • 5 years ago

A story of crime and bravery in 1976; Harvard Business School paper advises synergy between Soul and Machine; HP cutting 7,000-9,000 jobs in next 3 years; Fed official says central bank digital currency is inevitable, and it's time to start preparing; and a Steem essay arguing that cryptocurrency is going to dominate the financial landscape and early adopters will be at the top of the food chain.

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Buried Alive: The California School Bus Kidnappings of 1976 - I was a young child at the time, so it's not surprising that I don't remember this. It's an interesting story about crime and bravery, though. Three men hijacaked a school bus full of 26 kids and the bus driver on July 15, 1976, in Chowchilla, California. The hostages were moved to vans and taken on an 11 hour drive to a rock quarry, where they were forced into a hole. The kidnappers forced the kids to give their names, addresses, and phone numbers, and then went off to seek a $5 million ransom. Fortunately for everyone, though, they didn't leave a guard behind. After some time in the hole, the hostages were led by Mike Marshall and bus driver Frank Edward Ray in escaping, at which time Marshall broke off from the main group so that he could seek help if they were captured. The kidnappers were soon apprehended, and 26 years later, 2 of the kidnappers were released from prison on parole in 2012. The third will be eligible for parole on October 8 (Tuesday). The bus driver, Frank Edward Ray, received a letter from President Ford commending him for his bravery, and went back to driving the very same bus, #1, a month after the incident. He bought the bus to save it from a junkyard, and gave it to a neighbor when he died in 2012. Today, the neighbor still keeps the bus indoors on his property.

Soul and Machine (Learning) - This Harvard Business School (HBS) working paper by David Prosperpio and about a dozen colleagues argues that without a soul, the potential for true advances in marketing is limited, and the best marketing will only arrive when marketing managers learn when to trust their instincts, and when to trust the machines. In particular, it says that soul is needed to deal with "what-if" and "but-for" scenarios, and that businesses should seek synergy by letting humans and machines both do what they're good at. Moreover, the paper argues that soul and machine are iteratively synergistic, where the insights of managers feed improvements to machine learning, which in turn, give the managers new insights. The paper gives examples from current businesses, and predicts the emergence of "virtual customers" - of which, I suppose Steem's SPS DAO could be one. Seems a little like a consequence of the theory of comparative advantage

HP to slash 7,000 to 9,000 jobs over three years as part of major restructuring - The headline says it all. That's 13-16% of their work force. I was just thinking this morning that it might be good to direct some Steem outreach toward discussion boards at TheLayoff.com web site. Maybe HP's section would be a good place to start. Laid off tech workers with a severance and time on their hands might really ramp-up the pace of development and growth.

Fed Official Says Digital Central Bank Currency Is ‘Inevitable’ - Philadelphia Federal Reserve bank president Patrick Harker said that the US dollar is in a strong position as the world's reserve currency, so the US should not be an early adopter, but it's inevitable that a central bank digital currency will eventually be issued. So, he says, the Federal Reserve needs to start understanding it now. BIS, the European Central Bank, is supporting initiatives for central banks to research and develop digital currencies.

STEEM Is it the best time to get involved with cryptocurrency? - In this post, @blind-spot argues that because it's easy to accumulate - almost free, and also secure and useful, cryptocurrency will eventually dominate the financial landscape. The author also argues that when it happens, the early adopters will be at the "top of the food chain." (A 10% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @blind-spot.)

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