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Riccardo Tonon

Business and Innovation

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    Why Great Success Can Bring Out the Worst Parts of Our Personalities

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    By any measure, Elon Musk is exceptionally successful. Having cofounded and sold PayPal, he quickly moved on to launching a range of ventures with world-changing aspirations for how we generate energy, transport ourselves and our goods, interface with machines, and explore our solar system. These ventures are unified in their vision — really more of an obsessive quest — for a more sustainable and resilient future for humanity, executed through a mixture of brilliant engineering and out-of-the-box thinking. To be sure, the ultimate success of these endeavors remains an open question, but so far they have defied expectations and inspired people around the world.

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    To Make Self-Driving Cars Safe, We Also Need Better Roads and Infrastructure

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    The big question around self-driving cars, for many people, is: When will the technology be ready? In other words, when will autonomous vehicles be safe enough to operate on their own? But there has been far less attention paid to two equally important questions: When will the driving environment be ready to accommodate self-driving cars? And where will this technology work best?

    Self-driving cars are the most challenging automation project ever undertaken. Driving requires a great deal of processing and decision making, which must be automated. On top of that, there are many unpredictable external factors that must be accounted for, and therefore many ways in which the driving environment must change.

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    Managers Think They’re Good at Coaching. They’re Not.

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    Are you successful at coaching your employees? In our years studying and working with companies on this topic, we’ve observed that when many executives say “yes,” they’re incorrectly answering the question. Why? For one, managers tend to think they’re coaching when they’re actually just telling their employees what to do — and this behavior is often reinforced by their peers. This is hardly an effective way to motivate people and help them grow, and it can result in wasted time, money, and energy.

    According to Sir John Whitmore, a leading figure in executive coaching, the definition of coaching is “unlocking a person’s potential to maximize their own performance. It is helping them to learn rather than teaching them.” When done right, coaching can also help with employee engagement; it is often more motivating to bring your expertise to a situation than to be told what to do.

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    Why Western Digital Firms Have Failed in China

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    Many leading American digital firms, including Google, Amazon, eBay, and Uber, have successfully expanded internationally by introducing their products, services, and platforms in other countries. However, they have all failed in China, the world’s largest digital market.

    The widely touted reasons for these failures include censorship by the Chinese government and cultural differences between China and the West. While these factors undoubtedly have played a role, such explanations are overly simplistic. Google, for example, has succeeded in dominating many foreign markets that have radically different political systems and cultures (including Indonesia, Thailand, and Saudi Arabia). And these factors have not stopped Western multinationals from succeeding in China in car manufacturing, fast-moving consumer goods, and even sectors where culture plays a key role, such as beer, coffee shops, fast food, and the film industry. There are deeper reasons behind the systematic failure of Western digital firms in China. (The term “digital firms” refers to those companies that from their inception have focused on digital services enabled by the internet and related technologies, including mobile. It does not include traditional IT firms that rely on sales of hardware or software as their main source of revenue.)

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    The Best Way for Netflix to Keep Growing

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    Netflix has a lot to gain by becoming a multisided platform.

    Currently, Netflix is in the business of buying or making content, which it sells consumers access to at prices and on terms it fully controls (a monthly subscription). That’s unlike a platform such as YouTube, which enables myriad content providers to sell directly to users at prices they control, with limited intervention by YouTube other than the enforcement of some content guidelines.

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    The Simple Question That Can Make or Break a Startup

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    There’s an unassuming restaurant in Dallas called Chop House Burger, home to handspun milkshakes, truffle parmesan french fries, and six innovative burgers. It’s an eight-year-old restaurant in an industry where 80% of new entrants fail in the first five years. And stitched into its origin story is a clue to why some products (and businesses) succeed in the market while most wither and die.

    The burger place spun out of a The Dallas Chop House, a high-end steakhouse two blocks away. The Chop House was known for its ribeye, filet mignon, and flat iron steaks, dry-aged in the restaurant with Himalayan sea salt. In an effort to diversify their menu, the owners also offered a gourmet burger. Despite how good the steaks were, the burger became one of the most popular items on the menu. So the owners decided to build a restaurant around it.

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    Build Self-Awareness with Help from Your Team

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    There are lots of compelling reasons to build a better team. Great teams deliver stronger results, faster. They’re more innovative. They challenge you to learn more quickly and to be at your best.  And, let’s face it — they’re simply more fun to work with.

    Recently, I found a new reason to build a better team — to address the fact that most of us are surprisingly lacking in self-awareness. Researcher and author Tasha Eurich uncovered this disturbing statistic through her multi-year study on the topic of self-awareness: 95% of us think we are quite self-aware, but only about 10-15% of us actually are.

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    What’s the Purpose of Companies in the Age of AI?

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    Recent advances in artificial intelligence (AI) and computer technology are causing us to think again about some really basic questions: what is a firm?  What can firms do better than markets?  And what are the distinctive qualities of firms in a world of smart contracts and AI?

    While there has been a lot of discussion about “what’s left for humans?” as AI improves at exponential rates — the customary answer is that humans need to focus on the things they are uniquely good at, such as creativity, intuition, and personal empathy — I think we now have to ask, “what’s left for firms?”

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    There’s Only One Way to Break into China’s Crowded Retail Market

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    China’s two retailing powerhouses, online commerce pioneer Alibaba and social media-gaming pioneer Tencent, have systematically established a duopoly of record proportions in record time. Combined, they have spent more than $20 billion in the past 12 months alone to change the way people in China shop. (The precise value of their investments cannot be determined, given that many of them are undisclosed or private deals. This figure, along with some others in this article, are drawn from a Bain analysis.)

    It started when online retailer Alibaba made the seemingly counterintuitive expansion into the brick-and-mortar world. To do this, they invested heavily in everything from Lianhua supermarkets to Intime department stores to electronics retailer Suning. Alibaba is now working to connect China’s millions of mom-and-pop stores with their internet-based distribution network, an initiative called Ling Shou Tong. It has opened futuristic Hema Xiansheng supermarkets, where consumers use the Alipay app to order groceries or prepared food for delivery to their homes—in many places, within 30 minutes.

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    Posted on September 17, 2019 by admin
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    How B2B Software Vendors Can Help Their Customers Benchmark

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    Knowing which organizations perform the best on any particular dimension used to require subjective surveys or painstaking research. Today, the data to answer those questions exists — it’s captured by the software-as-a-service firms whose services companies use to run their businesses. Mainstream software companies are beginning to hold “data mirrors” up to their customers, allowing scoring and benchmarking of their customers’ strategies. We’ve already seen that it’s possible to use external data to evaluate firms on what business models they are employing, and what those business models mean for their valuations.  Those analyses rely on publicly available data sources, but software providers have accumulated growing amounts of private data on almost every aspect of their customers’ technology, operations, people, and strategies. It’s time that these data accumulators begin to share insights back to the creators of all this data, and several firms are beginning to do so.

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