MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System

Said Dawlabani understands that economic systems theory and analysis has moved away from the necessary holistic and societal level of thought. The author presents the idea of value systems as memes, and their evolution and organic growth, to form the overarching basis of a culture. While other economic theories tend toward rigidity and an inability to forecast the future reliably, memenomic principles are designed to predict the evolution of human thought and activity, environmental changes of all types, and human value transition.

Said Dawlabani offers an open values systems approach that considers the entirety of the system of leadership. The historical analysis provide for an examination of previous approaches including the failure of trickle down economic theory. The authors presents the importance of integrating human culture and values to meet the challenges of the modern capitalist system. The author divides the book into three major sections to provide a framework for study of the cultural values systems theory as follows:

* A whole systems view on the evolution of economies
* History of the value of a subsistence economy
* The platform for functional capitalism

For me, the power of the book is how Said Dawlabani combines a comprehensive examination and framework for his cultural values systems economics, with the prescriptive approach necessary for leaders to make the transition to the new economic paradigm. The author considers the societal culture and human values to form integral parts of the economic system. This inclusive approach to economic theory is lacking in the mainstream economic thought that has become conventional wisdom. The author demonstrates the historic and current failure of those isolated theories.

Said Dawlabani shows clearly how a cultural values systems theory is essential for navigating the current economic crisis, and to break the deadlock that has stifled the capitalist system. The author understands that economists must remove the rigidity of their theories, and consider societal and cultural evolution as an integral part to a holistic understanding of the economic system. With the road map offered by Said Dawlabani, the opportunity arises to establish a new form of leadership in both government and the private sector. The author also provides examples of where that transition is already taking place, and that existing economic theory is unable to cope with or describe the transformation.

I highly recommend the groundbreaking and very important book MEMEnomics: The Next Generation Economic System by Said Elias Dawlabani, to any business leaders, political leaders, public policy makers, economists, economics students, and anyone serious about establishing a more realistic economic system based on the ever evolving human culture, society, and environments. This book takes a whole systems approach to the challenges posed by the rapid changes taking place within government and the capitalist system.

What Employees Want

Instead of dangling career dreams and money in front of your team, you should instead focus on giving them OPI — Opportunity for Positive Impact.

"Money can even be an irritant if compensation is not adequate or fair, and compensation runs out of steam quickly as a source of sustained performance," Kanter writes. "Instead, people happy in their work are often found in mission-driven organizations where people feel they have positive impact on social needs."

If your employees are working towards something important and meaningful, they will be motivated to come to work and more loyal to the team and mission. Kanter says real motivation requires what she refers to as "the three Ms" — mastery, membership, and meaning.

Make them masters.

Kanter says a boss needs to give their employees an opportunity to "develop deep skills" and become a master over their work. Employees take pride in learning, so give them the chance to learn a new skill with appropriate resources. "Even in the most seemingly routine areas, when people are given difficult problems to tackle, with appropriate and tools and support, they can do things faster, smarter, and better," she writes.

Make them members.

Membership cannot be confused with exclusivity — your job is to make everyone feel welcome. But you should build a friendly environment where employees interact across departments. "Create community by honoring individuality," she says. "Community solidarity comes from allowing the whole person to surface, which means going beyond superficial conformity to know what else people care about. Encourage employees to bring outside interests to work. Give them frequent opportunities to meet people across the organization to help them get to know one another more deeply."

Give their job meaning.

Your employees will be motivated only if their job matters to the larger whole.

BERTRAND RUSSELL, the English philosopher, was not a fan of work. In his 1932 essay, “In Praise of Idleness”, he reckoned that if society were better managed the average person would only need to work four hours a day. Such a small working day would “entitle a man to the necessities and elementary comforts of life.”
Read more: http://www.inc.com/will-yakowicz/motivate-employees-with-opportunity-for-positive-impact.html#ixzz2omRDKfFt

How to hire.
Instead of answer a most common job interview questions
 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aw1ekqxULTs&feature=share

-give them a webinars on the emergent ITC with global mentors
http://mitpeople.org/index.php?id=aboutus

James Kuffner, Google Robotics

At a military contest in Miami, a Google scientist discusses the future of robotics.
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/523096/qa-with-james-kuffner-google-robotics-researcher/

And Christmas Story with robots
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B92k044LNm4&feature=youtu.be

TOP M&A of 2013 in order to undestand future trends

1.  Google has acquired robotics engineering company Boston Dynamics

2. oDesk to merge with Elance. Just as Amazon reinvented retail, and Apple iTunes transformed the music industry, together oDesk and Elance will revolutionize the way we work. This merger will create unprecedented freedom for people to find job opportunities regardless of their location, and will allow businesses of all sizes to more easily access the best available talent.
Global staffing is a $422 billion market (according to Staffing Industry Analysts) that we believe is ripe for reinvention. Online work, any type of work that can be done via the Internet, is an emerging sector within it that SIA predicts will reach $5 billion by 2018.

3. Google has acquired mobile navigation application firm Waze

Google has acquired mobile navigation application firm Waze. The deal is worth $1.3bn, according to news agency Reuters. The Tel-Aviv start up uses live maps with real-time traffic updates, a feature Google is keen to integrate into its own offerings.

“The Waze product development team will remain in Israel and operate separately for now,” explained Brian McClendon, vice president of Google’s Geo product family. “We’re excited about the prospect of enhancing Google Maps with some of the traffic update features provided by Waze and enhancing Waze with Google’s search capabilities.”

4. Amazon has acquired TenMarks, an edtech computer program that teaches math to grades K-12. It’s part of a big wave in edtech these days:robot teachers. American Institutes for Research argues that personalized learning environments are the next wave of K–12 education reform. “Adaptive learning” is another term for the same trend.

Software like TenMarks is riding the same big data trends we’re seeing impact other fields, from recruitment and hiring to health and fitness. Students do their assignments in the program, which tracks their performance. The resulting data can be used to tailor lessons to individuals, instead of trying to fit all students in the same box. Furthermore, since the programs monitor the students’ progress, grade their assignments, and provide new lessons when students are confused, they take a lot of the work out of the teacher’s lap. Teachers can use extra time developing their in-class lessons, or checking in one-on-one to support students who are struggling.

5. Google Ventures made a $258 million investment in Uber earlier this year

6. Q&A platform Answers is announcing a big acquisition and fundraising tonight–the company is buying customer experience analytics companyForeSee, and just raised $300 million in new funding in equity from existing investors, including Summit Partners, TA Associates, AFCV and others; and in debt from SunTrust Robinson Humphrey and Silicon Valley Bank. We’ve heard that Answers paid north of $200 million for ForeSee, which raised around $20 million in funding.

What is the future of Google’s investment in robotics?

Association for Advancing Automation (A3) President Jeff Burnstein participated in a discussion on the Bloomberg Television Network “Street Smart” program. Through a satellite feed from Ann Arbor, MI, Burnstein commented on Google’s latest acquisitions of eight robotics companies, including Boston Dynamics. 


http://www.bloomberg.com/video/attack-of-the-cool-google-acquires-boston-dynamics-LsTHegJNQgq0~5VSg6R54A.html

What's the biggest impace to seed- to early-stage investing these days?

What's the biggest impace to seed- to early-stage investing these days? 

That was the driving question for this panel of early-stage investors, including Renata Quintini, partner at Felicis Ventures, Dave McClure, partner at 500 Startups, Paul Lee, partner at Lightbank and Cindy Padnos, partner at Illuminate Ventures. Alastair Goldfisher, Editor of Thomson Reuter's Venture Capital Journal was the moderator.

The panelists spoke at The Ritz in Half Moon Bay, at Amplify, an event focused on empowering females to take more leadership roles in the high-tech startup and venture ecosystem. Amplify is produced by Vator, Girls in Tech, and was hosted by Thomson Reuters. 

Here's some highlights (answers are consolidated and slightly edited):

What's the biggest impace to early-stage investing?

Seed companies are raising larger rounds compared to a year or two ago and the number of seed-stage companies has increased. More people are starting their own funds, creating a structural shift in how companies get funded. More consumer Internet investors are starting to look at enterprise investments. There's too much money in Silicon Valley, though there seems to be a scarcity of capital around the world and possibly across the country. Seed-stage investing is still a local phenomenon.

How important is it for the VC firm to help their portfolio companies raise a Series A?

McClure: 500 Startups is active in Brazil, Southeast Asia, Mexico and China. The firm has to be cognizant of "downstream" capital for their companies because follow-on capital is not often easy to come by. For instance, there are only two active firms in Mexico, and 500 Startups is invested in one of them. This is a strategy to help its downstream partners, and ultimately its own portfolio. At times, 500 Startups will provide $250k to $500k in a bridge loan to a Series A. That's not the case in the US. 

Watch the video to learn more about what the investors think about funding platforms, as well as how they see the entire venture landscape changing and what technologies they're interested in investing in.

Read more at http://vator.tv/news/2013-12-13-changes-at-the-seed-to-early-stages-of-venture-capital#36gR8LfSq65yb1bu.99

Hiring in the new brave world. People analytics

Scholarly research strongly suggests that happiness at work depends greatly on feeling a sense of agency. If the tools now being developed and deployed really can get more people into better-fitting jobs, then those people’s sense of personal effectiveness will increase. And if those tools can provide workers, once hired, with better guidance on how to do their jobs well, and how to collaborate with their fellow workers, then those people will experience a heightened sense of mastery. It is possible that some people who now skate from job to job will find it harder to work at all, as professional evaluations become more refined. But on balance, these strike me as developments that are likely to make people happier.

Because the algorithmic assessment of workers’ potential is so new, not much hard data yet exist demonstrating its effectiveness. The arena in which it has been best proved, and where it is most widespread, is hourly work. Jobs at big-box retail stores and call centers, for example, warm the hearts of would-be corporate Billy Beanes: they’re pretty well standardized, they exist in huge numbers, they turn over quickly (it’s not unusual for call centers, for instance, to experience 50 percent turnover in a single year), and success can be clearly measured (through a combination of variables like sales, call productivity, customer-complaint resolution, and length of tenure). Big employers of hourly workers are also not shy about using psychological tests, partly in an effort to limit theft and absenteeism. In the late 1990s, as these assessments shifted from paper to digital formats and proliferated, data scientists started doing massive tests of what makes for a successful customer-support technician or salesperson. This has unquestionably improved the quality of the workers at many firms.

Teri Morse, the vice president for recruiting at Xerox Services, oversees hiring for the company’s 150 U.S. call and customer-care centers, which employ about 45,000 workers. When I spoke with her in July, she told me that as recently as 2010, Xerox had filled these positions through interviews and a few basic assessments conducted in the office—a typing test, for instance. Hiring managers would typically look for work experience in a similar role, but otherwise would just use their best judgment in evaluating candidates. In 2010, however, Xerox switched to an online evaluation that incorporates personality testing, cognitive-skill assessment, and multiple-choice questions about how the applicant would handle specific scenarios that he or she might encounter on the job. An algorithm behind the evaluation analyzes the responses, along with factual information gleaned from the candidate’s application, and spits out a color-coded rating: red (poor candidate), yellow (middling), or green (hire away). Those candidates who score best, I learned, tend to exhibit a creative but not overly inquisitive personality, and participate in at least one but not more than four social networks, among many other factors. (Previous experience, one of the few criteria that Xerox had explicitly screened for in the past, turns out to have no bearing on either productivity or retention. Distance between home and work, on the other hand, is strongly associated with employee engagement and retention.)

When Xerox started using the score in its hiring decisions, the quality of its hires immediately improved. The rate of attrition fell by 20 percent in the initial pilot period, and over time, the number of promotions rose. Xerox still interviews all candidates in person before deciding to hire them, Morse told me, but, she added, “We’re getting to the point where some of our hiring managers don’t even want to interview anymore”—they just want to hire the people with the highest scores.

The online test that Xerox uses was developed by a small but rapidly growing company based in San Francisco called Evolv. I spoke with Jim Meyerle, one of the company’s co‑founders, and David Ostberg, its vice president of workforce science, who described how modern techniques of gathering and analyzing data offer companies a sharp edge over basic human intuition when it comes to hiring. Gone are the days, Ostberg told me, when, say, a small survey of college students would be used to predict the statistical validity of an evaluation tool. “We’ve got a data set of 347,000 actual employees who have gone through these different types of assessments or tools,” he told me, “and now we have performance-outcome data, and we can split those and slice and dice by industry and location.”

Evolv’s tests allow companies to capture data about everybody who applies for work, and everybody who gets hired—a complete data set from which sample bias, long a major vexation for industrial-organization psychologists, simply disappears. The sheer number of observations that this approach makes possible allows Evolv to say with precision which attributes matter more to the success of retail-sales workers (decisiveness, spatial orientation, persuasiveness) or customer-service personnel at call centers (rapport-building). And the company can continually tweak its questions, or add new variables to its model, to seek out ever stronger correlates of success in any given job. For instance, the browser that applicants use to take the online test turns out to matter, especially for technical roles: some browsers are more functional than others, but it takes a measure of savvy and initiative to download them.

There are some data that Evolv simply won’t use, out of a concern that the information might lead to systematic bias against whole classes of people. The distance an employee lives from work, for instance, is never factored into the score given each applicant, although it is reported to some clients. That’s because different neighborhoods and towns can have different racial profiles, which means that scoring distance from work could violate equal-employment-opportunity standards. Marital status? Motherhood? Church membership? “Stuff like that,” Meyerle said, “we just don’t touch”—at least not in the U.S., where the legal environment is strict. Meyerle told me that Evolv has looked into these sorts of factors in its work for clients abroad, and that some of them produce “startling results.” Citing client confidentiality, he wouldn’t say more.