Design Thinking

We need more mad designers focused on customer experience and business model innovation. If you don't have design talent in your organization doing more than product and website design you are making a mistake. Whether you are interested in business model innovation or not you should be leveraging design thinking and process to improve your customer experience. It is a requirement for business model innovation. In fact, maybe we need to bang together the heads of mad scientists and mad designers.

(via Fortune)

Endettement étudiant

Un étudiant du MBA à Harvard qui a pris le taureau par les cornes pour éliminer ses dettes.

La pollution à Beijing

Une étude qui démontre que les efforts pour améliorer la qualité de l'air à Beijing pendant les jeux olympiques ont porté fruit.

MIT et Harvard Online

Ça s'en vient. (via The Atlantic)

Orage au-dessus de Montréal

The Demon Storm from operatique on Vimeo.

Une autre opportunité manquée

En ces temps de magasinage d'auto, un site qui donne de l'information pertinente. (via Fortune)

Les barges de Paducah

Bon article sur l'industrie du transport par barges aux États-Unis.

Director vs Facilitator

George C. Edwards III, a political scientist at Texas A. & M., who has sparked a quiet revolution in the ways that academics look at Presidential leadership, argues in “The Strategic President” that there are two ways to think about great leaders. The common view is of a leader whom Edwards calls “the director of change,” someone who reshapes public opinion and the political landscape with his charisma and his powers of persuasion. Obama’s many admirers expected him to be just this.

Instead, Obama has turned out to be what Edwards calls “a facilitator of change.” The facilitator is acutely aware of the constraints of public opinion and Congress. He is not foolish enough to believe that one man, even one invested with the powers of the Presidency, can alter the fundamentals of politics. Instead, “facilitators understand the opportunities for change in their environments and fashion strategies and tactics to exploit them.” Directors are more like revolutionaries. Facilitators are more like tacticians. Directors change the system. Facilitators work the system. Obama’s first three years as President are the story of his realization of the limits of his office, his frustration with those constraints, and, ultimately, his education in how to successfully operate within them. A close look at the choices Obama made on domestic policy, based on a review of hundreds of pages of internal White House documents, reveals someone who is canny and tough—but who is not the President his most idealistic supporters thought they had elected.

(from the Obama Memos, The New Yorker)

NTIC

On ne profite vraiment du numérique que quand on a formé son esprit sans lui.

Comme la triste impression que ça va faire mal

Une triste vieillesse.

Le tiers des ménages a atteint la limite maximale d’endettement, qui est d’avoir des dettes totales représentant 160 % du revenu disponible. Notre endettement privé moyen est maintenant égal à celui des Américains au moment du krach immobilier de 2008.

Maintenant, cette spirale de l’endettement maximal est largement le fait de gens de 45 ans et plus qui devraient être en train de préparer leur retraite.

Pourquoi est-il si difficile au Québec de prendre des décisions politiques de bon sens élémentaire, comme le retour des péages ou moduler les tarifs des garderies selon les revenus des usagers ?

Être coincé financièrement oblige à penser à court terme. Forcément, des enjeux qui exigent de penser à long terme sembleront moins prioritaires. Réparer des écoles, défendre votre langue ou faire un pays seront des questions très abstraites quand vous voyez le postier venir déposer une enveloppe dont vous connaissez l’angoissant contenu.

Et c’est toute la collectivité qui s’en trouve perdante.