Archive

Decoding Workforce Productivity: Brian Ballard

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is ush­er­ing in a sig­nif­i­cant increase in con­nect­ed machines, con­nect­ed prod­ucts. And at the same time, the peo­ple who are stand­ing next to these high­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed machines are ulti­mate­ly con­nect­ed in their home lives. They car­ry a cell phone that’s man­ag­ing their smart car, their smart home, their smart sys­tems. But they have almost no inter­ac­tion with the sys­tems at work.

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Ian Goldin

Our con­nec­tiv­i­ty not only spreads good ideas, it spreads bad ones too. Our con­nec­tiv­i­ty not only allows us to make finance trav­el around the world and help peo­ple, it means that a cas­cad­ing risk that orig­i­nates in the South of the US can be every­where with­in a mat­ter of hours. And this hyper­con­nec­tiv­i­ty, this but­ter­fly defect of glob­al­iza­tion, requires new management. 

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Hannah Dawson

The ques­tion that philoso­phers have asked since antiq­ui­ty is how should you live? What is the good life for a human being? And the two answers that have repeat­ed­ly come back time and time again are that there are two things that mat­ter. One is agency. That’s to say being in con­trol of your life, active­ly, cre­ative­ly engag­ing with the world. And the oth­er is community.

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Patrick McCray

One of the ways that indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions are inter­est­ing to think about is that they look dif­fer­ent­ly depend­ing on how and where you see them from. They look dif­fer­ent whether you see them from Europe or Asia or Africa. But regard­less of time or place, econ­o­mists and his­to­ri­ans gen­er­al­ly tend to look at indus­tri­al rev­o­lu­tions through the lens of inno­va­tion. And in my short talk today I want to encour­age a dif­fer­ent way of think­ing about this.