Corporations began trumpeting their Corporate Social Responsibility in the 80s and 90s following a series of landmark corporate scandals that gave Big Business a bad name. The corporate psychopath had emerged into the collective conscious as a new bogeyman, and companies fell over themselves to avoid being tarred with that image. Fast forward to 2018 and CSR is more crucial than ever, with pressure to toe the line coming from all sides.
2015’s Mad Max: Fury Road was all about water scarcity, how it can be exploited in order to wield power, and how desperate people can get when their access to water is restricted or cut off. The film predicts a future in which violent despots can gain control of water supplies and use them to manipulate populations. This futuristic conflict is based entirely on access to water.
Running a business used to be an analog affair based on straightforward principles. Retail? Buy low, sell high. Services? Give a little, charge a lot. Rinse and repeat. But then a flood of zeroes and ones invaded business, disrupted everything and changed the way we work, making us dependent on it in order to perpetuate itself. Whether we become slaves to the beast or tame it to serve our own ends depends on us.
Learning Chinese is not as hard as you might think. It just looks scary to Westerners because of the unfamiliar writing. In fact, Mandarin Chinese is refreshingly simple and logical to learn. Here’s an example from the British Council in which they introduce us to Chinese characters:
The relentless pace of Formula 1 innovation is legendary. Performance on track depends on the constant examination and improvement of every aspect of a complex machine and its track team in order to gain a small but significant edge on rivals, who are themselves all striving in the same way. Competition is so fierce in F1 that the sport’s HQ have launched a series of management events aimed at bringing some of that constant innovation thinking into the business world.
The Institute for Digital Business Strategy is a new online school with the aim of helping executives in Africa and other continents to manage the process of realigning their strategies in the face of digital disruption.
What is the real value of an MBA? The skills developed, or the prestige of the issuing institution? For those seeking to add an MBA to their resume, their answer to that question will make the difference between spending thousands of dollars and spending no dollars at all.
Drones are filling our skies. If companies like Amazon manage to negotiate their way past aviation restrictions, drones will soon be delivering our shopping to our homes and workplaces. No longer just toys and aerial photography tools, drones are here to stay. They are used in search and rescue, disaster relief, bomb disposal, military and civilian reconnaissance, archaeology, infrastructure inspection, anti-poaching, conservation, construction and law enforcement.
In 1233 a papal bull decreed that anyone admitted to the mastership at the University of Toulouse should be allowed to teach freely in any other university. Ever since then it has been set in stone that the rite of passage into a master’s degree is a three or four-year undergraduate degree. Pretty much by definition, a master’s is a follow-on from a bachelor’s degree.
Sometimes the Earth bites. Some would say ‘sometimes the Earth bites back,’ with climate change and rising incidents of flooding in mind. But most natural disasters are not man-made. There’s very little we can do at the moment about earthquakes and volcanoes, for example. And hurricanes and typhoons were around long before we started filling the atmosphere with CO2. So studying natural disasters and preparing for them shouldn’t be undertaken with a sense of guilt about self-inflicted damage. It should be done with a simple sense of self-preservation.
Ever since the robot dog K-9 appeared in Doctor Who in the 1970s, geeks of a certain age have fantasized about having a metallic sidekick that does most things a real dog would do but doesn’t need to poop and can beat them at chess.
