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.
Forbes is angling for a bite of the Continuing Professional Education market with learn.forbes.com, its new eLearning platform launched June 6. Aspiring professionals, the bedrock of Forbes’ readership, can now choose from 60-plus self-paced online courses focused on leadership, entrepreneurship, business, IT, sales and cybersecurity.
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.
The World Health Organization recently added workplace burnout to its International Classification of Diseases as an occupational phenomenon. It isn’t classed as a disease but a ‘factor influencing health status’.
It is no surprise that if the place where you spend most of your waking life is getting you down, then you are not going to be the happiest bunny on the block and eventually something will have to give. The WHO define burnout as follows:
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.
A new video lecture course has emerged which brings a fresh angle on the ancient and classical worlds, delivered by a lecturer whose enthusiasm for her subject shines through and brings ‘dead’ history to life. If you are looking for a deep dive into the civilizations which preceded the Middle Ages – how they lived, what they believed, how they rose and fell, what they left behind and their influence on successive civilizations right up to the present day – then this video lecture series is for you.
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.
