Finding your ikigai
I had a busy day, but I still find time to squeeze in a short existential crisis.
Tolg a friend that while I’m happy, I’m not sure I have an ikigai any more.
He said “Huh?” so I decided to explain the word.
Declan Dunn once explained that “you don’t search Google for the meaning of life”
He’s right. But at least you can find some good instruction on how to find it!
Ikigai. The reason you get up in the morningI
Google is sharing its management tools with the world
Written by Leah Fessler
Speaking at his alma mater in January, Sundar Pichai, Google’s low-profile CEO, revealed his key to effective management: “Let others succeed.”
Enacting Pichai’s advice is easier said than done. But Google is sharing some tools that might help. Its Re:Work blog is offering a series of instructive documents used by managers at Google. They cover everything from feedback and career development to setting agendas for one-on-ones, and codify the insights Google gleaned from spending years analyzing reviews and other observable data at the company to determine essential leadership traits.
Here’s an overview of what’s available. Each section header below has the link to the corresponding documentation from Google.
Googlers evaluate their managers on a semi-annual basis with a 13-question survey. The first 11 measure whether employees agree or disagree with statements like “My manager shows consideration for me as a person.” The final two questions (“What would you recommend your manager keep doing?” and “What would you have your manager change?”) are open-ended.
At Google, these survey responses are reported confidentially, and managers receive a report of anonymized, aggregated feedback, plus verbatim answers to the two open-ended questions. “The feedback a manager gets through this survey is purely developmental,” Google says. “It isn’t directly considered in performance or compensation reviews, in the hope that Googlers will be honest and constructive with their feedback.”
Career conversations worksheet
Google’s management analysis reveals that above all, employees value knowing that their manager is invested in their personal success and career development. To help managers effectively discuss development with their direct reports, Google uses the GROW model – which organizes the conversation into four recommended sections:
- Goal: What do you want? Establish what the team member really wants to achieve with their career.
- Reality: What’s happening now? Establish the team member’s understanding of their current role and skills.
- Options: What could you do? Generate multiple options for closing the gap from goal to reality.
- Will: What will you do? Identify achievable steps to move from reality to goal.
To encourage personal well-being and work-life balance, Google uses the popular goal-setting practice “One Simple Thing.” The goal should be specific enough to measure its impact on one’s well-being. “Managers can encourage team members to explain how pursuing this one thing won’t negatively affect their work,” Google explains. “That goal then becomes part of a team member’s set of goals that managers should hold them accountable for, along with whatever work-related goals they already have.”
Some examples of “One Simple Thing” goals include “I will take a one hour break three times a week to work out,” and “I will not read emails on the weekends.”
At Google, the highest-rated managers hold frequent one-on-one meetings with their direct reports. However, as most leaders know, individual check-ins can often feel rushed and disorganized. To squeeze the most out of each one-on-one (which Google managers are advised to hold every week or two) Googlers set up a shared meeting agenda ahead of time – which both the manager and the report should contribute to.
Some agenda items Google suggests include:
- Check-in and catch-up questions: “What can I help you with?” and “What have you been up to?”
- Roadblocks or issues
- Goal updates
- Administrative topics (e.g., upcoming vacations, expense reports)
- Next steps to confirm actions and agreements
- Career development and coaching
New manager training course materials
As Google explains, “These course materials were originally designed for Google managers to help them transition from individual contributor roles to manager roles.” As anyone who has done this can attest, conducting the transition gracefully requires a bit of perspective shifting, and more than a little awareness building.
The course materials include a facilitator guide (to help whoever is training the new managers), a new manager student workbook (including interactive exercises), and the presentation slides that Google trainers use internally.
This article originally appeared at: https://qz.com/1058563/these-are-googles-tools-for-effective-management/.
Colombia building house out of recycled plastic
Amazon’s private brands have gone from $0 to $2.5 billion in sales in less than a decade
Cloud driver profiles mean any Tesla could automatically become your Tesla
Imagine getting into any car and it knowing who you are and how you like your car configured
I’d rather just have the car/driver take me where I need to go, but this idea sounds so cool I had to share
Tesla has a plan to move its personalized driver profiles, which track things like seat and steering wheel position, to the cloud. This would mean Tesla drivers can download to them to theoretically any connected Tesla vehicle and have all their driver preferences in place, including regenerative braking, temperature units, map settings and more.
Tesla CEO and founder Elon Musk tweeted the news about server-stored profiles in response to a question from a Tesla owner, which actually wasn’t specifically asking about driver preferences that follow you across vehicles.
Musk noted that Tesla’s plan was to move “all info and settings” to cloud-based storage, so that “any Tesla you drive in the world automatically adjusts to you.” I remember when driver profiles specific to vehicles were introduced -it was like a revelation. Being able to have that same experience even when you’re popping into a rental car, a friend’s vehicle, or a Tesla connected to a future brand-wide opt-in ride sharing service would be amazing.
Tesla’s also setting the stage here for something that will likely become even more important to automakers in general in the future: A persistent, data-rich profile of a user that extends over time, much like a Google account. The auto industry seems bound to evolve to place more emphasis on shared services in place of traditional ownership, and that kind of customer relationship will be key as we move towards that.
Tesla is arguably already best-positioned to build those kinds of lifetime customer bonds, but features like cloud profiles could help deepen the connection, giving the carmaker an advantage that can’t be matched by technical innovation alone.
This article originally appeared at: https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/21/cloud-driver-profiles-mean-any-tesla-could-automatically-become-your-tesla/.
Microsoft researchers achieve new conversational speech recognition milestone
Markforged announces two 3D printers that produce items as strong as steel
With fewer cash registers, Hershey tries to re-create the impulse buy online – Digiday
The convenience of picking up an item while standing in line has been a big influence on store design.
And why we have a zillion Convenience Stores.
Merchandising is sometimes neglected in ecommerce stores, though the state of the art in merchandising is Amazon and the algorithms. Putting on a headset to shop may just be a novelty as it’s not as convenient as unwrapping a candy bar while the clerk sets pump number 7 for 5 gallons of unleaded.
The rise of self-checkouts at supermarkets and convenience stores has led to a drastic decrease in the unplanned purchases that are crucial to Hershey’s sales. As a result, the maker of Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups and Almond Joy chocolate bars is trying to trigger impulse candy sales online.
Most candy-buying decisions are made in the aisles rather than at registers. But people still grab sweets while waiting in line for the cashier, so the dwindling number of cash registers means Hershey is missing a chance to nudge consumers into last-minute purchases, said Brian Kavanagh, senior director of retail evolution for Hershey. Purchases used to be all made at the main cash register, but now 60 percent are done at self-checkouts and another 10-15 percent are done through mobile devices, he said.
E-commerce is a single-digit yet growing business for Hershey, according to its quarterly earnings report in July. Re-creating that unplanned purchase online is not easy. While most online shopping today starts with search, people tend not to intentionally search for candy, Kavanagh said.
The idea is to use new technologies like virtual reality to make shopping interesting, he said. Hershey just started doing a test at its innovation center with an online retailer, which Hershey declined to name, where people put on the HTC Vive VR headset and see different brands and product categories in everyday environments like a living room-based on the idea that shopping can be done anywhere. When viewers click on a brand or a product category, they see snack options like a bottled tea and a Reese’s peanut butter cup.
Kavanagh envisions the possibility of a retailer’s shopping app giving users the option of shopping through a virtual experience. The user could then put on VR goggles, walk around a fake retail environment and shop-increasing the chances of them stumbling on products like Hershey candy that they wouldn’t have intentionally searched for.
Michael Rucker, co-founder of VR ad platform OmniVirt, said that VR has potential for retailers. With VR, shoppers can try new products that may not be in stock at the store. The retailer can see if a consumer looked at the blue shoes or the black shoes, and on average how long the person needed to look at those shoes before they decided to purchase them, for instance.
“There is a tremendous amount of data captured through VR, so the opportunity for VR in retail is huge,” said Rucker.
But for the time being, VR seems to be more hype than reality because the consumer adoption rate is low and the cost for brands to develop an immersive VR experience would be high.
Beyond VR, Kavanagh’s team recently worked with an unnamed grocery chain to create a seasonal aisle on its website. So instead of searching for products on the chain’s website, visitors could browse an online aisle that was organized by theme, such as Easter, and because there were no physical limitations, refrigerated and shelf-stable items could sit side by side. The result was that shoppers discovered items they wouldn’t have necessarily searched for and basket size was three times higher than usual, translating to more sales, according to Kavanagh.
Kavanagh’s team also plans to do tests with retailers who send digital reminders to people who order on mobile and pick up in-store. For instance, if a person orders something through a retailer’s app, at checkout the app will send the person a reminder, asking if they want to add items that they’ve bought before.
While digital is important, Hershey will continue working with retailers to make candy aisles in physical stores more tempting. The company’s tests show that aisles with eye-catching designs get people to buy more candy that wasn’t on their shopping lists, Kavanagh said.
“We don’t want to leave the physical world because brick-and-mortar retail is not dead, and we cannot afford to lose more consumers,” he said. “We are working hard with our retailers to make the same 60-foot aisle fun and engaging.”
Image courtesy of Hershey
This article originally appeared at: https://digiday.com/marketing/hershey-invests-more-in-digital-shopping/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=digidaydis&utm_source=daily&utm_content=170823.
Google touts Titan security chip to market cloud services
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Alphabet Inc’s (GOOGL.O) Google this week will disclose technical details of its new Titan computer chip, an elaborate security feature for its cloud computing network that the company hopes will enable it to steal a march on Amazon.com Inc (AMZN.O) and Microsoft Corp (MSFT.O).
Titan is the size of a tiny stud earring that Google has installed in each of the many thousands of computer servers and network cards that populate its massive data centers that power Google’s cloud services.
Google is hoping Titan will help it carve out a bigger piece of the worldwide cloud computing market, which is forecast by Gartner to be worth nearly $50 billion.
A Google spokeswoman said the company plans to disclose Titan’s technical details in a blog post on Thursday.
Titan scans hardware to ensure it has not been tampered with, Neal Mueller, head of infrastructure product marketing for Google Cloud Platform, said in a recent interview. If anything has been changed, Titan chip will prevent the machine from booting.
Data center operators are concerned that cyber criminals or nation-state hackers could compromise their servers, which are mostly made by Asian hardware companies, before they even reach the United States.
“It allows us to maintain a level of understanding in our supply chain that we otherwise wouldn’t have,” Mueller said.
Neither Amazon.com nor Microsoft – which hold 41 percent and 13 percent of cloud market share, respectively, according to Synergy Research Group – have said if they have similar features. In response to inquiries from Reuters, representatives of both companies pointed to the various ways they use encryption and other measures to secure their data centers.
Google holds just 7 percent of the worldwide cloud market. Titan is part of a strategy Google hopes will differentiate its services and attract enterprise customers from sectors with complex compliance regulations, such as those in financial services and the medical field. Google announced Titan in March.
“Having physical safeguards goes a long way of telling the story of how seriously Google takes people’s security,” said Kim Forrest, vice president at Fort Pitt Capital Group.
Google has struggled to compete with Amazon Web Services, which has more features, and Microsoft, which has long-standing relationships with enterprises, said Lydia Leong, an analyst for Gartner.
Leong was skeptical of Google’s strategy.
“Security is a hallmark for both AWS and Microsoft,” she said this week. “Google has a lot more work to do.”
Google uses Titan chips to protect the servers running its own services like search, Gmail and YouTube, and the company claims Titan has already driven sales. It points to Metamarkets, a real-time analytics firm, as a customer it landed in part due to Titan.
Dan Cornell, principal at Denim Group, a firm that helps tech organizations build secure systems, said the rise of nation-state hacking makes such a feature timely.
“Those level of adversaries certainly have an incentive to hack or to have influence over the security of hardware. It’s interesting of Google to say, ‘Here’s one part of the hardware that we’re going to control.'”
This article originally appeared at: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-alphabet-google-titan-idUSKCN1B22D6.