Men hate to shop. It’s a truism that Bud Light ads have hammered into us for decades. Ikea has absorbed it, too, and come up with a novel solution in its Australian stores. It’s launched a special in-store area called Mänland, a kind of daycare where husbands and boyfriends can hang out with their own kind (i.e., other Cro-Magnon morons) while their wives and girlfriends shop. Judging by the video below, this makes everyone happy—particularly the guys, who don’t seem to mind the suggestion that they’re essentially imbecilic toddlers who need to be dropped off and picked up like they’re still in preschool. The area is even modeled off the actual Ikea toddler-care area—and women are given a buzzer to remind them to collect their significant other after 30 minutes of shopping. (Instead of arts and crafts, the guys play foosball and Xbox games, watch sports, and eat free hot dogs.) It’s a nice little PR gambit, and it got lots of play in the Australian media—and would surely be a hit in the U.S. too. Because really, the men aren’t needed until the assembly phase anyway.
US Treasury Secretary’s Debt Advice to Europe Generates Some Blowback
Joshua Chaffin and Alex Barker in Wroclaw and Kerin Hope in Athens:
However, some eurozone finance ministers hit back at Mr Geithner’s comments, questioning the usefulness of his visit.
“I found it peculiar that even though the Americans have significantly worse fundamental data than the eurozone, that they tell us what we should do and when we make a suggestion … that they say no straight away,” said Maria Fekter, Austria’s finance minister.
Sweden’s Anders Borg said: “we need to make progress, but it’s quite clear the US has a big debt problem and the situation would be better if the US could show a sustainable way forward.”
Amazing.
The Rise of the Generalist
I don’t know if I’ve heard anyone say this and I am not quite sure what I think about it myself, but one way to view the economy in the Information Age is that the returns to specialization are falling.
So, those who like such things can go all the way back to Adam Smiths pin factory and think about all the tasks involved in making pins and how each person could become more suited to that task and learn the ins and outs of it.
However, in the information age I can in many cases write a program to repeatedly perform each of these tasks and record every single step that it makes for later review by me. The individualized skill and knowledge is not so important because it can all be dumped into a database.
United States health care may need reverse innovation
The realization that the American health care system must simultaneously decrease per-capita cost and increase quality has created the opportunity for the United States to learn from low and middle-income countries. “Reverse innovation” describes the process whereby an inexpensive innovation is used first in countries with limited infrastructure and resources and then spreads to industrialized nations like the United States.
The traditional model of innovation has involved the creation of high end products by companies in industrialized nations and the spread of these products to the developing world by adapting them to function in low and middle-income countries. Reverse innovation reverses the direction of spread with the United States borrowing new ideas and products designed for less wealthy countries in order to deliver health care more efficiently.
Resource challenged low and middle-income countries are different from the United States in at least six ways that can serve as catalysts for such reverse innovation: 1) affordability, 2) leapfrog technologies, 3) service ecosystems, 4) robust systems, 5) new applications, and 6) the absence of intermediaries.
Germany’s Choice
Germany is the world’s #2 exporter, very close behind China. In 2010 it exported a total of 960 billion euro, amounting to 42% of its GDP. Its trade surplus came to 153 billion euro, almost 7% of GDP. Impressive stuff, no doubt, and an achievement that Germans are justly proud of.
But, not all surpluses are created equal… 35 billion of that surplus, a whopping 23%, was accounted by just four countries: Italy, Spain, Greece and Portugal. Yes, to a very large extent the PIGSs’ munching at the trough was what kept Germans working in their factories. And if you just add France, another country that is currently screeching towards the borderline of fiscal probity – at least according to financial markets – the numbers get even more interesting. Germany’s PIGS+F trade surplus jumps to 64 billion, a full 42% of Germany’s entire trade surplus. In GDP terms (trade surplus is GDP-additive), PIGS+F surplus accounts for nearly 3% of Germany’s economy.
Germany Plans for Possible Greek Default
The rest of the euro zone is losing patience with Greece. German Finance Minister Wolfgang Schäuble is no longer convinced that Athens can be saved from bankruptcy. His experts at the Finance Ministry have been working on scenarios exploring what would happen if Greece left the euro zone. By SPIEGEL Staff.
Herman Van Rompuy is an influential man in Europe. He is already president of the European Council, the assembly of the European Union’s heads of state and government. Soon he will also serve as the chief representative of the euro zone, if all goes according to plan.
Van Rompuy’s new role as “Mr. Euro” is a highly prestigious position. German Chancellor Angela Merkel thinks highly of the unassuming Belgian politician, who conceals a propensity for toughness and efficiency behind his seemingly humble appearance.
People are biased against creative ideas, studies find
The next time your great idea at work elicits silence or eye rolls, you might just pity those co-workers. Fresh research indicates they don’t even know what a creative idea looks like and that creativity, hailed as a positive change agent, actually makes people squirm.
“How is it that people say they want creativity but in reality often reject it?” said Jack Goncalo, ILR School assistant professor of organizational behavior and co-author of research to be published in an upcoming issue of the journal Psychological Science. The paper reports on two 2010 experiments at the University of Pennsylvania involving more than 200 people.
Don Norman: Google doesn’t get people, it sells them
“What is Google? What do they sell?” asks Don Norman, the author of The Design of Everyday Things and a demigod of the design world.
It’s a question that gets asked a lot, especially as the company’s power and products continue to expand. In a talk on Friday at the dConstruct conference in Brighton, England, he pointed out that –despite the complexity of the organization — the answer usually looks pretty simple.
“They have lots of people, lots of servers, they have Android, they have Google Docs, they just bought Motorola. Most people would say ‘we’re the users, and the product is advertising’,” he said. “But in fact the advertisers are the users and you are the product.”
Then he went further. “They say their goal is to gather all the knowledge in the world in one place, but really their goal is to gather all of the people in the world and sell them.”
“Can Intervention Work?” by Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus Can Intervention Work?
Rory Stewart and Gerald Knaus; Review by Seth Jones:
In his classic “Twenty-Seven Articles,” published in the Arab Bulletin in August 1917, the renowned British Army officer T.E. Lawrence advised beginners to use prudence when working with Arab armies. “Do not try to do too much with your own hands,” he warned. “Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are to help them, not to win it for them.”
It was sage advice from a seasoned warrior who traipsed around the Middle East wearing local garb, speaking several Arab dialects and living with Arab irregulars during their struggle against the Ottoman Empire. Since that time, the United States and Europe have engaged in dozens of interventions across the globe, from occupied Germany after World War II to the soft, limestone cave complexes of Afghanistan after 9/11. In some cases, as in Germany and Bosnia, these interventions have achieved impressive results. But in others, as in Somalia in the early 1990s, they have gone gravely awry.
Haven Bound A Q&A with Icelandic parliamentarian Birgitta Jónsdóttir
In 2008, Iceland was hit hard by the global financial crisis. Citizen outrage and political unrest followed, sparking a people-powered shift in government policies. In June of 2010, the parliament passed the Icelandic Modern Media Initiative (IMMI), a resolution to draft the world’s strongest free speech protections. Then, this spring, the government began crowdsourcing a new constitution online, and produced a draft in late July. Alysia Santo spoke with Birgitta Jónsdóttir, a member of parliament and a one-time WikiLeaks spokesperson, about her goals to transform Iceland into a haven for freedom of speech and transparency. A condensed version of this conversation appeared in the September/October 2011 issue of the Columbia Journalism Review.
You have said that journalists are information refugees.
In this fragile metamorphosis, where most of the media is moving on to the Internet but has not figured out how to make money, it’s all about what gets the most clicks. It’s usually not in-depth or investigative reporting. These types of reporting are very often quite expensive compared to the number of clicks it gets. We’re hoping to make Iceland into a place where if you take the chance to blow the whistle, your story is going to appear.
My driving force is bloggers in countries like China, Tibet, Sri Lanka, and others. They are risking their lives to tell us what’s really going on. I want to be able to provide them safe haven. At the very least we can make sure that their stories remain up no matter what.