Andrea Ovans:

In the 1989 movie Dead Poet’s Society, Robin Williams, playing the iconoclastic English teacher John Keating, dismisses the notion that you can judge the perfection of a poem mathematically by plotting how artfully it employs meter, rhyme, and metaphor against how important the subject is. Rather than have his students think they could graph the relative merits of, say, a Shakespeare sonnet against a poem by Alan Ginsberg, he has them rip up their textbooks. Data can’t tell us anything about stories, he’s saying, as pages of Understanding Poetry, by Dr. J. Evans Pritchard, Ph.D., fly all over the room.
 
 Businesspeople are often advised to turn their data into stories to make them more persuasive. And that is certainly good advice. But they are given precious few tools to help them do that. It turns out though, John Keating notwithstanding, that graphs can be remarkably useful in demonstrating the mechanics underpinning an effective story. One person who’d given this a lot of thought was novelist Kurt Vonnegut, a real-life literary iconoclast if there ever was one.

Franz H. Messerli, M.D.:

Chocolate consumption could hypothetically improve cognitive function not only in individuals but in whole populations. Could there be a correlation between a country’s level of chocolate consumption and its total number of Nobel laureates per capita?

Steve Denning:

And after it’s happened, there’s no going back. Capitalism’s process of creative destruction then takes over: knowledge can’t be put back in the bottle. Once it is known that it is possible to operate in this better, faster way, it will inexorably become the new normal. Customers will expect nothing less. Except where government regulation or private monopolies preserve the status quo, firms that don’t adjust over time won’t survive.
 
 Becoming Agile will steadily become a requirement just to stay in business. In effect, for most companies, failure to acquire digital agility will be an existential threat and so, establishing digital agility has become in effect a strategic necessity.
 
 How practical is it?
 Richard Straub, President of the Drucker Society Europe wrote that “improving the software in small increments seems to work much better than having a mega update in longer cycles. It seems to work better for all stake-holders – customers, employees and the investors.” He also had a few more practical questions worth exploring:

Tom Hamburger and Matea Gold:

Since then, Google has soared to near the top of the city’s lobbying ranks, placing second only to General Electric in corporate lobbying expenditures in 2012 and fifth place in 2013.
 
 The company gives money to nearly 140 business trade groups, advocacy organizations and think tanks, according to a Post analysis of voluntary disclosures by the company, which, like many corporations, does not reveal the size of its donations. That’s double the number of groups Google funded four years ago.
 
 This summer, Google will move to a new Capitol Hill office, doubling its Washington space to 55,000 square feet — roughly the size of the White House.

Medill Watchdog:

Last Sunday, The Times’ Elisabeth Rosenthal had another in her continuing periodic, and generally excellent, examinations of the costs of health care. This article focused on the cost of devices to treat chronic diseases, including Type 1 diabetes.
 
 “Today, the routine care costs of many chronic illnesses eclipse that of acute care because new treatments that keep patients well have become a multibillion-dollar business opportunity for device and drug makers and medical providers,” Rosenthal wrote. The captive audience of people suffering from type 1 diabetes “has spawned lines of high-priced gadgets and disposable accouterments, borrowing business models from technology companies like Apple: Each pump and monitor requires the separate purchase of an array of items that are often brand and model specific. A steady stream of new models and updates often offer dubious improvement: colored pumps; talking, bilingual meters; sensors reporting minute-by-minute sugar readouts.”

Gillian Tett:

A few short years ago, “subprime” was almost an expletive. During the financial crisis, mortgages linked to subprime borrowers – or those with poor credit history – caused devastating losses; so much so that many asset managers declared they would never touch subprime again.
 
 But the financial world has a short memory, particularly when easy money and innovation collide. In recent months subprime lending has quietly staged a surprisingly powerful return, not in relation to real estate, but another American passion – cars. Some wonder how long it will be before this new boom causes another wave of casualties, not just among naive consumers, but investors too.
 
 The historical echoes are uncanny. During most of the past decade the amount of car-related debt grew only modestly. Yet outstanding car loans, which totalled $700bn in 2010, have jumped by a quarter in the past three years. This has led to a sharp increase in car sales, benefiting groups such as General Motors.

John Koetsier:

This past year, digital advertising online and via mobile crossed the $40 billion mark for the first time ever, according to the Internet Advertising Bureau. Since 2004, the average growth rate has been 18 percent. And this year, digital ad revenues surpassed broadcast television for the first time.
 
 Not shockingly, mobile is leading the charge.
 
 Search remains the largest overall category, at $18.4 billion, and display hit $7.9 billion, according to the IAB’s numbers, but those categories are growing much slower than mobile and digital video ads. Search is “only” growing at 8.6 percent, while mobile ad revenue jumped 110 percent last year, and digital video ad revenue has tripled over the past few years to $2.8 billion.

John Hagel III:

Business strategy has evolved dramatically over the past four decades in response to the Big Shift that is re-shaping our global business landscape. We’re on the cusp of yet another shift that will determine who wins and who loses in the years ahead.
 
 We’ve recently been exploring some key elements required to escape from the dark side of technology: passion, institutional innovation and movements shaped by narratives.
 
 Today, we’ll look at the importance of new approaches to strategic advantage. These new approaches offer the potential to learn faster in ways that will be very difficult for others to copy. In a world of mounting performance pressure, this is a powerful advantage.
 
 A brief history
 
 Business strategy emerged in full force in the 1970’s and 1980’s with a strong focus on structural advantage. The essence of structural advantage was simple: find barriers to entry that will protect a company from competition. These barriers could take many forms: for example, geographic, economic, technological (patents) or regulatory. This made sense in a push based world: the key was to build walls to prevent others from pushing you out of your leadership position.
 
 But here’s the problem. The Big Shift is ultimately about the convergence of two powerful forces: digital technology infrastructures and long-term shifts in public policy towards economic liberalization. These two forces together are systematically and significantly reducing barriers to entry and barriers to movement on a global scale. The structural advantages that used to provide safe havens became less and less effective. If you’re an incumbent, welcome to the dark side!

Aboud Dandachi:

As a Syrian in Istanbul, watching the campaigning for the recently concluded 2014 Turkish local elections made me feel like a kid looking into a sumptuous candy store. For the first time in my life, I experienced first-hand the end-result and ideals the Syrian revolution was supposed to have bought to my own country; the democratic process in all its glory.
 
 Multiple political parties and candidates with banners and posters filling every area. The campaign offices with tables overflowing with electioneering pamphlets, staffed by volunteers sporting their respective party’s distinct colors. And roving vans blaring out campaign music. I loved hearing those vans in my neighborhood. They exemplified the very essence of a civilized society, one that resolves its differences not through guns, but at the ballot box. To a refugee who had left his own country in the midst of a devastating war, those campaign vans represented a veritable miracle; a functioning pluralistic, democratic society in the Middle East.
 
 Having lived my adult life in no less than fourteen cities in the Gulf and Levant, I moved to Istanbul in September 2013. After six months, I can unequivocally say that this metropolis is the standard by which Arab countries should be measuring themselves. Without a doubt, Istanbul is the city all Arab cities should have aspired to be.

Autumn Whitefield-Madrano:

Yesterday, I was informed that I’d “unlocked” the “VIB Level” of Sephora’s customer reward program. What this means in Sephoraspeak is that by “earning” 350 “points” at the store, I will receive seasonal VIB-only gifts—presumably along the lines of the free lip gloss I received whilst shopping during my birthday month, back when I was merely a Sephora “Beauty Insider”—that I will have advance access to sales, and that I get “dibs” on new products, so that I will be the first lady on the block to have NARS’s newest nail polish in Quivering Otter, or whatever the color of the season is.
 
 What this means in you-and-me-speak is that I have spent more than $350 at Sephora—not, as the company would put it, “earned” more than 350 “points” at Sephora—since this time last year.
 
 It was a shock to realize that I’d spent $350 at Sephora in the past 12 months, to be sure, but my financial navel-gazing is another post altogether. What “unlocking” this “VIB Level” made me think about was customer reward programs, and what we’re supposed to get out of them. With many customer loyalty programs, you actually save money. You might do this immediately/directly, as in my drugstore’s practice of advertising “specials” that are only “specials” if you are literally a card-carrying member of the drugstore’s loyalty program, or it might be savings down the line, as with frequent-flier miles. But the point is: You save money, as in cash, as in you have a compelling financial interest to use the loyalty program (which, of course, means that to some degree you’re loyal to the vendor, though of course consumers can belong to multiple loyalty programs, making them not loyal at all).