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Blog postThe human future of the supply chain is enmeshed with the future of absolutely everything else. The supply chain seems abstract, right? In some ways it’s quite simple: it’s just a metaphor for the connected systems that move goods from point A to point B. In other words, it’s the network of facilities, transportation systems, […]
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Blog postEvery now and then an article pops up touting subscription models as the wave of the future. And while they are future-ready, Having come up through early Netflix, and then having led customer experience and product development at Magazines.com among leadership roles in other sub-based businesses, I can tell you for sure: the model is […]
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Blog postAsking good questions is an important part of the KO insights process. Naturally, we want to define what makes a question good. There is no definitive answer to this question, but there are a few things that all good questions have in common. First, good questions are specific. They don’t try to ask too much […]
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Blog postThe headlines these days have been even more challenging than usual.* Or perhaps — hear me out — you could make that statement at almost moment ever, and people would agree: the headlines right now are more challenging than usual. Humans have a very complicated relationship with change, and that’s partly because we have a very […]
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Blog postAs a business leader, you’ve probably been eyeing the headlines about the metaverse and pondering your organization’s future there. Maybe you already have a metaverse strategy — in which case, congratulations on your virtual fashions, virtual makeup, virtual bank lobby, or whatever other virtual product you’ve already launched. Or perhaps you’re watching the news of the metaverse […]
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Blog postOne of the perks of being a lifelong sociolinguistics nerd (full disclosure: there aren’t that many) is when I can take notice of the range of terminology people use to describe my own work. It turns out people have a wide variety of ways to think about and describe the relationship between technology and humanity. […]
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Blog postSomewhere on my computer, I keep a collection of images of humans showing up in non-human contexts. These are contexts that are supposed to be sterile and devoid of humanity. If you’ve just wandered into my site on a search, that may sound like a rather odd hobby; if you’ve been here a while you’ve […]
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Blog postToday is National Optimists Day, apparently. (I mean, there’s a day for everything.) In honor of the, uh, holiday(?), I wanted to address a point of confusion that has surfaced in a few of my media interviews since launching A Future So Bright. People latch on to the word “bright” in the title as well […]
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Blog postNothing changes faster than the trends you haven’t been paying attention to. But in the past few years there’s been SO MUCH OTHER STUFF to pay attention to that you’d be forgiven for taking your eye off of the zeitgeist. That’s fundamentally why I began sharing these trends. Over the years, our savviest clients have […]
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Blog postThe following is an excerpt from my latest book, A Future So Bright: How Strategic Optimism and Meaningful Innovation Can Restore Our Humanity and Save the World: I’m not an economist by education—as I’ve previously mentioned, I was a linguist—so it has taken me a few years and a lot of reading to arrive at […]
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Blog postThis is an excerpt of the “manifesto”-style summary of some of the key ideas in my new book A Future So Bright, which will be coming out on September 7th.
You are welcome to print these pages out (and might I suggest reused or recycled paper) and hang them on your wall, give them to someone who needs to see them, or just refer back to them when you need a reminder.
Our brighter future is going to require both hope and strategy together The future of human experience is deeply -
Blog postOn the day that was and would be our wedding anniversary, it is important to me to remember the first great love of my life, Karsten Soltauer.
I’m always conflicted about milestones that represent significant days with loved ones after they’ve gone — it becomes meaningless to say “today we would have been married for 18 years” because that’s like peering into some alternate dimension in which he is still alive and we are still married. He is not and we are not, even though in this dim -
Blog postThe end of the year teaches us about letting go and renewal, if we let it.55th Street between 8th and 9th Avenues, my favorite block in Midtown during the winter As a child, I thought December was winter, and that winter meant the end of the year. Having grown up in the suburbs of Chicago, I knew gray Januaries and bleak Februaries that felt like the longest, rather than the shortest, months, and I guess if anyone asked me what season we were in before the Vernal Equinox I would hav
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Blog postA call to make our appreciation for our own good fortune more actionable for others.Atlas masked, at Rockefeller Center Most people think of Thanksgiving as the high holiday of gratitude in the calendar year, but for me it tends to be the last few weeks of December. The more time I spend reflecting on the year about to end and making plans and strategies for the year ahead, the more opportunity I find to appreciate what went well, and what could have gone worse.
In a year it was -
Blog postThere is a popular tendency, amplified perhaps by social media, to catalog all current events by the year in which they are happening, and when these current events are what we might call ”bad,“ to then blame the year itself for being a bad year. 2020, by this reckoning, feels like the worst year of our lifetimes.
But you and I, brilliant creatures that we are, both know that events aren’t dictated by the earth’s rotation of the sun, and we know that the human concept of time is arbitr -
Blog postWhile business tends to focus on the future of work and humans tend to focus on the future of jobs, the real potential for the future is in aligning them.
A baby interacting with Pepper the robot, taken from https://www.flickr.com/photos/jeena/37017614286/ (CC BY 2.0) When I speak with groups of executives about emerging technology, digital transformation, and the future of human experiences, every group eventually tends to ask the same questions about the future of work. They -
Blog postBeing a “resident” (speaker) at the House of Beautiful Business was a unique and memorable experience:
My sessions were well attended and people were engaged:
This was my first time in Lisbon — it was gorgeous. I already want to go back:
Tile everywhere:
I ate and drank like vegan royalty:
We even took a side trip to Cascais on our last day in town:
The post The House of Beautiful Business in Lisbon, November 2019 appeared first on kate
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Blog post“The first question I ask myself when something doesn’t seem to be beautiful is why do I think it’s not beautiful. And very shortly you discover that there is no reason.”
— John Cage I’ve been traveling a lot these last few years and it’s always an interesting temptation, everywhere I go, to judge the places I visit in terms of whether I could live there, whether it’s cool, whether it’s beautiful. But I find the most satisfying experiences are had when I can remind myself to appreciate -
Blog postThe Adobe Summit has been taking place in Las Vegas this week, and having attended as part of the Adobe Insiders influencers program, I’ve…
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Blog postI’m thankful to Tony and Camille Chatman for including us in their family Thanksgiving celebration — and then humbling us hard at the family domino game.
The Chatman family and me at dinner; not pictured because he’s taking the photo is Robbie Quinn
The table
Close-up of place setting
The domino game
Looking from their balcony across the East River to Long Island City, Queens
Wherever you were and whomever you were with, I hope your day was as f -
Blog post“Excuse me”—
I keep walking. As one does. Vaguely aware of two young women sitting off to the side of the sidewalk and laughing, I quickly come to the conclusion that they’re trying to ask for money.
But the voice repeats and gets to the point more quickly:
— “excusemecanyoutakeapictureofus?”
I turn to see two 20-something women sitting on a sidewalk bench bundled up for the cold and glowing with leftover laughter from whatever had them cracking up just before this m -
Blog postvia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Renaissance_humanism
What about blogs? When I first started mine, I had a small group of friends who posted pretty much daily, often nothing longer than a longish Facebook post. We all read and commented on one another’s posts.
Source: Time for a blog renaissance | David B. Thomas
Totally. I’m all for a blog renaissance, for a revival of the blogging arts, for Blogging 2.0 or 3.0 or 6.3 or whatever it would be now.
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Blog postWith humans and automation sharing many customer care responsibilities, the answer’s not totally straightforward
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Blog postthe Chicago River dyed green, photo taken by Mike Boehmer from Chicago, via Wikipedia
Although I lived in Chicago for many St. Patrick’s Days, there was only one year I actually saw the boats out dyeing the river green, and that was in 2003 as I walked to the court house with the first great love of my life, Karsten Soltauer, to get married. We paused for a while to lean over a bridge and watch the boats cruising around in the river pouring in bags of dye behind them, turning their wa -
Blog postI would never claim to know more about love than most people. All humans — and maybe non-human animals too — probably come equipped with a fairly intuitive understanding of it. But as a widow, having seen the one I then loved most in the world die, my view of what love is and what it does and what it means is perhaps unusually clear. And since I’m now remarried, I can test myself every day on how practical what I see is.
I’ve written a lot about love over the years, and I think th -
Blog postI dreamed that the title of the book I’m working on in reality, which doesn’t yet have a firm title, was “0 the Humanity” — 0 as in zero, as in binary 1s and 0s, referring of course to data and technology and their impact on humanity. Which is indeed what the book is about.
It seemed quite clever, except in the dream as I was being introduced before keynotes and book readings, people kept pronouncing it “zero the humanity.” Which sounds, well, kind of like the opposite of the underlyi -
Blog postA long time ago I read something Kevin Smith said about how if you ever thought you might be a filmmaker, guess what: you are. I don’t remember how he said it exactly, but what I took away was that if you want to be a filmmaker, you have to both decide you are a filmmaker and, y’know, actually make films.
I’m not a filmmaker, but I’m a writer. I identify as a writer. It’s easy because I’ve been one all my life. I have the body of work: I’ve written b -
Blog post2012 was one of the most profoundly life-altering years for me. I lost my husband, I became chronically injured, my business struggled from my inability to focus on it, many of my friends went through illnesses, divorces, and family deaths of their own — no kidding, it was a very hard time. But in mid-December with only two weeks left, the year did at least one thing right: it threw me in the path of someone who ultimately helped me reimagine the rest of my life as uncharted territory yet to
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Blog postI know things don’t always work out.
I know life doesn’t last. Life is finite.
I know love survives death.
But I also know sometimes love doesn’t work out, doesn’t last, doesn’t live up to all of its promises.
I know bad things happen to good people.
I know all of this.
And yet I know this, too:
I know it’s still possible to be happy.
I know it’s still possible to throw yourself wholeheartedly into love -
Blog postWe need to encode technology with the best of our humanity. Note: this manifesto generated so much interest and such encouraging feedback that it grew into a book published in 2018: Tech Humanist. Please buy, read, review, share, and keep spreading the word.
After twenty-plus years of working in web technology, digital strategy, marketing, and operations, with job titles like “intranet developer,” “content manager,” “head of customer experience,” and even “search monkey,” and afte
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