The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed May 2015 at TEDSalon NY2015
Chip Kidd: The art of first impressions -- in design and life
Book designer Chip Kidd knows all too well how often we judge things by first appearances. In this hilarious, fast-paced talk, he explains the two techniques designers use to communicate instantly — clarity and mystery — and when, why and how they work. He celebrates beautiful, useful pieces of design, skewers less successful work, and shares the thinking behind some of his own iconic book covers.
Transcript:
Blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah blah, blah blah, blah blah blah blah blah blah. Blah blah blah, blah.
So what the hell was that? Well, you don't know because you couldn't understand it. It wasn't clear. But hopefully, it was said with enough conviction that it was at least alluringly mysterious.
Clarity or mystery? I'm balancing these two things in my daily work as a graphic designer, as well as my daily life as a New Yorker every day, and there are two elements that absolutely fascinate me.
Here's an example. Now, how many people know what this is? Okay. Now how many people know what this is? Okay. Thanks to two more deft strokes by the genius Charles M. Schulz, we now have seven deft strokes that in and of themselves create an entire emotional life, one that has enthralled hundreds of millions of fans for over 50 years. This is actually a cover of a book that I designed about the work of Schulz and his art, which will be coming out this fall, and that is the entire cover. There is no other typographic information or visual information on the front, and the name of the book is "Only What's Necessary." So this is sort of symbolic about the decisions I have to make every day about the design that I'm perceiving, and the design I'm creating.
So clarity. Clarity gets to the point. It's blunt. It's honest. It's sincere. We ask ourselves this. ["When should you be clear?"]
Now, something like this, whether we can read it or not, needs to be really, really clear. Is it?
This is a rather recent example of urban clarity that I just love, mainly because I'm always late and I am always in a hurry. So when these meters started showing up a couple of years ago on street corners, I was thrilled, because now I finally knew how many seconds I had to get across the street before I got run over by a car. Six? I can do that. (Laughter)
So let's look at the yin to the clarity yang, and that is mystery. Mystery is a lot more complicated by its very definition. Mystery demands to be decoded, and when it's done right, we really, really want to. ["When should you be mysterious?"] In World War II, the Germans really, really wanted to decode this, and they couldn't.
Here's an example of a design that I've done recently for a novel by Haruki Murakami, who I've done design work for for over 20 years now, and this is a novel about a young man who has four dear friends who all of a sudden, after their freshman year of college, completely cut him off with no explanation, and he is devastated. And the friends' names each have a connotation in Japanese to a color. So there's Mr. Red, there's Mr. Blue, there's Ms. White, and Ms. Black. Tsukuru Tazaki, his name does not correspond to a color, so his nickname is Colorless, and as he's looking back on their friendship, he recalls that they were like five fingers on a hand. So I created this sort of abstract representation of this, but there's a lot more going on underneath the surface of the story, and there's more going on underneath the surface of the jacket. The four fingers are now four train lines in the Tokyo subway system, which has significance within the story. And then you have the colorless subway line intersecting with each of the other colors, which basically he does later on in the story. He catches up with each of these people to find out why they treated him the way they did.
And so this is the three-dimensional finished product sitting on my desk in my office, and what I was hoping for here is that you'll simply be allured by the mystery of what this looks like, and will want to read it to decode and find out and make more clear why it looks the way it does.
["The Visual Vernacular."]
This is a way to use a more familiar kind of mystery. What does this mean? This is what it means. ["Make it look like something else."] The visual vernacular is the way we are used to seeing a certain thing applied to something else so that we see it in a different way.
This is an approach I wanted to take to a book of essays by David Sedaris that had this title at the time. ["All the Beauty You Will Ever Need"] Now, the challenge here was that this title actually means nothing. It's not connected to any of the essays in the book. It came to the author's boyfriend in a dream. Thank you very much, so -- (Laughter) -- so usually, I am creating a design that is in some way based on the text, but this is all the text there is. So you've got this mysterious title that really doesn't mean anything, so I was trying to think: Where might I see a bit of mysterious text that seems to mean something but doesn't? And sure enough, not long after, one evening after a Chinese meal, this arrived, and I thought, "Ah, bing, ideagasm!" (Laughter) I've always loved the hilariously mysterious tropes of fortune cookies that seem to mean something extremely deep but when you think about them -- if you think about them -- they really don't. This says, "Hardly anyone knows how much is gained by ignoring the future." Thank you. (Laughter) But we can take this visual vernacular and apply it to Mr. Sedaris, and we are so familiar with how fortune cookie fortunes look that we don't even need the bits of the cookie anymore. We're just seeing this strange thing and we know we love David Sedaris, and so we're hoping that we're in for a good time.
["'Fraud' Essays by David Rakoff"] David Rakoff was a wonderful writer and he called his first book "Fraud" because he was getting sent on assignments by magazines to do things that he was not equipped to do. So he was this skinny little urban guy and GQ magazine would send him down the Colorado River whitewater rafting to see if he would survive. And then he would write about it, and he felt that he was a fraud and that he was misrepresenting himself. And so I wanted the cover of this book to also misrepresent itself and then somehow show a reader reacting to it.
This led me to graffiti. I'm fascinated by graffiti. I think anybody who lives in an urban environment encounters graffiti all the time, and there's all different sorts of it. This is a picture I took on the Lower East Side of just a transformer box on the sidewalk and it's been tagged like crazy. Now whether you look at this and think, "Oh, that's a charming urban affectation," or you look at it and say, "That's illegal abuse of property," the one thing I think we can all agree on is that you cannot read it. Right? There is no clear message here. There is another kind of graffiti that I find far more interesting, which I call editorial graffiti. This is a picture I took recently in the subway, and sometimes you see lots of prurient, stupid stuff, but I thought this was interesting, and this is a poster that is saying rah-rah Airbnb, and someone has taken a Magic Marker and has editorialized about what they think about it. And it got my attention.
So I was thinking, how do we apply this to this book? So I get the book by this person, and I start reading it, and I'm thinking, this guy is not who he says he is; he's a fraud. And I get out a red Magic Marker, and out of frustration just scribble this across the front. Design done. (Laughter) And they went for it! (Laughter) Author liked it, publisher liked it, and that is how the book went out into the world, and it was really fun to see people reading this on the subway and walking around with it and what have you, and they all sort of looked like they were crazy. (Laughter)
["'Perfidia' a novel by James Ellroy"] Okay, James Ellroy, amazing crime writer, a good friend, I've worked with him for many years. He is probably best known as the author of "The Black Dahlia" and "L.A. Confidential." His most recent novel was called this, which is a very mysterious name that I'm sure a lot of people know what it means, but a lot of people don't. And it's a story about a Japanese-American detective in Los Angeles in 1941 investigating a murder. And then Pearl Harbor happens, and as if his life wasn't difficult enough, now the race relations have really ratcheted up, and then the Japanese-American internment camps are quickly created, and there's lots of tension and horrible stuff as he's still trying to solve this murder. And so I did at first think very literally about this in terms of all right, we'll take Pearl Harbor and we'll add it to Los Angeles and we'll make this apocalyptic dawn on the horizon of the city. And so that's a picture from Pearl Harbor just grafted onto Los Angeles. My editor in chief said, "You know, it's interesting but I think you can do better and I think you can make it simpler." And so I went back to the drawing board, as I often do. But also, being alive to my surroundings, I work in a high-rise in Midtown, and every night, before I leave the office, I have to push this button to get out, and the big heavy glass doors open and I can get onto the elevator. And one night, all of a sudden, I looked at this and I saw it in a way that I hadn't really noticed it before. Big red circle, danger. And I thought this was so obvious that it had to have been done a zillion times, and so I did a Google image search, and I couldn't find another book cover that looked quite like this, and so this is really what solved the problem, and graphically it's more interesting and creates a bigger tension between the idea of a certain kind of sunrise coming up over L.A. and America.
["'Gulp' A tour of the human digestive system by Mary Roach."]
Mary Roach is an amazing writer who takes potentially mundane scientific subjects and makes them not mundane at all; she makes them really fun. So in this particular case, it's about the human digestive system. So I'm trying to figure out what is the cover of this book going to be. This is a self-portrait. (Laughter) Every morning I look at myself in the medicine cabinet mirror to see if my tongue is black. And if it's not, I'm good to go. (Laughter) I recommend you all do this. But I also started thinking, here's our introduction. Right? Into the human digestive system. But I think what we can all agree on is that actual photographs of human mouths, at least based on this, are off-putting. (Laughter) So for the cover, then, I had this illustration done which is literally more palatable and reminds us that it's best to approach the digestive system from this end. (Laughter) I don't even have to complete the sentence. All right.
["Unuseful mystery"] What happens when clarity and mystery get mixed up? And we see this all the time. This is what I call unuseful mystery. I go down into the subway -- I take the subway a lot -- and this piece of paper is taped to a girder. Right? And now I'm thinking, uh-oh, and the train's about to come and I'm trying to figure out what this means, and thanks a lot. Part of the problem here is that they've compartmentalized the information in a way they think is helpful, and frankly, I don't think it is at all. So this is mystery we do not need. What we need is useful clarity, so just for fun, I redesigned this. This is using all the same elements. (Applause) Thank you. I am still waiting for a call from the MTA. (Laughter) You know, I'm actually not even using more colors than they use. They just didn't even bother to make the 4 and the 5 green, those idiots. (Laughter) So the first thing we see is that there is a service change, and then, in two complete sentences with a beginning, a middle and an end, it tells us what the change is and what's going to be happening. Call me crazy! (Laughter)
["Useful mystery"] All right. Now, here is a piece of mystery that I love: packaging. This redesign of the Diet Coke can by Turner Duckworth is to me truly a piece of art. It's a work of art. It's beautiful. But part of what makes it so heartening to me as a designer is that he's taken the visual vernacular of Diet Coke -- the typefaces, the colors, the silver background -- and he's reduced them to their most essential parts, so it's like going back to the Charlie Brown face. It's like, how can you give them just enough information so they know what it is but giving them the credit for the knowledge that they already have about this thing? It looks great, and you would go into a delicatessen and all of a sudden see that on the shelf, and it's wonderful. Which makes the next thing -- ["Unuseful clarity"] -- all the more disheartening, at least to me. So okay, again, going back down into the subway, after this came out, these are pictures that I took. Times Square subway station: Coca-Cola has bought out the entire thing for advertising. Okay? And maybe some of you know where this is going. Ahem.
"You moved to New York with the clothes on your back, the cash in your pocket, and your eyes on the prize. You're on Coke." (Laughter) "You moved to New York with an MBA, one clean suit, and an extremely firm handshake. You're on Coke." (Laughter) These are real! (Laughter) Not even the support beams were spared, except they switched into Yoda mode. (Laughter) "Coke you're on." (Laughter) ["Excuse me, I'm on WHAT??"] This campaign was a huge misstep. It was pulled almost instantly due to consumer backlash and all sorts of unflattering parodies on the web -- (Laughter) -- and also that dot next to "You're on," that's not a period, that's a trademark. So thanks a lot.
So to me, this was just so bizarre about how they could get the packaging so mysteriously beautiful and perfect and the message so unbearably, clearly wrong. It was just incredible to me.
So I just hope that I've been able to share with you some of my insights on the uses of clarity and mystery in my work, and maybe how you might decide to be more clear in your life, or maybe to be a bit more mysterious and not so over-sharing. (Laughter)
And if there's just one thing that I leave you with from this talk, I hope it's this: Blih blih blih blah. Blah blah blih blih. ["'Judge This,' Chip Kidd"] Blih blih blah blah blah. Blah blah blah.
Blah blah.
(Applause)
In this blog, teachers, students and all those who have some kind of interest in the English language will find useful, interesting, curious and funny things to be used in their classes or for their personal enjoyment.
Sunday, June 28, 2015
MED/GralInt-TED Talks-Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?
Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria mean we're entering a post-antibiotic world — and it won't be pretty. There are, however, things we can do ... if we start right now.
Transcript:
This is my great uncle, my father's father's younger brother. His name was Joe McKenna. He was a young husband and a semi-pro basketball player and a fireman in New York City. Family history says he loved being a fireman, and so in 1938, on one of his days off, he elected to hang out at the firehouse. To make himself useful that day, he started polishing all the brass, the railings on the fire truck, the fittings on the walls, and one of the fire hose nozzles, a giant, heavy piece of metal, toppled off a shelf and hit him. A few days later, his shoulder started to hurt. Two days after that, he spiked a fever. The fever climbed and climbed. His wife was taking care of him, but nothing she did made a difference, and when they got the local doctor in, nothing he did mattered either.
They flagged down a cab and took him to the hospital. The nurses there recognized right away that he had an infection, what at the time they would have called "blood poisoning," and though they probably didn't say it, they would have known right away that there was nothing they could do.
There was nothing they could do because the things we use now to cure infections didn't exist yet. The first test of penicillin, the first antibiotic, was three years in the future. People who got infections either recovered, if they were lucky, or they died. My great uncle was not lucky. He was in the hospital for a week, shaking with chills, dehydrated and delirious, sinking into a coma as his organs failed. His condition grew so desperate that the people from his firehouse lined up to give him transfusions hoping to dilute the infection surging through his blood.
Nothing worked. He died. He was 30 years old.
If you look back through history, most people died the way my great uncle died. Most people didn't die of cancer or heart disease, the lifestyle diseases that afflict us in the West today. They didn't die of those diseases because they didn't live long enough to develop them. They died of injuries -- being gored by an ox, shot on a battlefield, crushed in one of the new factories of the Industrial Revolution -- and most of the time from infection, which finished what those injuries began.
All of that changed when antibiotics arrived. Suddenly, infections that had been a death sentence became something you recovered from in days. It seemed like a miracle, and ever since, we have been living inside the golden epoch of the miracle drugs.
And now, we are coming to an end of it. My great uncle died in the last days of the pre-antibiotic era. We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple infections such as the one Joe had will kill people once again.
In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance. Briefly, it works like this. Bacteria compete against each other for resources, for food, by manufacturing lethal compounds that they direct against each other. Other bacteria, to protect themselves, evolve defenses against that chemical attack. When we first made antibiotics, we took those compounds into the lab and made our own versions of them, and bacteria responded to our attack the way they always had.
Here is what happened next: Penicillin was distributed in 1943, and widespread penicillin resistance arrived by 1945. Vancomycin arrived in 1972, vancomycin resistance in 1988. Imipenem in 1985, and resistance to in 1998. Daptomycin, one of the most recent drugs, in 2003, and resistance to it just a year later in 2004.
For 70 years, we played a game of leapfrog -- our drug and their resistance, and then another drug, and then resistance again -- and now the game is ending. Bacteria develop resistance so quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided making antibiotics is not in their best interest, so there are infections moving across the world for which, out of the more than 100 antibiotics available on the market, two drugs might work with side effects, or one drug, or none.
This is what that looks like. In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, identified a single case in a hospital in North Carolina of an infection resistant to all but two drugs. Today, that infection, known as KPC, has spread to every state but three, and to South America, Europe and the Middle East. In 2008, doctors in Sweden diagnosed a man from India with a different infection resistant to all but one drug that time. The gene that creates that resistance, known as NDM, has now spread from India into China, Asia, Africa, Europe and Canada, and the United States.
It would be natural to hope that these infections are extraordinary cases, but in fact, in the United States and Europe, 50,000 people a year die of infections which no drugs can help. A project chartered by the British government known as the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year.
That is a lot of deaths, and yet, the chances are good that you don't feel at risk, that you imagine these people were hospital patients in intensive care units or nursing home residents near the ends of their lives, people whose infections are remote from us, in situations we can't identify with.
What you didn't think about, none of us do, is that antibiotics support almost all of modern life.
If we lost antibiotics, here's what else we'd lose: First, any protection for people with weakened immune systems -- cancer patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, premature babies.
Next, any treatment that installs foreign objects in the body: stents for stroke, pumps for diabetes, dialysis, joint replacements. How many athletic baby boomers need new hips and knees? A recent study estimates that without antibiotics, one out of ever six would die.
8:01
Next, we'd probably lose surgery. Many operations are preceded by prophylactic doses of antibiotics. Without that protection, we'd lose the ability to open the hidden spaces of the body. So no heart operations, no prostate biopsies, no Cesarean sections. We'd have to learn to fear infections that now seem minor. Strep throat used to cause heart failure. Skin infections led to amputations. Giving birth killed, in the cleanest hospitals, almost one woman out of every 100. Pneumonia took three children out of every 10.
More than anything else, we'd lose the confident way we live our everyday lives. If you knew that any injury could kill you, would you ride a motorcycle, bomb down a ski slope, climb a ladder to hang your Christmas lights, let your kid slide into home plate? After all, the first person to receive penicillin, a British policeman named Albert Alexander, who was so ravaged by infection that his scalp oozed pus and doctors had to take out an eye, was infected by doing something very simple. He walked into his garden and scratched his face on a thorn. That British project I mentioned which estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year also predicts that if we can't get this under control by 2050, not long, the worldwide toll will be 10 million deaths a year.
How did we get to this point where what we have to look forward to is those terrifying numbers? The difficult answer is, we did it to ourselves. Resistance is an inevitable biological process, but we bear the responsibility for accelerating it. We did this by squandering antibiotics with a heedlessness that now seems shocking. Penicillin was sold over the counter until the 1950s. In much of the developing world, most antibiotics still are. In the United States, 50 percent of the antibiotics given in hospitals are unnecessary. Forty-five percent of the prescriptions written in doctor's offices are for conditions that antibiotics cannot help. And that's just in healthcare. On much of the planet, most meat animals get antibiotics every day of their lives, not to cure illnesses, but to fatten them up and to protect them against the factory farm conditions they are raised in. In the United States, possibly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year go to farm animals, not to humans, creating resistant bacteria that move off the farm in water, in dust, in the meat the animals become. Aquaculture depends on antibiotics too, particularly in Asia, and fruit growing relies on antibiotics to protect apples, pears, citrus, against disease. And because bacteria can pass their DNA to each other like a traveler handing off a suitcase at an airport, once we have encouraged that resistance into existence, there is no knowing where it will spread.
This was predictable. In fact, it was predicted by Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin. He was given the Nobel Prize in 1945 in recognition, and in an interview shortly after, this is what he said:
"The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of a man who succumbs to infection with a pencillin-resistant organism." He added, "I hope this evil can be averted."
Can we avert it? There are companies working on novel antibiotics, things the superbugs have never seen before. We need those new drugs badly, and we need incentives: discovery grants, extended patents, prizes, to lure other companies into making antibiotics again.
But that probably won't be enough. Here's why: Evolution always wins. Bacteria birth a new generation every 20 minutes. It takes pharmaceutical chemistry 10 years to derive a new drug. Every time we use an antibiotic, we give the bacteria billions of chances to crack the codes of the defenses we've constructed. There has never yet been a drug they could not defeat.
This is asymmetric warfare, but we can change the outcome. We could build systems to harvest data to tell us automatically and specifically how antibiotics are being used. We could build gatekeeping into drug order systems so that every prescription gets a second look. We could require agriculture to give up antibiotic use. We could build surveillance systems to tell us where resistance is emerging next.
Those are the tech solutions. They probably aren't enough either, unless we help. Antibiotic resistance is a habit. We all know how hard it is to change a habit. But as a society, we've done that in the past. People used to toss litter into the streets, used to not wear seatbelts, used to smoke inside public buildings. We don't do those things anymore. We don't trash the environment or court devastating accidents or expose others to the possibility of cancer, because we decided those things were expensive, destructive, not in our best interest. We changed social norms. We could change social norms around antibiotic use too.
I know that the scale of antibiotic resistance seems overwhelming, but if you've ever bought a fluorescent lightbulb because you were concerned about climate change, or read the label on a box of crackers because you think about the deforestation from palm oil, you already know what it feels like to take a tiny step to address an overwhelming problem. We could take those kinds of steps for antibiotic use too. We could forgo giving an antibiotic if we're not sure it's the right one. We could stop insisting on a prescription for our kid's ear infection before we're sure what caused it. We could ask every restaurant, every supermarket, where their meat comes from. We could promise each other never again to buy chicken or shrimp or fruit raised with routine antibiotic use, and if we did those things, we could slow down the arrival of the post-antibiotic world.
But we have to do it soon. Penicillin began the antibiotic era in 1943. In just 70 years, we walked ourselves up to the edge of disaster. We won't get 70 years to find our way back out again.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Maryn McKenna: What do we do when antibiotics don’t work any more?
Penicillin changed everything. Infections that had previously killed were suddenly quickly curable. Yet as Maryn McKenna shares in this sobering talk, we've squandered the advantages afforded us by that and later antibiotics. Drug-resistant bacteria mean we're entering a post-antibiotic world — and it won't be pretty. There are, however, things we can do ... if we start right now.
Transcript:
This is my great uncle, my father's father's younger brother. His name was Joe McKenna. He was a young husband and a semi-pro basketball player and a fireman in New York City. Family history says he loved being a fireman, and so in 1938, on one of his days off, he elected to hang out at the firehouse. To make himself useful that day, he started polishing all the brass, the railings on the fire truck, the fittings on the walls, and one of the fire hose nozzles, a giant, heavy piece of metal, toppled off a shelf and hit him. A few days later, his shoulder started to hurt. Two days after that, he spiked a fever. The fever climbed and climbed. His wife was taking care of him, but nothing she did made a difference, and when they got the local doctor in, nothing he did mattered either.
They flagged down a cab and took him to the hospital. The nurses there recognized right away that he had an infection, what at the time they would have called "blood poisoning," and though they probably didn't say it, they would have known right away that there was nothing they could do.
There was nothing they could do because the things we use now to cure infections didn't exist yet. The first test of penicillin, the first antibiotic, was three years in the future. People who got infections either recovered, if they were lucky, or they died. My great uncle was not lucky. He was in the hospital for a week, shaking with chills, dehydrated and delirious, sinking into a coma as his organs failed. His condition grew so desperate that the people from his firehouse lined up to give him transfusions hoping to dilute the infection surging through his blood.
Nothing worked. He died. He was 30 years old.
If you look back through history, most people died the way my great uncle died. Most people didn't die of cancer or heart disease, the lifestyle diseases that afflict us in the West today. They didn't die of those diseases because they didn't live long enough to develop them. They died of injuries -- being gored by an ox, shot on a battlefield, crushed in one of the new factories of the Industrial Revolution -- and most of the time from infection, which finished what those injuries began.
All of that changed when antibiotics arrived. Suddenly, infections that had been a death sentence became something you recovered from in days. It seemed like a miracle, and ever since, we have been living inside the golden epoch of the miracle drugs.
And now, we are coming to an end of it. My great uncle died in the last days of the pre-antibiotic era. We stand today on the threshold of the post-antibiotic era, in the earliest days of a time when simple infections such as the one Joe had will kill people once again.
In fact, they already are. People are dying of infections again because of a phenomenon called antibiotic resistance. Briefly, it works like this. Bacteria compete against each other for resources, for food, by manufacturing lethal compounds that they direct against each other. Other bacteria, to protect themselves, evolve defenses against that chemical attack. When we first made antibiotics, we took those compounds into the lab and made our own versions of them, and bacteria responded to our attack the way they always had.
Here is what happened next: Penicillin was distributed in 1943, and widespread penicillin resistance arrived by 1945. Vancomycin arrived in 1972, vancomycin resistance in 1988. Imipenem in 1985, and resistance to in 1998. Daptomycin, one of the most recent drugs, in 2003, and resistance to it just a year later in 2004.
For 70 years, we played a game of leapfrog -- our drug and their resistance, and then another drug, and then resistance again -- and now the game is ending. Bacteria develop resistance so quickly that pharmaceutical companies have decided making antibiotics is not in their best interest, so there are infections moving across the world for which, out of the more than 100 antibiotics available on the market, two drugs might work with side effects, or one drug, or none.
This is what that looks like. In 2000, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the CDC, identified a single case in a hospital in North Carolina of an infection resistant to all but two drugs. Today, that infection, known as KPC, has spread to every state but three, and to South America, Europe and the Middle East. In 2008, doctors in Sweden diagnosed a man from India with a different infection resistant to all but one drug that time. The gene that creates that resistance, known as NDM, has now spread from India into China, Asia, Africa, Europe and Canada, and the United States.
It would be natural to hope that these infections are extraordinary cases, but in fact, in the United States and Europe, 50,000 people a year die of infections which no drugs can help. A project chartered by the British government known as the Review on Antimicrobial Resistance estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year.
That is a lot of deaths, and yet, the chances are good that you don't feel at risk, that you imagine these people were hospital patients in intensive care units or nursing home residents near the ends of their lives, people whose infections are remote from us, in situations we can't identify with.
What you didn't think about, none of us do, is that antibiotics support almost all of modern life.
If we lost antibiotics, here's what else we'd lose: First, any protection for people with weakened immune systems -- cancer patients, AIDS patients, transplant recipients, premature babies.
Next, any treatment that installs foreign objects in the body: stents for stroke, pumps for diabetes, dialysis, joint replacements. How many athletic baby boomers need new hips and knees? A recent study estimates that without antibiotics, one out of ever six would die.
8:01
Next, we'd probably lose surgery. Many operations are preceded by prophylactic doses of antibiotics. Without that protection, we'd lose the ability to open the hidden spaces of the body. So no heart operations, no prostate biopsies, no Cesarean sections. We'd have to learn to fear infections that now seem minor. Strep throat used to cause heart failure. Skin infections led to amputations. Giving birth killed, in the cleanest hospitals, almost one woman out of every 100. Pneumonia took three children out of every 10.
More than anything else, we'd lose the confident way we live our everyday lives. If you knew that any injury could kill you, would you ride a motorcycle, bomb down a ski slope, climb a ladder to hang your Christmas lights, let your kid slide into home plate? After all, the first person to receive penicillin, a British policeman named Albert Alexander, who was so ravaged by infection that his scalp oozed pus and doctors had to take out an eye, was infected by doing something very simple. He walked into his garden and scratched his face on a thorn. That British project I mentioned which estimates that the worldwide toll right now is 700,000 deaths a year also predicts that if we can't get this under control by 2050, not long, the worldwide toll will be 10 million deaths a year.
How did we get to this point where what we have to look forward to is those terrifying numbers? The difficult answer is, we did it to ourselves. Resistance is an inevitable biological process, but we bear the responsibility for accelerating it. We did this by squandering antibiotics with a heedlessness that now seems shocking. Penicillin was sold over the counter until the 1950s. In much of the developing world, most antibiotics still are. In the United States, 50 percent of the antibiotics given in hospitals are unnecessary. Forty-five percent of the prescriptions written in doctor's offices are for conditions that antibiotics cannot help. And that's just in healthcare. On much of the planet, most meat animals get antibiotics every day of their lives, not to cure illnesses, but to fatten them up and to protect them against the factory farm conditions they are raised in. In the United States, possibly 80 percent of the antibiotics sold every year go to farm animals, not to humans, creating resistant bacteria that move off the farm in water, in dust, in the meat the animals become. Aquaculture depends on antibiotics too, particularly in Asia, and fruit growing relies on antibiotics to protect apples, pears, citrus, against disease. And because bacteria can pass their DNA to each other like a traveler handing off a suitcase at an airport, once we have encouraged that resistance into existence, there is no knowing where it will spread.
This was predictable. In fact, it was predicted by Alexander Fleming, the man who discovered penicillin. He was given the Nobel Prize in 1945 in recognition, and in an interview shortly after, this is what he said:
"The thoughtless person playing with penicillin treatment is morally responsible for the death of a man who succumbs to infection with a pencillin-resistant organism." He added, "I hope this evil can be averted."
Can we avert it? There are companies working on novel antibiotics, things the superbugs have never seen before. We need those new drugs badly, and we need incentives: discovery grants, extended patents, prizes, to lure other companies into making antibiotics again.
But that probably won't be enough. Here's why: Evolution always wins. Bacteria birth a new generation every 20 minutes. It takes pharmaceutical chemistry 10 years to derive a new drug. Every time we use an antibiotic, we give the bacteria billions of chances to crack the codes of the defenses we've constructed. There has never yet been a drug they could not defeat.
This is asymmetric warfare, but we can change the outcome. We could build systems to harvest data to tell us automatically and specifically how antibiotics are being used. We could build gatekeeping into drug order systems so that every prescription gets a second look. We could require agriculture to give up antibiotic use. We could build surveillance systems to tell us where resistance is emerging next.
Those are the tech solutions. They probably aren't enough either, unless we help. Antibiotic resistance is a habit. We all know how hard it is to change a habit. But as a society, we've done that in the past. People used to toss litter into the streets, used to not wear seatbelts, used to smoke inside public buildings. We don't do those things anymore. We don't trash the environment or court devastating accidents or expose others to the possibility of cancer, because we decided those things were expensive, destructive, not in our best interest. We changed social norms. We could change social norms around antibiotic use too.
I know that the scale of antibiotic resistance seems overwhelming, but if you've ever bought a fluorescent lightbulb because you were concerned about climate change, or read the label on a box of crackers because you think about the deforestation from palm oil, you already know what it feels like to take a tiny step to address an overwhelming problem. We could take those kinds of steps for antibiotic use too. We could forgo giving an antibiotic if we're not sure it's the right one. We could stop insisting on a prescription for our kid's ear infection before we're sure what caused it. We could ask every restaurant, every supermarket, where their meat comes from. We could promise each other never again to buy chicken or shrimp or fruit raised with routine antibiotic use, and if we did those things, we could slow down the arrival of the post-antibiotic world.
But we have to do it soon. Penicillin began the antibiotic era in 1943. In just 70 years, we walked ourselves up to the edge of disaster. We won't get 70 years to find our way back out again.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)
IOT/TECH/GralInt-Unlocking the potential of the Internet of Things
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Report| McKinsey Global Institute
Unlocking the potential of the Internet of Things
June 2015 | by James Manyika, Michael Chui, Peter Bisson, Jonathan Woetzel, Richard Dobbs, Jacques Bughin, and Dan Aharon
The Internet of Things—sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems—has received enormous attention over the past five years. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype, attempts to determine exactly how IoT technology can create real economic value. Our central finding is that the hype may actually understate the full potential—but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real value can be created and a successful effort to address a set of systems issues, including interoperability.
To get a broader view of the IoT’s potential benefits and challenges across the global economy, we analyzed more than 150 use cases, ranging from people whose devices monitor health and wellness to manufacturers that utilize sensors to optimize the maintenance of equipment and protect the safety of workers. Our bottom-up analysis for the applications we size estimates that the IoT has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. At the top end, that level of value—including the consumer surplus—would be equivalent to about 11 percent of the world economy (exhibit).
Achieving this kind of impact would require certain conditions to be in place, notably overcoming the technical, organizational, and regulatory hurdles. In particular, companies that use IoT technology will play a critical role in developing the right systems and processes to maximize its value. Among our findings:
Podcast
Getting the most out of the Internet of Things
http://www.mckinsey.com/assets/dotcom/mgi/Podcasts/Unlocking%20Internet%20of%20Things/MGI_Getting_the_most_out_of_the_Internet_of_Things.zip
MGI’s Michael Chui discusses how businesses could unlock trillions of dollars in value during the next decade.
Interoperability between IoT systems is critical. Of the total potential economic value the IoT enables, interoperability is required for 40 percent on average and for nearly 60 percent in some settings.
Currently, most IoT data are not used. For example, on an oil rig that has 30,000 sensors, only 1 percent of the data are examined. That’s because this information is used mostly to detect and control anomalies—not for optimization and prediction, which provide the greatest value.
Business-to-business applications will probably capture more value—nearly 70 percent of it—than consumer uses, although consumer applications, such as fitness monitors and self-driving cars, attract the most attention and can create significant value, too.
The IoT has a large potential in developing economies. Still, we estimate that it will have a higher overall value impact in advanced economies because of the higher value per use. However, developing economies could generate nearly 40 percent of the IoT’s value, and nearly half in some settings.
Customers will capture most of the benefits. We estimate that IoT users (businesses, other organizations, and consumers) could capture 90 percent of the value that IoT applications generate. For example, in 2025 remote monitoring could create as much as $1.1 trillion a year in value by improving the health of chronic-disease patients.
A dynamic industry is evolving around IoT technology. As in other technology waves, both incumbents and new players have opportunities. Digitization blurs the lines between technology companies and other types of businesses; makers of industrial machinery, for example, are creating new business models by using IoT links and data to offer their products as a service.
The digitization of machines, vehicles, and other elements of the physical world is a powerful idea. Even at this early stage, the IoT is starting to have a real impact by changing how goods are made and distributed, how products are serviced and refined, and how doctors and patients manage health and wellness. But capturing the full potential of IoT applications will require innovation in technologies and business models, as well as investment in new capabilities and talent. With policy actions to encourage interoperability, ensure security, and protect privacy and property rights, the Internet of Things can begin to reach its full potential—especially if leaders truly embrace data-driven decision making.
About the authors
James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, and Richard Dobbs are directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, where Michael Chui is a partner; Peter Bisson is a director in McKinsey’s Stamford office; Jacques Bughin is a director in the Brussels office; and Dan Aharon is a consultant in the New York office.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
Report| McKinsey Global Institute
Unlocking the potential of the Internet of Things
June 2015 | by James Manyika, Michael Chui, Peter Bisson, Jonathan Woetzel, Richard Dobbs, Jacques Bughin, and Dan Aharon
The Internet of Things—sensors and actuators connected by networks to computing systems—has received enormous attention over the past five years. A new McKinsey Global Institute report, The Internet of Things: Mapping the value beyond the hype, attempts to determine exactly how IoT technology can create real economic value. Our central finding is that the hype may actually understate the full potential—but that capturing it will require an understanding of where real value can be created and a successful effort to address a set of systems issues, including interoperability.
To get a broader view of the IoT’s potential benefits and challenges across the global economy, we analyzed more than 150 use cases, ranging from people whose devices monitor health and wellness to manufacturers that utilize sensors to optimize the maintenance of equipment and protect the safety of workers. Our bottom-up analysis for the applications we size estimates that the IoT has a total potential economic impact of $3.9 trillion to $11.1 trillion a year by 2025. At the top end, that level of value—including the consumer surplus—would be equivalent to about 11 percent of the world economy (exhibit).
Achieving this kind of impact would require certain conditions to be in place, notably overcoming the technical, organizational, and regulatory hurdles. In particular, companies that use IoT technology will play a critical role in developing the right systems and processes to maximize its value. Among our findings:
Podcast
Getting the most out of the Internet of Things
http://www.mckinsey.com/assets/dotcom/mgi/Podcasts/Unlocking%20Internet%20of%20Things/MGI_Getting_the_most_out_of_the_Internet_of_Things.zip
MGI’s Michael Chui discusses how businesses could unlock trillions of dollars in value during the next decade.
Interoperability between IoT systems is critical. Of the total potential economic value the IoT enables, interoperability is required for 40 percent on average and for nearly 60 percent in some settings.
Currently, most IoT data are not used. For example, on an oil rig that has 30,000 sensors, only 1 percent of the data are examined. That’s because this information is used mostly to detect and control anomalies—not for optimization and prediction, which provide the greatest value.
Business-to-business applications will probably capture more value—nearly 70 percent of it—than consumer uses, although consumer applications, such as fitness monitors and self-driving cars, attract the most attention and can create significant value, too.
The IoT has a large potential in developing economies. Still, we estimate that it will have a higher overall value impact in advanced economies because of the higher value per use. However, developing economies could generate nearly 40 percent of the IoT’s value, and nearly half in some settings.
Customers will capture most of the benefits. We estimate that IoT users (businesses, other organizations, and consumers) could capture 90 percent of the value that IoT applications generate. For example, in 2025 remote monitoring could create as much as $1.1 trillion a year in value by improving the health of chronic-disease patients.
A dynamic industry is evolving around IoT technology. As in other technology waves, both incumbents and new players have opportunities. Digitization blurs the lines between technology companies and other types of businesses; makers of industrial machinery, for example, are creating new business models by using IoT links and data to offer their products as a service.
The digitization of machines, vehicles, and other elements of the physical world is a powerful idea. Even at this early stage, the IoT is starting to have a real impact by changing how goods are made and distributed, how products are serviced and refined, and how doctors and patients manage health and wellness. But capturing the full potential of IoT applications will require innovation in technologies and business models, as well as investment in new capabilities and talent. With policy actions to encourage interoperability, ensure security, and protect privacy and property rights, the Internet of Things can begin to reach its full potential—especially if leaders truly embrace data-driven decision making.
About the authors
James Manyika, Jonathan Woetzel, and Richard Dobbs are directors of the McKinsey Global Institute, where Michael Chui is a partner; Peter Bisson is a director in McKinsey’s Stamford office; Jacques Bughin is a director in the Brussels office; and Dan Aharon is a consultant in the New York office.
Source: www.mckinsey.com
MED/TECH/GralInt-Interview:Novartis on digitizing medicine in an aging world (unedited)
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Interview
Novartis on digitizing medicine in an aging world
CEO Joseph Jimenez explains where the company is placing its bets and how it’s seeking to bridge biology with technology.
June 2015
Serving an aging populationPharmaceutical discovery and innovationLeadership priorities The global population is aging as life expectancy increases. That means not only is demand for healthcare rising, but the very nature of that care is changing. In this interview, the CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, Joseph Jimenez, discusses with McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland issues including the emerging need for regenerative medicine, how digitization is driving innovation, and why Novartis is shifting to an outcomes-based approach for patient treatments. An extended and edited transcript of Jimenez’s remarks follows. Interview transcript Serving an aging population Part of our view of what’s going to happen over the next ten years is, first, the global population is going to increase by about a billion people, from seven billion to eight billion. Second, 50 percent of that increase is going to be people over the age of 50. So you have not only an expanding population but an aging population. We’re thinking about two big areas. The first is regenerative medicine—hearing, sight, muscle—and also the digitization of medicine, where biology and technology comes together. There is a geographic lens as well, particularly in the fast-growing markets. Emerging markets account for about 25 percent of our sales, and we project that over the next ten years that number is going to increase substantially as a percent of the total sales of the company. What we have to do to seize those growth opportunities is to make sure that our innovation is strong. That means finding the right scientists, the right physicians, and then giving them the budget it takes to discover. We have to build a data-analytics capability that we don’t have today. We’re also going to have to create partnerships and think about different types of people that we need to bring into our company so that we can take full advantage of that part of healthcare. A good example is what we did when we partnered with Google. We took their smart-lens technology, and we’re using it for contact lenses. This is a lens that will actually have a miniature sensor and miniature batteries in it, which will allow your eye to autofocus like a camera. It’s a great example of biology and technology coming together. So where Novartis is placing its bets from a portfolio standpoint is in three areas: innovative pharmaceuticals, because that changes the practice of medicine and that’s what we’re all about; eye care, because with an aging population, there’s going to be tremendous need for vision correction; and generic drugs, because it is especially difficult to make generics, like biosimilars. And the need for biosimilars comes from the pressure that health systems are going to be under over the next ten years. Pharmaceutical discovery and innovation Digitization is going to change our industry in a couple of ways. The first is around drug discovery. Because we built a bioinformatics capability with deep sequencing of the human genome, we’re now able to map tumor types like we have never been able to before. And we’re then able to develop new targets based on seeing multiple genetic mutations. The next area is around the shifting from a transactional approach to an outcomes-based approach. Transactional means, for example, just selling a pill. An outcome approach focuses on delivering a positive patient outcome, of which that pill is one piece. A perfect example is what we would potentially do with our new heart-failure drug. By partnering with companies that could monitor some patients remotely, we look for vital signs that would tell us whether they should go to the hospital. This is something that is starting already. Investing in health outcomes We have to be very fast moving to be able to capitalize on these trends. But we also can’t get into this cycle of disinvestment that many of our peers have, where they’re trying to make short-term earnings targets, and that ends up leading to a reduction in research-and-development spending. At Novartis, we’re trying to take costs out of procurement areas that are not leading to innovation, and we’re investing in research and development. Last year we spent almost $10 billion in R&D, and that number is going to continue to go up, because that really is the driver of our business: innovation, new medicines. We spend a lot of time measuring the productivity of R&D, but we take a very different approach than some of our peers. We resource-allocate in R&D based on the unmet medical need in a particular area, not necessarily based on how big the market size will be, because we believe that if we follow the science and we deliver on that unmet medical need, that the financial returns will happen. When you think about the challenges in the healthcare system over the next ten years, spending is going to have to double because we’re coming out with even more expensive new therapies. But if you forget about the transaction and think about the cost of managing a disease through the entire chain, you find a lot of waste in the system. We project that probably 25 percent of all healthcare spending is wasted. Shifting to an outcomes-based approach, where you just focus on what delivers the outcome, you get rid of everything else, and the physical medicine is going to be part of that. Those medicines are only about 10 percent of the total healthcare cost. So it’s not that much of a contradiction when you think about the fact that these new technologies are more expensive, but at the same time you’re going to have downward pressure. There’s a lot of efficiency that we can get out of the system. We’re going to have to partner with tech companies. We’re going to have to partner with data-management companies. We’re going to have to partner with providers in ways that can deliver a positive outcome so that we can improve the efficiency of that system. That’s the only way that we’re going to be able to deal with this aging population and constrained budgets. Leadership priorities My role in the company is to make sure that we have the best physicians and the best scientists. I spend a lot of time with our research organization, ensuring that we recruit the right people. I also ensure that they have the money that they need to do their magic. The second thing that I spend a lot of my time around is execution. Many companies that get into trouble in our space are maybe great at discovery and development, but then they don’t execute. This is where the CEO of the company must not just preside over execution but participate in it. And then the third area’s around talent. How can I personally help develop talent around the world? I spend a lot of time building emerging-market talent, because if you look around Novartis, we don’t have enough senior leaders that are from Asia or Brazil, for example. There’s an initiative called the Lead Program, where we pick 30 to 40 high-potential emerging-market leaders and we give them a 12-month assignment, during which they work on a real problem that Novartis is facing. We’re in our third year, and a number of these leaders have already been promoted into areas of greater responsibility within the company. Novartis is also elevating some values that reflect the way society is changing. For example, being more collaborative with other types of companies, other types of institutions. Having the courage to try and to fail. Because in our business, when you innovate, nine times out of ten, you’re going to fail. And the final one is integrity, because society’s expectations about healthcare companies have shifted over time. Doing what’s legal is not enough. We have to do what’s right. And so that means making some hard choices. It’s perfectly legal to pay a physician to speak about your drug to other physicians. So when you have a new-product launch, that’s the way that we educate physicians, by paying some physicians to speak. But if you think about this as a person who’s going to that physician and thinking, “Well, Novartis paid this physician to speak about their new drug. Is that doctor prescribing it because they paid him? Or is that doctor prescribing it because that’s really what’s necessary for me?” So we’re looking for other ways to educate physicians and other ways to ensure that the benefits of our drug are known among the physician community. About the authors Joseph Jimenez is the CEO of Novartis. Rik Kirkland is the senior managing editor of McKinsey Publishing, based in McKinsey’s New York office. Source: www.mckinsey.com
Interview
Novartis on digitizing medicine in an aging world
CEO Joseph Jimenez explains where the company is placing its bets and how it’s seeking to bridge biology with technology.
June 2015
Serving an aging populationPharmaceutical discovery and innovationLeadership priorities The global population is aging as life expectancy increases. That means not only is demand for healthcare rising, but the very nature of that care is changing. In this interview, the CEO of Swiss pharmaceutical company Novartis, Joseph Jimenez, discusses with McKinsey’s Rik Kirkland issues including the emerging need for regenerative medicine, how digitization is driving innovation, and why Novartis is shifting to an outcomes-based approach for patient treatments. An extended and edited transcript of Jimenez’s remarks follows. Interview transcript Serving an aging population Part of our view of what’s going to happen over the next ten years is, first, the global population is going to increase by about a billion people, from seven billion to eight billion. Second, 50 percent of that increase is going to be people over the age of 50. So you have not only an expanding population but an aging population. We’re thinking about two big areas. The first is regenerative medicine—hearing, sight, muscle—and also the digitization of medicine, where biology and technology comes together. There is a geographic lens as well, particularly in the fast-growing markets. Emerging markets account for about 25 percent of our sales, and we project that over the next ten years that number is going to increase substantially as a percent of the total sales of the company. What we have to do to seize those growth opportunities is to make sure that our innovation is strong. That means finding the right scientists, the right physicians, and then giving them the budget it takes to discover. We have to build a data-analytics capability that we don’t have today. We’re also going to have to create partnerships and think about different types of people that we need to bring into our company so that we can take full advantage of that part of healthcare. A good example is what we did when we partnered with Google. We took their smart-lens technology, and we’re using it for contact lenses. This is a lens that will actually have a miniature sensor and miniature batteries in it, which will allow your eye to autofocus like a camera. It’s a great example of biology and technology coming together. So where Novartis is placing its bets from a portfolio standpoint is in three areas: innovative pharmaceuticals, because that changes the practice of medicine and that’s what we’re all about; eye care, because with an aging population, there’s going to be tremendous need for vision correction; and generic drugs, because it is especially difficult to make generics, like biosimilars. And the need for biosimilars comes from the pressure that health systems are going to be under over the next ten years. Pharmaceutical discovery and innovation Digitization is going to change our industry in a couple of ways. The first is around drug discovery. Because we built a bioinformatics capability with deep sequencing of the human genome, we’re now able to map tumor types like we have never been able to before. And we’re then able to develop new targets based on seeing multiple genetic mutations. The next area is around the shifting from a transactional approach to an outcomes-based approach. Transactional means, for example, just selling a pill. An outcome approach focuses on delivering a positive patient outcome, of which that pill is one piece. A perfect example is what we would potentially do with our new heart-failure drug. By partnering with companies that could monitor some patients remotely, we look for vital signs that would tell us whether they should go to the hospital. This is something that is starting already. Investing in health outcomes We have to be very fast moving to be able to capitalize on these trends. But we also can’t get into this cycle of disinvestment that many of our peers have, where they’re trying to make short-term earnings targets, and that ends up leading to a reduction in research-and-development spending. At Novartis, we’re trying to take costs out of procurement areas that are not leading to innovation, and we’re investing in research and development. Last year we spent almost $10 billion in R&D, and that number is going to continue to go up, because that really is the driver of our business: innovation, new medicines. We spend a lot of time measuring the productivity of R&D, but we take a very different approach than some of our peers. We resource-allocate in R&D based on the unmet medical need in a particular area, not necessarily based on how big the market size will be, because we believe that if we follow the science and we deliver on that unmet medical need, that the financial returns will happen. When you think about the challenges in the healthcare system over the next ten years, spending is going to have to double because we’re coming out with even more expensive new therapies. But if you forget about the transaction and think about the cost of managing a disease through the entire chain, you find a lot of waste in the system. We project that probably 25 percent of all healthcare spending is wasted. Shifting to an outcomes-based approach, where you just focus on what delivers the outcome, you get rid of everything else, and the physical medicine is going to be part of that. Those medicines are only about 10 percent of the total healthcare cost. So it’s not that much of a contradiction when you think about the fact that these new technologies are more expensive, but at the same time you’re going to have downward pressure. There’s a lot of efficiency that we can get out of the system. We’re going to have to partner with tech companies. We’re going to have to partner with data-management companies. We’re going to have to partner with providers in ways that can deliver a positive outcome so that we can improve the efficiency of that system. That’s the only way that we’re going to be able to deal with this aging population and constrained budgets. Leadership priorities My role in the company is to make sure that we have the best physicians and the best scientists. I spend a lot of time with our research organization, ensuring that we recruit the right people. I also ensure that they have the money that they need to do their magic. The second thing that I spend a lot of my time around is execution. Many companies that get into trouble in our space are maybe great at discovery and development, but then they don’t execute. This is where the CEO of the company must not just preside over execution but participate in it. And then the third area’s around talent. How can I personally help develop talent around the world? I spend a lot of time building emerging-market talent, because if you look around Novartis, we don’t have enough senior leaders that are from Asia or Brazil, for example. There’s an initiative called the Lead Program, where we pick 30 to 40 high-potential emerging-market leaders and we give them a 12-month assignment, during which they work on a real problem that Novartis is facing. We’re in our third year, and a number of these leaders have already been promoted into areas of greater responsibility within the company. Novartis is also elevating some values that reflect the way society is changing. For example, being more collaborative with other types of companies, other types of institutions. Having the courage to try and to fail. Because in our business, when you innovate, nine times out of ten, you’re going to fail. And the final one is integrity, because society’s expectations about healthcare companies have shifted over time. Doing what’s legal is not enough. We have to do what’s right. And so that means making some hard choices. It’s perfectly legal to pay a physician to speak about your drug to other physicians. So when you have a new-product launch, that’s the way that we educate physicians, by paying some physicians to speak. But if you think about this as a person who’s going to that physician and thinking, “Well, Novartis paid this physician to speak about their new drug. Is that doctor prescribing it because they paid him? Or is that doctor prescribing it because that’s really what’s necessary for me?” So we’re looking for other ways to educate physicians and other ways to ensure that the benefits of our drug are known among the physician community. About the authors Joseph Jimenez is the CEO of Novartis. Rik Kirkland is the senior managing editor of McKinsey Publishing, based in McKinsey’s New York office. Source: www.mckinsey.com
Saturday, June 20, 2015
GralInt-Cómo funciona la mente de un corrupto:cuando los incentivos de lucro valen más que la ética
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Cómo funciona la mente de un corrupto:cuando los incentivos de lucro valen más que la ética
En el año 2000 se publicó un experimento social de laboratorio realizado en una universidad alemana. Un billete de 200 marcos (el equivalente a unos 100 euros) ha caído por el tubo del desagüe en las instalaciones de una sala de proyecciones. A cada uno de los sujetos del experimento se le pone en el escenario de llamar a un fontanero para recuperarlo, pagar a este por sus servicios y entregar el resto del dinero a su propietario.
Cada sujeto dispone de hasta diez ofertas de fontaneros a los que contratar, con tarifas de entre 20 y 200 marcos, de modo que cuanta más cara es la tarifa también hay una cantidad mayor como soborno. En esta tesitura, cada sujeto del experimento puede elegir en aras del interés del dueño del dinero o tomar la decisión de aceptar alguno de los presupuestos más caros, pagar al fontanero por sus servicios -solo el sujeto sabrá cuánto le han cobrado, así que no hay posibilidad de ser descubiertos- y quedarse una parte del dinero.
El resultado, demoledor para la ética. Solo el 12% de los sujetos se comportaron de manera perfectamente honesta; el 28% tomó el soborno máximo que permitían las ofertas, y la cantidad media de la que se apropió el 88% de los individuos corruptos fue de 85 marcos (unos 42 euros).
¿Corruptos por naturaleza?
“El ser humano es un animal con una tendencia biológica a la corrupción”, “con tendencia a lo que llamaríamos ser un free-rider, a aprovecharse del sudor de los demás”, y, llegado el extremo, “a aprovechar cualquier cargo en beneficio propio”.
¿Se puede explicar por qué la gente, sean ciudadanos de a pie, políticos o empresarios, deja de cumplir con la ley y se corrompe? Básicamente, el camino que lleva a la corrupción es una combinación de un entorno propicio, una oportunidad y un tipo de personalidad que, superando el temor a un posible castigo, antepone el beneficio individual al interés de los demás y al cumplimiento de la ley.Según los expertos, hay “profesiones de riesgo” en el mundo de las finanzas, las grandes empresas o la política.
Personalidades narcisistas y antisociales, más propensas a la corrupción
Sin embargo, es también evidente que no todo el mundo que tiene la oportunidad de infringir la ley en beneficio propio lo hace. “Hay que tener también ciertos rasgos de personalidad. Intervienen variables contextuales y de personalidad unidas”.
Hay ingredientes en la personalidad que agitan el cóctel y pueden desembocar en comportamientos corruptos si se dan unos condicionantes. Las investigaciones sobre el comportamiento humano y los trastornos de personalidad señalan dos: la personalidad narcisista y la antisocial.
El rasgo predominante de la personalidad narcisista es el egocentrismo, es decir, utilizar a los otros para fortalecer su autoestima y satisfacer sus deseos."Es un patrón de grandiosidad: los narcisistas sobrevaloran su valía personal y esperan que las otras personas atiendan a la alta estima en la que se apoyan.
Son personas que necesitan sentirse admiradas, carecen de empatía y sobrevaloran sus capacidades, creen que son especiales y tienen muchas fantasías de éxito. Operan sobre la presunción de que el mero deseo de cualquier cosa justifica por sí mismo su posesión”.
La personalidad antisocial, por su parte, conlleva una frialdad emocional, una carencia de ética y un comportamiento basado en el engaño y la manipulación, sin remordimiento por las consecuencias de sus actos.
“Son personas a las que les gusta el poder, les activa la motivación de poder, de relaciones sociales o personales muy positivas pero falsas. Suelen ser personas extrovertidas, afables, pero todo eso pensando en su beneficio personal y conseguir lo que sea sin importar los medios”.
“Un corrupto es una persona que realiza un proceso premeditado, razonado y calculado de costes y beneficios“
Estos rasgos dibujan un llamativo perfil de la personalidad corrupta, pero no hay que confundirse; simplemente se pone de manifiesto el elevado riesgo que supondría para una de estas personalidades enfrentarse a una situación propicia para la corrupción”.
“Hay personas que han cometido estafas en sus lugares de trabajo”.
Corrupción, una cuenta de pérdidas y ganancias
El cálculo de pérdidas y beneficios lleva a otra dimensión útil para entender la corrupción, la económica, que establece que las personas que se corrompen son, ante todo, seres racionales.Las personas se relacionan y toman decisiones en una interacción estratégica, es decir, en un intercambio de jugadas para conseguir un fin con el mayor beneficio posible y el mínimo coste.
El homo sapiens maximiza resultados. El corrupto ve una oportunidad que implica una acción contraria a la ley o a la ética, y calcula los posibles resultados económicos: un beneficio o un lucro en caso de que no se le descubra y un coste o castigo, en forma de multa, cárcel, etc., si lo atrapan. De manera general, si el beneficio obtenido es mayor que el potencial coste de ser descubierto, se puede llevar a cabo la acción corrupta.
“El acto corrupto comienza con la idea de cometerse una sola vez, pero si sale hay un incentivo para continuar“
“La corrupción muchas veces comienza con la idea de cometer una infracción una sola vez, pero si sale bien, si no es descubierto, hay un incentivo para incurrir de nuevo en esa conducta".
"Por ejemplo, una empresa cuya actividad está vinculada con la administración y tiene la posibilidad de hacer un soborno para ganar un concurso público tiene éxito y nadie le descubre. En un contexto de un mundo cada vez más competitivo, a partir de ese momento tiene un incentivo para modificar su estrategia”.
Desde el punto de vista psicológico, se podría atribuir a esta conducta las características de una adicción. "Del mismo modo que mojarse los labios en cerveza generaría un impulso irrefrenable en un alcohólico, administrar el dinero público puede ser una tentación incontrolable para algunas personas en determinadas situaciones.
Incluso crea una tolerancia, de modo que se empiece por actos ilegales pequeños y que para conseguir el mismo placer se vayan cometiendo actos más importantes".
Fuente: www.rtve.es (Versión editada de la nota original por José A. Carpio-15-09-2013)
Cómo funciona la mente de un corrupto:cuando los incentivos de lucro valen más que la ética
En el año 2000 se publicó un experimento social de laboratorio realizado en una universidad alemana. Un billete de 200 marcos (el equivalente a unos 100 euros) ha caído por el tubo del desagüe en las instalaciones de una sala de proyecciones. A cada uno de los sujetos del experimento se le pone en el escenario de llamar a un fontanero para recuperarlo, pagar a este por sus servicios y entregar el resto del dinero a su propietario.
Cada sujeto dispone de hasta diez ofertas de fontaneros a los que contratar, con tarifas de entre 20 y 200 marcos, de modo que cuanta más cara es la tarifa también hay una cantidad mayor como soborno. En esta tesitura, cada sujeto del experimento puede elegir en aras del interés del dueño del dinero o tomar la decisión de aceptar alguno de los presupuestos más caros, pagar al fontanero por sus servicios -solo el sujeto sabrá cuánto le han cobrado, así que no hay posibilidad de ser descubiertos- y quedarse una parte del dinero.
El resultado, demoledor para la ética. Solo el 12% de los sujetos se comportaron de manera perfectamente honesta; el 28% tomó el soborno máximo que permitían las ofertas, y la cantidad media de la que se apropió el 88% de los individuos corruptos fue de 85 marcos (unos 42 euros).
¿Corruptos por naturaleza?
“El ser humano es un animal con una tendencia biológica a la corrupción”, “con tendencia a lo que llamaríamos ser un free-rider, a aprovecharse del sudor de los demás”, y, llegado el extremo, “a aprovechar cualquier cargo en beneficio propio”.
¿Se puede explicar por qué la gente, sean ciudadanos de a pie, políticos o empresarios, deja de cumplir con la ley y se corrompe? Básicamente, el camino que lleva a la corrupción es una combinación de un entorno propicio, una oportunidad y un tipo de personalidad que, superando el temor a un posible castigo, antepone el beneficio individual al interés de los demás y al cumplimiento de la ley.Según los expertos, hay “profesiones de riesgo” en el mundo de las finanzas, las grandes empresas o la política.
Personalidades narcisistas y antisociales, más propensas a la corrupción
Sin embargo, es también evidente que no todo el mundo que tiene la oportunidad de infringir la ley en beneficio propio lo hace. “Hay que tener también ciertos rasgos de personalidad. Intervienen variables contextuales y de personalidad unidas”.
Hay ingredientes en la personalidad que agitan el cóctel y pueden desembocar en comportamientos corruptos si se dan unos condicionantes. Las investigaciones sobre el comportamiento humano y los trastornos de personalidad señalan dos: la personalidad narcisista y la antisocial.
El rasgo predominante de la personalidad narcisista es el egocentrismo, es decir, utilizar a los otros para fortalecer su autoestima y satisfacer sus deseos."Es un patrón de grandiosidad: los narcisistas sobrevaloran su valía personal y esperan que las otras personas atiendan a la alta estima en la que se apoyan.
Son personas que necesitan sentirse admiradas, carecen de empatía y sobrevaloran sus capacidades, creen que son especiales y tienen muchas fantasías de éxito. Operan sobre la presunción de que el mero deseo de cualquier cosa justifica por sí mismo su posesión”.
La personalidad antisocial, por su parte, conlleva una frialdad emocional, una carencia de ética y un comportamiento basado en el engaño y la manipulación, sin remordimiento por las consecuencias de sus actos.
“Son personas a las que les gusta el poder, les activa la motivación de poder, de relaciones sociales o personales muy positivas pero falsas. Suelen ser personas extrovertidas, afables, pero todo eso pensando en su beneficio personal y conseguir lo que sea sin importar los medios”.
“Un corrupto es una persona que realiza un proceso premeditado, razonado y calculado de costes y beneficios“
Estos rasgos dibujan un llamativo perfil de la personalidad corrupta, pero no hay que confundirse; simplemente se pone de manifiesto el elevado riesgo que supondría para una de estas personalidades enfrentarse a una situación propicia para la corrupción”.
“Hay personas que han cometido estafas en sus lugares de trabajo”.
Corrupción, una cuenta de pérdidas y ganancias
El cálculo de pérdidas y beneficios lleva a otra dimensión útil para entender la corrupción, la económica, que establece que las personas que se corrompen son, ante todo, seres racionales.Las personas se relacionan y toman decisiones en una interacción estratégica, es decir, en un intercambio de jugadas para conseguir un fin con el mayor beneficio posible y el mínimo coste.
El homo sapiens maximiza resultados. El corrupto ve una oportunidad que implica una acción contraria a la ley o a la ética, y calcula los posibles resultados económicos: un beneficio o un lucro en caso de que no se le descubra y un coste o castigo, en forma de multa, cárcel, etc., si lo atrapan. De manera general, si el beneficio obtenido es mayor que el potencial coste de ser descubierto, se puede llevar a cabo la acción corrupta.
“El acto corrupto comienza con la idea de cometerse una sola vez, pero si sale hay un incentivo para continuar“
“La corrupción muchas veces comienza con la idea de cometer una infracción una sola vez, pero si sale bien, si no es descubierto, hay un incentivo para incurrir de nuevo en esa conducta".
"Por ejemplo, una empresa cuya actividad está vinculada con la administración y tiene la posibilidad de hacer un soborno para ganar un concurso público tiene éxito y nadie le descubre. En un contexto de un mundo cada vez más competitivo, a partir de ese momento tiene un incentivo para modificar su estrategia”.
Desde el punto de vista psicológico, se podría atribuir a esta conducta las características de una adicción. "Del mismo modo que mojarse los labios en cerveza generaría un impulso irrefrenable en un alcohólico, administrar el dinero público puede ser una tentación incontrolable para algunas personas en determinadas situaciones.
Incluso crea una tolerancia, de modo que se empiece por actos ilegales pequeños y que para conseguir el mismo placer se vayan cometiendo actos más importantes".
Fuente: www.rtve.es (Versión editada de la nota original por José A. Carpio-15-09-2013)
MED/GralInt-TED Talks- Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism
Decades ago, few pediatricians had heard of autism. In 1975, 1 in 5,000 kids was estimated to have it. Today, 1 in 68 is on the autism spectrum. What caused this steep rise? Steve Silberman points to “a perfect storm of autism awareness” — a pair of psychologists with an accepting view, an unexpected pop culture moment and a new clinical test. But to really understand, we have to go back further to an Austrian doctor by the name of Hans Asperger, who published a pioneering paper in 1944. Because it was buried in time, autism has been shrouded in misunderstanding ever since. (This talk was part of a TED2015 session curated by Pop-Up Magazine: popupmagazine.com or @popupmag on Twitter.)
Transcript:
Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who'd been there. The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec. One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world. An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism.
But wait -- wasn't the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal? Don't most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.
Why? Here's why. This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time. For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition. The few psychologists and pediatricians who'd even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case. For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000. But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket. Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland.
So what's going on? If it isn't vaccines, what is it? If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what's going on, they tend to rely on phrases like "broadened diagnostic criteria" and "better case finding" to explain these rising numbers. But that kind of language doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two-year-old's face for eye contact. If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place? Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s?
Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions. I learned that what happened has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science than it does with the seductive power of storytelling. For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health. There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature. This second story tells us everything about how we got here and where we need to go next.
The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Leo Kanner. In 1943, Kanner published a paper describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them, even their own parents. They could amuse themselves for hours by flapping their hands in front of their faces, but they were panicked by little things like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge. Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare. By the 1950s, as the world's leading authority on the subject, he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa. That's actually not surprising, because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective. For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism. He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis.
Kanner was a smart guy, but a number of his theories didn't pan out. He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents. These children, he said, had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn't defrost. At the same time, however, Kanner noticed that some of his young patients had special abilities that clustered in certain areas like music, math and memory. One boy in his clinic could distinguish between 18 symphonies before he turned two. When his mother put on one of his favorite records, he would correctly declare, "Beethoven!" But Kanner took a dim view of these abilities, claiming that the kids were just regurgitating things they'd heard their pompous parents say, desperate to earn their approval. As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large.
Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare. Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London who thought that Kanner's theory of refrigerator parenting were "bloody stupid," as she told me. She and her husband John were warm and affectionate people, and they had a profoundly autistic daughter named Susie. Lorna and John knew how hard it was to raise a child like Susie without support services, special education, and the other resources that are out of reach without a diagnosis. To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families,
Lorna and her colleague Judith Gould decided to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier. They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population. They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community. What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse. Some kids couldn't talk at all, while others waxed on at length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty. In other words, these children didn't fit into nice, neat boxes, as Judith put it, and they saw lots of them, way more than Kanner's monolithic model would have predicted.
At first, they were at a loss to make sense of their data. How had no one noticed these children before? But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner's paper, and then forgotten, buried with the ashes of a terrible time that no one wanted to remember or think about. Kanner knew about this competing paper, but scrupulously avoided mentioning it in his own work. It had never even been translated into English, but luckily, Lorna's husband spoke German, and he translated it for her.
The paper offered an alternate story of autism. Its author was a man named Hans Asperger, who ran a combination clinic and residential school in Vienna in the 1930s. Asperger's ideas about teaching children with learning differences were progressive even by contemporary standards. Mornings at his clinic began with exercise classes set to music, and the children put on plays on Sunday afternoons. Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life. Rather than treating the kids in his clinic like patients, Asperger called them his little professors, and enlisted their help in developing methods of education that were particularly suited to them. Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability. He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor. He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.
Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it. Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called "the autism spectrum." In the late '80s and early 1990s, their changes went into effect, swapping out Kanner's narrow model for Asperger's broad and inclusive one.
These changes weren't happening in a vacuum. By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time. Before "Rain Man" came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned "Rain Man" four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like.
Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced. You no longer had to have a connection to that tiny circle of experts to get your child evaluated.
The combination of "Rain Man," the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness. The number of diagnoses started to soar, just as Lorna and Judith predicted, indeed hoped, that it would, enabling autistic people and their families to finally get the support and services they deserved.
Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner's theory that autism was rare.
If the CDC's current estimate, that one in 68 kids in America are on the spectrum, is correct, autistics are one of the largest minority groups in the world. In recent years, autistic people have come together on the Internet to reject the notion that they are puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough, coining the term "neurodiversity" to celebrate the varieties of human cognition.
One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken. By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them. [Seventy] years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the "cure" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential.
An autistic woman named Zosia Zaks once said, "We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity." As we sail into an uncertain future, we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society. We can't afford to waste a brain.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Steve Silberman: The forgotten history of autism
Decades ago, few pediatricians had heard of autism. In 1975, 1 in 5,000 kids was estimated to have it. Today, 1 in 68 is on the autism spectrum. What caused this steep rise? Steve Silberman points to “a perfect storm of autism awareness” — a pair of psychologists with an accepting view, an unexpected pop culture moment and a new clinical test. But to really understand, we have to go back further to an Austrian doctor by the name of Hans Asperger, who published a pioneering paper in 1944. Because it was buried in time, autism has been shrouded in misunderstanding ever since. (This talk was part of a TED2015 session curated by Pop-Up Magazine: popupmagazine.com or @popupmag on Twitter.)
Transcript:
Just after Christmas last year, 132 kids in California got the measles by either visiting Disneyland or being exposed to someone who'd been there. The virus then hopped the Canadian border, infecting more than 100 children in Quebec. One of the tragic things about this outbreak is that measles, which can be fatal to a child with a weakened immune system, is one of the most easily preventable diseases in the world. An effective vaccine against it has been available for more than half a century, but many of the kids involved in the Disneyland outbreak had not been vaccinated because their parents were afraid of something allegedly even worse: autism.
But wait -- wasn't the paper that sparked the controversy about autism and vaccines debunked, retracted, and branded a deliberate fraud by the British Medical Journal? Don't most science-savvy people know that the theory that vaccines cause autism is B.S.? I think most of you do, but millions of parents worldwide continue to fear that vaccines put their kids at risk for autism.
Why? Here's why. This is a graph of autism prevalence estimates rising over time. For most of the 20th century, autism was considered an incredibly rare condition. The few psychologists and pediatricians who'd even heard of it figured they would get through their entire careers without seeing a single case. For decades, the prevalence estimates remained stable at just three or four children in 10,000. But then, in the 1990s, the numbers started to skyrocket. Fundraising organizations like Autism Speaks routinely refer to autism as an epidemic, as if you could catch it from another kid at Disneyland.
So what's going on? If it isn't vaccines, what is it? If you ask the folks down at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta what's going on, they tend to rely on phrases like "broadened diagnostic criteria" and "better case finding" to explain these rising numbers. But that kind of language doesn't do much to allay the fears of a young mother who is searching her two-year-old's face for eye contact. If the diagnostic criteria had to be broadened, why were they so narrow in the first place? Why were cases of autism so hard to find before the 1990s?
Five years ago, I decided to try to uncover the answers to these questions. I learned that what happened has less to do with the slow and cautious progress of science than it does with the seductive power of storytelling. For most of the 20th century, clinicians told one story about what autism is and how it was discovered, but that story turned out to be wrong, and the consequences of it are having a devastating impact on global public health. There was a second, more accurate story of autism which had been lost and forgotten in obscure corners of the clinical literature. This second story tells us everything about how we got here and where we need to go next.
The first story starts with a child psychiatrist at Johns Hopkins Hospital named Leo Kanner. In 1943, Kanner published a paper describing 11 young patients who seemed to inhabit private worlds, ignoring the people around them, even their own parents. They could amuse themselves for hours by flapping their hands in front of their faces, but they were panicked by little things like their favorite toy being moved from its usual place without their knowledge. Based on the patients who were brought to his clinic, Kanner speculated that autism is very rare. By the 1950s, as the world's leading authority on the subject, he declared that he had seen less than 150 true cases of his syndrome while fielding referrals from as far away as South Africa. That's actually not surprising, because Kanner's criteria for diagnosing autism were incredibly selective. For example, he discouraged giving the diagnosis to children who had seizures but now we know that epilepsy is very common in autism. He once bragged that he had turned nine out of 10 kids referred to his office as autistic by other clinicians without giving them an autism diagnosis.
Kanner was a smart guy, but a number of his theories didn't pan out. He classified autism as a form of infantile psychosis caused by cold and unaffectionate parents. These children, he said, had been kept neatly in a refrigerator that didn't defrost. At the same time, however, Kanner noticed that some of his young patients had special abilities that clustered in certain areas like music, math and memory. One boy in his clinic could distinguish between 18 symphonies before he turned two. When his mother put on one of his favorite records, he would correctly declare, "Beethoven!" But Kanner took a dim view of these abilities, claiming that the kids were just regurgitating things they'd heard their pompous parents say, desperate to earn their approval. As a result, autism became a source of shame and stigma for families, and two generations of autistic children were shipped off to institutions for their own good, becoming invisible to the world at large.
Amazingly, it wasn't until the 1970s that researchers began to test Kanner's theory that autism was rare. Lorna Wing was a cognitive psychologist in London who thought that Kanner's theory of refrigerator parenting were "bloody stupid," as she told me. She and her husband John were warm and affectionate people, and they had a profoundly autistic daughter named Susie. Lorna and John knew how hard it was to raise a child like Susie without support services, special education, and the other resources that are out of reach without a diagnosis. To make the case to the National Health Service that more resources were needed for autistic children and their families,
Lorna and her colleague Judith Gould decided to do something that should have been done 30 years earlier. They undertook a study of autism prevalence in the general population. They pounded the pavement in a London suburb called Camberwell to try to find autistic children in the community. What they saw made clear that Kanner's model was way too narrow, while the reality of autism was much more colorful and diverse. Some kids couldn't talk at all, while others waxed on at length about their fascination with astrophysics, dinosaurs or the genealogy of royalty. In other words, these children didn't fit into nice, neat boxes, as Judith put it, and they saw lots of them, way more than Kanner's monolithic model would have predicted.
At first, they were at a loss to make sense of their data. How had no one noticed these children before? But then Lorna came upon a reference to a paper that had been published in German in 1944, the year after Kanner's paper, and then forgotten, buried with the ashes of a terrible time that no one wanted to remember or think about. Kanner knew about this competing paper, but scrupulously avoided mentioning it in his own work. It had never even been translated into English, but luckily, Lorna's husband spoke German, and he translated it for her.
The paper offered an alternate story of autism. Its author was a man named Hans Asperger, who ran a combination clinic and residential school in Vienna in the 1930s. Asperger's ideas about teaching children with learning differences were progressive even by contemporary standards. Mornings at his clinic began with exercise classes set to music, and the children put on plays on Sunday afternoons. Instead of blaming parents for causing autism, Asperger framed it as a lifelong, polygenetic disability that requires compassionate forms of support and accommodations over the course of one's whole life. Rather than treating the kids in his clinic like patients, Asperger called them his little professors, and enlisted their help in developing methods of education that were particularly suited to them. Crucially, Asperger viewed autism as a diverse continuum that spans an astonishing range of giftedness and disability. He believed that autism and autistic traits are common and always have been, seeing aspects of this continuum in familiar archetypes from pop culture like the socially awkward scientist and the absent-minded professor. He went so far as to say, it seems that for success in science and art, a dash of autism is essential.
Lorna and Judith realized that Kanner had been as wrong about autism being rare as he had been about parents causing it. Over the next several years, they quietly worked with the American Psychiatric Association to broaden the criteria for diagnosis to reflect the diversity of what they called "the autism spectrum." In the late '80s and early 1990s, their changes went into effect, swapping out Kanner's narrow model for Asperger's broad and inclusive one.
These changes weren't happening in a vacuum. By coincidence, as Lorna and Judith worked behind the scenes to reform the criteria, people all over the world were seeing an autistic adult for the first time. Before "Rain Man" came out in 1988, only a tiny, ingrown circle of experts knew what autism looked like, but after Dustin Hoffman's unforgettable performance as Raymond Babbitt earned "Rain Man" four Academy Awards, pediatricians, psychologists, teachers and parents all over the world knew what autism looked like.
Coincidentally, at the same time, the first easy-to-use clinical tests for diagnosing autism were introduced. You no longer had to have a connection to that tiny circle of experts to get your child evaluated.
The combination of "Rain Man," the changes to the criteria, and the introduction of these tests created a network effect, a perfect storm of autism awareness. The number of diagnoses started to soar, just as Lorna and Judith predicted, indeed hoped, that it would, enabling autistic people and their families to finally get the support and services they deserved.
Then Andrew Wakefield came along to blame the spike in diagnoses on vaccines, a simple, powerful, and seductively believable story that was as wrong as Kanner's theory that autism was rare.
If the CDC's current estimate, that one in 68 kids in America are on the spectrum, is correct, autistics are one of the largest minority groups in the world. In recent years, autistic people have come together on the Internet to reject the notion that they are puzzles to be solved by the next medical breakthrough, coining the term "neurodiversity" to celebrate the varieties of human cognition.
One way to understand neurodiversity is to think in terms of human operating systems. Just because a P.C. is not running Windows doesn't mean that it's broken. By autistic standards, the normal human brain is easily distractable, obsessively social, and suffers from a deficit of attention to detail. To be sure, autistic people have a hard time living in a world not built for them. [Seventy] years later, we're still catching up to Asperger, who believed that the "cure" for the most disabling aspects of autism is to be found in understanding teachers, accommodating employers, supportive communities, and parents who have faith in their children's potential.
An autistic woman named Zosia Zaks once said, "We need all hands on deck to right the ship of humanity." As we sail into an uncertain future, we need every form of human intelligence on the planet working together to tackle the challenges that we face as a society. We can't afford to waste a brain.
Thank you.
(Applause)
BUS/TW/GralInt-TED Talks- Margaret Heffernan: Why it's time to forget the pecking order at work
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed May 2015 at TEDWomen 2015
Margaret Heffernan: Why it's time to forget the pecking order at work
Organizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,” where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It's a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out: “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.”
Transcript:
An evolutionary biologist at Purdue University named William Muir studied chickens. He was interested in productivity -- I think it's something that concerns all of us -- but it's easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs. (Laughter) He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised a beautiful experiment. Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations. But then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens -- you could call them superchickens -- and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding.
After six generations had passed, what did he find? Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. What about the second group? Well, all but three were dead. They'd pecked the rest to death. (Laughter) The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest.
Now, as I've gone around the world talking about this and telling this story in all sorts of organizations and companies, people have seen the relevance almost instantly, and they come up and they say things to me like, "That superflock, that's my company." (Laughter) Or, "That's my country." Or, "That's my life."
All my life I've been told that the way we have to get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top, and I've really never found it very inspiring. I've started and run businesses because invention is a joy, and because working alongside brilliant, creative people is its own reward. And I've never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchickens or by superstars. But for the past 50 years, we've run most organizations and some societies along the superchicken model. We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. And the result has been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste. If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live. (Applause)
So what is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others? Well, that's the question a team at MIT took to research. They brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups, and they gave them very hard problems to solve. And what happened was exactly what you'd expect, that some groups were very much more successful than others, but what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high I.Q. Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q. Instead, they had three characteristics, the really successful teams. First of all, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. This is measured by something called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. It's broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better. Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. (Applause) Now, was this because women typically score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, so you're getting a doubling down on the empathy quotient? Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective? We don't really know, but the striking thing about this experiment is that it showed what we know, which is some groups do better than others, but what's key to that is their social connectedness to each other.
So how does this play out in the real world? Well, it means that what happens between people really counts, because in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other, ideas can flow and grow. People don't get stuck. They don't waste energy down dead ends.
An example: Arup is one of the world's most successful engineering firms, and it was commissioned to build the equestrian center for the Beijing Olympics. Now, this building had to receive two and a half thousand really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest. And the problem the engineer confronted was, what quantity of waste to cater for? Now, you don't get taught this in engineering school -- (Laughter) -- and it's not really the kind of thing you want to get wrong, so he could have spent months talking to vets, doing the research, tweaking the spreadsheet. Instead, he asked for help and he found someone who had designed the Jockey Club in New York. The problem was solved in less than a day. Arup believes that the culture of helpfulness is central to their success.
Now, helpfulness sounds really anemic, but it's absolutely core to successful teams, and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence. Helpfulness means I don't have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help. At SAP, they reckon that you can answer any question in 17 minutes. But there isn't a single high-tech company I've worked with that imagines for a moment that this is a technology issue, because what drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other. Now that sounds so obvious, and we think it'll just happen normally, but it doesn't. When I was running my first software company, I realized that we were getting stuck. There was a lot of friction, but not much else, and I gradually realized the brilliant, creative people that I'd hired didn't know each other. They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn't even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum.
Now, that was 20 years ago, and now I visit companies that have banned coffee cups at desks because they want people to hang out around the coffee machines and talk to each other. The Swedes even have a special term for this. They call it fika, which means more than a coffee break. It means collective restoration. At Idexx, a company up in Maine, they've created vegetable gardens on campus so that people from different parts of the business can work together and get to know the whole business that way. Have they all gone mad? Quite the opposite -- they've figured out that when the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you're doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help. Companies don't have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks.
Now,when you put all of this together, what you get is something called social capital. Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candor and openness. And time is what builds value. When Alex Pentland suggested to one company that they synchronize coffee breaks so that people would have time to talk to each other, profits went up 15 million dollars, and employee satisfaction went up 10 percent. Not a bad return on social capital, which compounds even as you spend it. Now, this isn't about chumminess, and it's no charter for slackers, because people who work this way tend to be kind of scratchy, impatient, absolutely determined to think for themselves because that's what their contribution is. Conflict is frequent because candor is safe. And that's how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities. And it's only through the generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential. And that's what social capital supports.
Now, we aren't really used to talking about this, about talent, about creativity, in this way. We're used to talking about stars. So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? So I went and I sat in on the auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. And what I saw there really surprised me, because the teachers weren't looking for individual pyrotechnics. They were looking for what happened between the students, because that's where the drama is. And when I talked to producers of hit albums, they said, "Oh sure, we have lots of superstars in music. It's just, they don't last very long. It's the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves." And when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity, I couldn't even see any superstars, because everybody there really mattered. And when I reflected on my own career, and the extraordinary people I've had the privilege to work with, I realized how much more we could give each other if we just stopped trying to be superchickens. (Laughter) (Applause) Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change. Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other. Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital. For decades, we've tried to motivate people with money, even though we've got a vast amount of research that shows that money erodes social connectedness. Now, we need to let people motivate each other. And for years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together.
We know that this works. When the Montreal Protocol called for the phasing out of CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer, the risks were immense. CFCs were everywhere, and nobody knew if a substitute could be found. But one team that rose to the challenge adopted three key principles. The first was the head of engineering, Frank Maslen, said, there will be no stars in this team. We need everybody. Everybody has a valid perspective. Second, we work to one standard only: the best imaginable. And third, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out, because he knew how disruptive power can be. Now, this didn't mean Tudhope did nothing. He gave the team air cover, and he listened to ensure that they honored their principles. And it worked: Ahead of all the other companies tackling this hard problem, this group cracked it first. And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the most successful international environmental agreement ever implemented.
There was a lot at stake then, and there's a lot at stake now, and we won't solve our problems if we expect it to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen. Now we need everybody, because it is only when we accept that everybody has value that we will liberate the energy and imagination and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed May 2015 at TEDWomen 2015
Margaret Heffernan: Why it's time to forget the pecking order at work
Organizations are often run according to “the superchicken model,” where the value is placed on star employees who outperform others. And yet, this isn’t what drives the most high-achieving teams. Business leader Margaret Heffernan observes that it is social cohesion — built every coffee break, every time one team member asks another for help — that leads over time to great results. It's a radical rethink of what drives us to do our best work, and what it means to be a leader. Because as Heffernan points out: “Companies don’t have ideas. Only people do.”
Transcript:
An evolutionary biologist at Purdue University named William Muir studied chickens. He was interested in productivity -- I think it's something that concerns all of us -- but it's easy to measure in chickens because you just count the eggs. (Laughter) He wanted to know what could make his chickens more productive, so he devised a beautiful experiment. Chickens live in groups, so first of all, he selected just an average flock, and he let it alone for six generations. But then he created a second group of the individually most productive chickens -- you could call them superchickens -- and he put them together in a superflock, and each generation, he selected only the most productive for breeding.
After six generations had passed, what did he find? Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. What about the second group? Well, all but three were dead. They'd pecked the rest to death. (Laughter) The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success by suppressing the productivity of the rest.
Now, as I've gone around the world talking about this and telling this story in all sorts of organizations and companies, people have seen the relevance almost instantly, and they come up and they say things to me like, "That superflock, that's my company." (Laughter) Or, "That's my country." Or, "That's my life."
All my life I've been told that the way we have to get ahead is to compete: get into the right school, get into the right job, get to the top, and I've really never found it very inspiring. I've started and run businesses because invention is a joy, and because working alongside brilliant, creative people is its own reward. And I've never really felt very motivated by pecking orders or by superchickens or by superstars. But for the past 50 years, we've run most organizations and some societies along the superchicken model. We've thought that success is achieved by picking the superstars, the brightest men, or occasionally women, in the room, and giving them all the resources and all the power. And the result has been just the same as in William Muir's experiment: aggression, dysfunction and waste. If the only way the most productive can be successful is by suppressing the productivity of the rest, then we badly need to find a better way to work and a richer way to live. (Applause)
So what is it that makes some groups obviously more successful and more productive than others? Well, that's the question a team at MIT took to research. They brought in hundreds of volunteers, they put them into groups, and they gave them very hard problems to solve. And what happened was exactly what you'd expect, that some groups were very much more successful than others, but what was really interesting was that the high-achieving groups were not those where they had one or two people with spectacularly high I.Q. Nor were the most successful groups the ones that had the highest aggregate I.Q. Instead, they had three characteristics, the really successful teams. First of all, they showed high degrees of social sensitivity to each other. This is measured by something called the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test. It's broadly considered a test for empathy, and the groups that scored highly on this did better. Secondly, the successful groups gave roughly equal time to each other, so that no one voice dominated, but neither were there any passengers. And thirdly, the more successful groups had more women in them. (Applause) Now, was this because women typically score more highly on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test, so you're getting a doubling down on the empathy quotient? Or was it because they brought a more diverse perspective? We don't really know, but the striking thing about this experiment is that it showed what we know, which is some groups do better than others, but what's key to that is their social connectedness to each other.
So how does this play out in the real world? Well, it means that what happens between people really counts, because in groups that are highly attuned and sensitive to each other, ideas can flow and grow. People don't get stuck. They don't waste energy down dead ends.
An example: Arup is one of the world's most successful engineering firms, and it was commissioned to build the equestrian center for the Beijing Olympics. Now, this building had to receive two and a half thousand really highly strung thoroughbred horses that were coming off long-haul flights, highly jet-lagged, not feeling their finest. And the problem the engineer confronted was, what quantity of waste to cater for? Now, you don't get taught this in engineering school -- (Laughter) -- and it's not really the kind of thing you want to get wrong, so he could have spent months talking to vets, doing the research, tweaking the spreadsheet. Instead, he asked for help and he found someone who had designed the Jockey Club in New York. The problem was solved in less than a day. Arup believes that the culture of helpfulness is central to their success.
Now, helpfulness sounds really anemic, but it's absolutely core to successful teams, and it routinely outperforms individual intelligence. Helpfulness means I don't have to know everything, I just have to work among people who are good at getting and giving help. At SAP, they reckon that you can answer any question in 17 minutes. But there isn't a single high-tech company I've worked with that imagines for a moment that this is a technology issue, because what drives helpfulness is people getting to know each other. Now that sounds so obvious, and we think it'll just happen normally, but it doesn't. When I was running my first software company, I realized that we were getting stuck. There was a lot of friction, but not much else, and I gradually realized the brilliant, creative people that I'd hired didn't know each other. They were so focused on their own individual work, they didn't even know who they were sitting next to, and it was only when I insisted that we stop working and invest time in getting to know each other that we achieved real momentum.
Now, that was 20 years ago, and now I visit companies that have banned coffee cups at desks because they want people to hang out around the coffee machines and talk to each other. The Swedes even have a special term for this. They call it fika, which means more than a coffee break. It means collective restoration. At Idexx, a company up in Maine, they've created vegetable gardens on campus so that people from different parts of the business can work together and get to know the whole business that way. Have they all gone mad? Quite the opposite -- they've figured out that when the going gets tough, and it always will get tough if you're doing breakthrough work that really matters, what people need is social support, and they need to know who to ask for help. Companies don't have ideas; only people do. And what motivates people are the bonds and loyalty and trust they develop between each other. What matters is the mortar, not just the bricks.
Now,when you put all of this together, what you get is something called social capital. Social capital is the reliance and interdependency that builds trust. The term comes from sociologists who were studying communities that proved particularly resilient in times of stress. Social capital is what gives companies momentum, and social capital is what makes companies robust. What does this mean in practical terms? It means that time is everything, because social capital compounds with time. So teams that work together longer get better, because it takes time to develop the trust you need for real candor and openness. And time is what builds value. When Alex Pentland suggested to one company that they synchronize coffee breaks so that people would have time to talk to each other, profits went up 15 million dollars, and employee satisfaction went up 10 percent. Not a bad return on social capital, which compounds even as you spend it. Now, this isn't about chumminess, and it's no charter for slackers, because people who work this way tend to be kind of scratchy, impatient, absolutely determined to think for themselves because that's what their contribution is. Conflict is frequent because candor is safe. And that's how good ideas turn into great ideas, because no idea is born fully formed. It emerges a little bit as a child is born, kind of messy and confused, but full of possibilities. And it's only through the generous contribution, faith and challenge that they achieve their potential. And that's what social capital supports.
Now, we aren't really used to talking about this, about talent, about creativity, in this way. We're used to talking about stars. So I started to wonder, well, if we start working this way, does that mean no more stars? So I went and I sat in on the auditions at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art in London. And what I saw there really surprised me, because the teachers weren't looking for individual pyrotechnics. They were looking for what happened between the students, because that's where the drama is. And when I talked to producers of hit albums, they said, "Oh sure, we have lots of superstars in music. It's just, they don't last very long. It's the outstanding collaborators who enjoy the long careers, because bringing out the best in others is how they found the best in themselves." And when I went to visit companies that are renowned for their ingenuity and creativity, I couldn't even see any superstars, because everybody there really mattered. And when I reflected on my own career, and the extraordinary people I've had the privilege to work with, I realized how much more we could give each other if we just stopped trying to be superchickens. (Laughter) (Applause) Once you appreciate truly how social work is, a lot of things have to change. Management by talent contest has routinely pitted employees against each other. Now, rivalry has to be replaced by social capital. For decades, we've tried to motivate people with money, even though we've got a vast amount of research that shows that money erodes social connectedness. Now, we need to let people motivate each other. And for years, we've thought that leaders were heroic soloists who were expected, all by themselves, to solve complex problems. Now, we need to redefine leadership as an activity in which conditions are created in which everyone can do their most courageous thinking together.
We know that this works. When the Montreal Protocol called for the phasing out of CFCs, the chlorofluorocarbons implicated in the hole in the ozone layer, the risks were immense. CFCs were everywhere, and nobody knew if a substitute could be found. But one team that rose to the challenge adopted three key principles. The first was the head of engineering, Frank Maslen, said, there will be no stars in this team. We need everybody. Everybody has a valid perspective. Second, we work to one standard only: the best imaginable. And third, he told his boss, Geoff Tudhope, that he had to butt out, because he knew how disruptive power can be. Now, this didn't mean Tudhope did nothing. He gave the team air cover, and he listened to ensure that they honored their principles. And it worked: Ahead of all the other companies tackling this hard problem, this group cracked it first. And to date, the Montreal Protocol is the most successful international environmental agreement ever implemented.
There was a lot at stake then, and there's a lot at stake now, and we won't solve our problems if we expect it to be solved by a few supermen or superwomen. Now we need everybody, because it is only when we accept that everybody has value that we will liberate the energy and imagination and momentum we need to create the best beyond measure.
Thank you.
(Applause)
TECH/APPS/GralInt-TED Talks- Rana el Kaliouby: This app knows how you feel -- from the look on your face
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed May 2015 at TEDWomen 2015
Rana el Kaliouby: This app knows how you feel -- from the look on your face
Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives — how we learn, how we communicate, how we make decisions. Yet they’re absent from our digital lives; the devices and apps we interact with have no way of knowing how we feel. Scientist Rana el Kaliouby aims to change that. She demos a powerful new technology that reads your facial expressions and matches them to corresponding emotions. This “emotion engine” has big implications, she says, and could change not just how we interact with machines — but with each other.
Transcript:
Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from our health and how we learn, to how we do business and make decisions, big ones and small. Our emotions also influence how we connect with one another. We've evolved to live in a world like this, but instead, we're living more and more of our lives like this -- this is the text message from my daughter last night -- in a world that's devoid of emotion. So I'm on a mission to change that. I want to bring emotions back into our digital experiences.
I started on this path 15 years ago. I was a computer scientist in Egypt, and I had just gotten accepted to a Ph.D. program at Cambridge University. So I did something quite unusual for a young newlywed Muslim Egyptian wife: With the support of my husband, who had to stay in Egypt, I packed my bags and I moved to England. At Cambridge, thousands of miles away from home, I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than I did with any other human. Yet despite this intimacy, my laptop had absolutely no idea how I was feeling. It had no idea if I was happy, having a bad day, or stressed, confused, and so that got frustrating. Even worse, as I communicated online with my family back home, I felt that all my emotions disappeared in cyberspace. I was homesick, I was lonely, and on some days I was actually crying, but all I had to communicate these emotions was this. (Laughter) Today's technology has lots of I.Q., but no E.Q.; lots of cognitive intelligence, but no emotional intelligence. So that got me thinking, what if our technology could sense our emotions? What if our devices could sense how we felt and reacted accordingly, just the way an emotionally intelligent friend would? Those questions led me and my team to create technologies that can read and respond to our emotions, and our starting point was the human face.
So our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states, everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy and curiosity. In emotion science, we call each facial muscle movement an action unit. So for example, action unit 12, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster, it is actually a lip corner pull, which is the main component of a smile. Try it everybody. Let's get some smiles going on. Another example is action unit 4. It's the brow furrow. It's when you draw your eyebrows together and you create all these textures and wrinkles. We don't like them, but it's a strong indicator of a negative emotion. So we have about 45 of these action units, and they combine to express hundreds of emotions.
Teaching a computer to read these facial emotions is hard, because these action units, they can be fast, they're subtle, and they combine in many different ways. So take, for example, the smile and the smirk. They look somewhat similar, but they mean very different things. (Laughter) So the smile is positive, a smirk is often negative. Sometimes a smirk can make you became famous. But seriously, it's important for a computer to be able to tell the difference between the two expressions.
So how do we do that? We give our algorithms tens of thousands of examples of people we know to be smiling, from different ethnicities, ages, genders, and we do the same for smirks. And then, using deep learning, the algorithm looks for all these textures and wrinkles and shape changes on our face, and basically learns that all smiles have common characteristics, all smirks have subtly different characteristics. And the next time it sees a new face, it essentially learns that this face has the same characteristics of a smile, and it says, "Aha, I recognize this. This is a smile expression."
So the best way to demonstrate how this technology works is to try a live demo, so I need a volunteer, preferably somebody with a face. (Laughter) Cloe's going to be our volunteer today.
So over the past five years, we've moved from being a research project at MIT to a company, where my team has worked really hard to make this technology work, as we like to say, in the wild. And we've also shrunk it so that the core emotion engine works on any mobile device with a camera, like this iPad. So let's give this a try.
As you can see, the algorithm has essentially found Chloe's face, so it's this white bounding box, and it's tracking the main feature points on her face, so her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth and her nose. The question is, can it recognize her expression? So we're going to test the machine. So first of all, give me your poker face. Yep, awesome. (Laughter) And then as she smiles, this is a genuine smile, it's great. So you can see the green bar go up as she smiles. Now that was a big smile. Can you try a subtle smile to see if the computer can recognize? It does recognize subtle smiles as well. We've worked really hard to make that happen. And then eyebrow raised, indicator of surprise. Brow furrow, which is an indicator of confusion. Frown. Yes, perfect. So these are all the different action units. There's many more of them. This is just a slimmed-down demo. But we call each reading an emotion data point, and then they can fire together to portray different emotions. So on the right side of the demo -- look like you're happy. So that's joy. Joy fires up. And then give me a disgust face. Try to remember what it was like when Zayn left One Direction. (Laughter) Yeah, wrinkle your nose. Awesome. And the valence is actually quite negative, so you must have been a big fan. So valence is how positive or negative an experience is, and engagement is how expressive she is as well. So imagine if Chloe had access to this real-time emotion stream, and she could share it with anybody she wanted to. Thank you. (Applause)
So, so far, we have amassed 12 billion of these emotion data points. It's the largest emotion database in the world. We've collected it from 2.9 million face videos, people who have agreed to share their emotions with us, and from 75 countries around the world. It's growing every day. It blows my mind away that we can now quantify something as personal as our emotions, and we can do it at this scale.
So what have we learned to date? Gender. Our data confirms something that you might suspect. Women are more expressive than men. Not only do they smile more, their smiles last longer, and we can now really quantify what it is that men and women respond to differently. Let's do culture: So in the United States, women are 40 percent more expressive than men, but curiously, we don't see any difference in the U.K. between men and women. (Laughter) Age: People who are 50 years and older are 25 percent more emotive than younger people. Women in their 20s smile a lot more than men the same age, perhaps a necessity for dating. But perhaps what surprised us the most about this data is that we happen to be expressive all the time, even when we are sitting in front of our devices alone, and it's not just when we're watching cat videos on Facebook. We are expressive when we're emailing, texting, shopping online, or even doing our taxes.
Where is this data used today? In understanding how we engage with media, so understanding virality and voting behavior; and also empowering or emotion-enabling technology, and I want to share some examples that are especially close to my heart. Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with. In education, imagine if your learning apps sense that you're confused and slow down, or that you're bored, so it sped up, just like a great teacher would in a classroom. What if your wristwatch tracked your mood, or your car sensed that you're tired, or perhaps your fridge knows that you're stressed, so it auto-locks to prevent you from binge eating. (Laughter) I would like that, yeah. What if, when I was in Cambridge, I had access to my real-time emotion stream, and I could share that with my family back home in a very natural way, just like I would've if we were all in the same room together?
I think five years down the line, all our devices are going to have an emotion chip, and we won't remember what it was like when we couldn't just frown at our device and our device would say, "Hmm, you didn't like that, did you?" Our biggest challenge is that there are so many applications of this technology, my team and I realize that we can't build them all ourselves, so we've made this technology available so that other developers can get building and get creative. We recognize that there are potential risks and potential for abuse, but personally, having spent many years doing this, I believe that the benefits to humanity from having emotionally intelligent technology far outweigh the potential for misuse. And I invite you all to be part of the conversation. The more people who know about this technology, the more we can all have a voice in how it's being used. So as more and more of our lives become digital, we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices in order to reclaim our emotions. So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology and make our technologies more responsive. So I want those devices that have separated us to bring us back together. And by humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another.
Thank you.
(Applause)
Filmed May 2015 at TEDWomen 2015
Rana el Kaliouby: This app knows how you feel -- from the look on your face
Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives — how we learn, how we communicate, how we make decisions. Yet they’re absent from our digital lives; the devices and apps we interact with have no way of knowing how we feel. Scientist Rana el Kaliouby aims to change that. She demos a powerful new technology that reads your facial expressions and matches them to corresponding emotions. This “emotion engine” has big implications, she says, and could change not just how we interact with machines — but with each other.
Transcript:
Our emotions influence every aspect of our lives, from our health and how we learn, to how we do business and make decisions, big ones and small. Our emotions also influence how we connect with one another. We've evolved to live in a world like this, but instead, we're living more and more of our lives like this -- this is the text message from my daughter last night -- in a world that's devoid of emotion. So I'm on a mission to change that. I want to bring emotions back into our digital experiences.
I started on this path 15 years ago. I was a computer scientist in Egypt, and I had just gotten accepted to a Ph.D. program at Cambridge University. So I did something quite unusual for a young newlywed Muslim Egyptian wife: With the support of my husband, who had to stay in Egypt, I packed my bags and I moved to England. At Cambridge, thousands of miles away from home, I realized I was spending more hours with my laptop than I did with any other human. Yet despite this intimacy, my laptop had absolutely no idea how I was feeling. It had no idea if I was happy, having a bad day, or stressed, confused, and so that got frustrating. Even worse, as I communicated online with my family back home, I felt that all my emotions disappeared in cyberspace. I was homesick, I was lonely, and on some days I was actually crying, but all I had to communicate these emotions was this. (Laughter) Today's technology has lots of I.Q., but no E.Q.; lots of cognitive intelligence, but no emotional intelligence. So that got me thinking, what if our technology could sense our emotions? What if our devices could sense how we felt and reacted accordingly, just the way an emotionally intelligent friend would? Those questions led me and my team to create technologies that can read and respond to our emotions, and our starting point was the human face.
So our human face happens to be one of the most powerful channels that we all use to communicate social and emotional states, everything from enjoyment, surprise, empathy and curiosity. In emotion science, we call each facial muscle movement an action unit. So for example, action unit 12, it's not a Hollywood blockbuster, it is actually a lip corner pull, which is the main component of a smile. Try it everybody. Let's get some smiles going on. Another example is action unit 4. It's the brow furrow. It's when you draw your eyebrows together and you create all these textures and wrinkles. We don't like them, but it's a strong indicator of a negative emotion. So we have about 45 of these action units, and they combine to express hundreds of emotions.
Teaching a computer to read these facial emotions is hard, because these action units, they can be fast, they're subtle, and they combine in many different ways. So take, for example, the smile and the smirk. They look somewhat similar, but they mean very different things. (Laughter) So the smile is positive, a smirk is often negative. Sometimes a smirk can make you became famous. But seriously, it's important for a computer to be able to tell the difference between the two expressions.
So how do we do that? We give our algorithms tens of thousands of examples of people we know to be smiling, from different ethnicities, ages, genders, and we do the same for smirks. And then, using deep learning, the algorithm looks for all these textures and wrinkles and shape changes on our face, and basically learns that all smiles have common characteristics, all smirks have subtly different characteristics. And the next time it sees a new face, it essentially learns that this face has the same characteristics of a smile, and it says, "Aha, I recognize this. This is a smile expression."
So the best way to demonstrate how this technology works is to try a live demo, so I need a volunteer, preferably somebody with a face. (Laughter) Cloe's going to be our volunteer today.
So over the past five years, we've moved from being a research project at MIT to a company, where my team has worked really hard to make this technology work, as we like to say, in the wild. And we've also shrunk it so that the core emotion engine works on any mobile device with a camera, like this iPad. So let's give this a try.
As you can see, the algorithm has essentially found Chloe's face, so it's this white bounding box, and it's tracking the main feature points on her face, so her eyebrows, her eyes, her mouth and her nose. The question is, can it recognize her expression? So we're going to test the machine. So first of all, give me your poker face. Yep, awesome. (Laughter) And then as she smiles, this is a genuine smile, it's great. So you can see the green bar go up as she smiles. Now that was a big smile. Can you try a subtle smile to see if the computer can recognize? It does recognize subtle smiles as well. We've worked really hard to make that happen. And then eyebrow raised, indicator of surprise. Brow furrow, which is an indicator of confusion. Frown. Yes, perfect. So these are all the different action units. There's many more of them. This is just a slimmed-down demo. But we call each reading an emotion data point, and then they can fire together to portray different emotions. So on the right side of the demo -- look like you're happy. So that's joy. Joy fires up. And then give me a disgust face. Try to remember what it was like when Zayn left One Direction. (Laughter) Yeah, wrinkle your nose. Awesome. And the valence is actually quite negative, so you must have been a big fan. So valence is how positive or negative an experience is, and engagement is how expressive she is as well. So imagine if Chloe had access to this real-time emotion stream, and she could share it with anybody she wanted to. Thank you. (Applause)
So, so far, we have amassed 12 billion of these emotion data points. It's the largest emotion database in the world. We've collected it from 2.9 million face videos, people who have agreed to share their emotions with us, and from 75 countries around the world. It's growing every day. It blows my mind away that we can now quantify something as personal as our emotions, and we can do it at this scale.
So what have we learned to date? Gender. Our data confirms something that you might suspect. Women are more expressive than men. Not only do they smile more, their smiles last longer, and we can now really quantify what it is that men and women respond to differently. Let's do culture: So in the United States, women are 40 percent more expressive than men, but curiously, we don't see any difference in the U.K. between men and women. (Laughter) Age: People who are 50 years and older are 25 percent more emotive than younger people. Women in their 20s smile a lot more than men the same age, perhaps a necessity for dating. But perhaps what surprised us the most about this data is that we happen to be expressive all the time, even when we are sitting in front of our devices alone, and it's not just when we're watching cat videos on Facebook. We are expressive when we're emailing, texting, shopping online, or even doing our taxes.
Where is this data used today? In understanding how we engage with media, so understanding virality and voting behavior; and also empowering or emotion-enabling technology, and I want to share some examples that are especially close to my heart. Emotion-enabled wearable glasses can help individuals who are visually impaired read the faces of others, and it can help individuals on the autism spectrum interpret emotion, something that they really struggle with. In education, imagine if your learning apps sense that you're confused and slow down, or that you're bored, so it sped up, just like a great teacher would in a classroom. What if your wristwatch tracked your mood, or your car sensed that you're tired, or perhaps your fridge knows that you're stressed, so it auto-locks to prevent you from binge eating. (Laughter) I would like that, yeah. What if, when I was in Cambridge, I had access to my real-time emotion stream, and I could share that with my family back home in a very natural way, just like I would've if we were all in the same room together?
I think five years down the line, all our devices are going to have an emotion chip, and we won't remember what it was like when we couldn't just frown at our device and our device would say, "Hmm, you didn't like that, did you?" Our biggest challenge is that there are so many applications of this technology, my team and I realize that we can't build them all ourselves, so we've made this technology available so that other developers can get building and get creative. We recognize that there are potential risks and potential for abuse, but personally, having spent many years doing this, I believe that the benefits to humanity from having emotionally intelligent technology far outweigh the potential for misuse. And I invite you all to be part of the conversation. The more people who know about this technology, the more we can all have a voice in how it's being used. So as more and more of our lives become digital, we are fighting a losing battle trying to curb our usage of devices in order to reclaim our emotions. So what I'm trying to do instead is to bring emotions into our technology and make our technologies more responsive. So I want those devices that have separated us to bring us back together. And by humanizing technology, we have this golden opportunity to reimagine how we connect with machines, and therefore, how we, as human beings, connect with one another.
Thank you.
(Applause)
MUS/GralInt-TED Talks- Joey Alexander: An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Joey Alexander: An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz
Raised listening to his dad's old records, Joey Alexander plays a brand of sharp, modern piano jazz that you likely wouldn't expect to hear from a pre-teenager. Listen as the 11-year-old delights the TED crowd with his very special performance of a Thelonious Monk classic.
Filmed March 2015 at TED2015
Joey Alexander: An 11-year-old prodigy performs old-school jazz
Raised listening to his dad's old records, Joey Alexander plays a brand of sharp, modern piano jazz that you likely wouldn't expect to hear from a pre-teenager. Listen as the 11-year-old delights the TED crowd with his very special performance of a Thelonious Monk classic.
Friday, June 19, 2015
BUS/INVEST/GralInt-Cómo ganar el primer millón: la fórmula de ocho empresas argentinas que lo lograron y las claves del decisivo punto de inflexión
The following information is used for educational purposes only.
08 de junio de 2015
Cómo ganar el primer millón: la fórmula de ocho empresas argentinas que lo lograron y las claves del decisivo punto de inflexión
Los primeros pasos, crecimiento y expansión de algunas compañías modelo en sectores tradicionales y en el tecnológico muestran diferentes recorridos con el mismo esfuerzo desde el momento eureka
Por Luján Scarpinelli | LA NACION
Blanca, un metro sesenta y seis, cualidades estándar. De no ser por los imanes de delivery, sería igual a cualquier otra. Pero no. La heladera que aparece en la pantalla del auditorio es lo que recibió un grupo de emprendedores como pago por el desarrollo de un sitio Web para una exportadora de frutas. Lo relata sobre el escenario Sally Buberman, una de las fundadoras de Wormhole IT, ahora, una compañía especializada en educación virtual que capacita en su plataforma a millones de personas, en una decena de países. Por simbolismo o por utilidad, años después de aquel trueque, Wormhole todavía conserva la heladera.
Las vivencias de fundadores de compañías dan cuenta del arduo camino hacia el primer millón de dólares. Ése que, según dicen, muchas veces resulta más difícil de alcanzar que los 100, e incluso los 1000. Parte de ese recorrido expusieron los oradores de Experiencia Endeavor, el evento de esa fundación que reúne cada año a grandes y nuevos entrepreneurs, realizado en la Usina del Arte porteña.
Vida austera; noches en la oficina; trabajos sin retribución; hombres o mujeres mantenidos; cambios, pruebas y nuevos cambios... El monto representa de algún modo un periodo de esfuerzo y validación de un modelo de negocios; un tiempo donde hay que empujar la rueda para que empiece a girar. En diferentes circunstancias personales, geografías y sectores, llegar al millón tiene una misma condición: la perseverancia.
"Es una ilusión que la plata está a la vuelta de la esquina", advirtió Buberman al público que integró años atrás y en el que despertó su vocación emprendedora. Inés Berton contaba, por entonces, que hasta los reyes de España y el Dalai Lama habían probado sus tés. Buberman empezó un proyecto con tres socios. Aunque soñaba con un alto impacto, sólo esperaba "juntar unos mangos" para ayudar en la casa. Obtuvieron premios, pero no convencieron a inversores. No quedó más que apelar a una estrategia que conocían desde la niñez. "Decidimos recortar nuestros gastos, que los dos técnicos renunciaran, y que lo que quedaba de lo que ganábamos los otros dos, fuera a un chanchito", contó. Así sentaron las bases de la empresa que cruzó la línea del millón cuando Microsoft, (cuya competencia habían ganado) empezó a entrenar personal en la plataforma.
Ni en el caso de Wormhole, ni en muchos otros, los emprendedores pudieron sopesar los diez kilos de billetes con la estampa de Benjamin Franklin. El primer millón tampoco les infló de fajos los bolsillos. En general, la cifra inmaterial se registró en los libros y volvió a la empresa en forma de nuevo personal, maquinaria, desarrollos, marketing, o lo que fuera necesario para apuntalar el crecimiento en un momento clave.
"Sala gadula menchicka bula. bibbidi babbidi bu ¿En qué idioma quiere que Salto 96 le ofrezca una cuenta corriente?". A David Ruda le divirtió la "música" de la frase y la incluyó en una publicidad de su tienda de artículos deportivos. Pero se quedó con las ganas de difundirla, ya que fue considerada un mensaje cifrado y prohibida en tiempos del Proceso. En ese contexto, el profesor de educación física creó e impulsó un negocio financiero que en los 80 recibió el nombre de Tarjeta Naranja. "Tuvimos que crear una tarjeta porque las fichitas de las cuentas de los clientes eran muy muchas", dijo el fundador de la firma que hoy es la principal emisora de Visa en el país. Todo fue producto de la iniciativa de dos profesores cordobeses que quisieron proveer material a la provincia donde "no se conseguía ni una colchoneta". "Lo intentemos", le dijo su todavía socio Gerardo Asrin. "La inversión inicial fue un pasaje en tren Córdoba- Buenos Aires, y la primera venta, a las Monjas Azules". Salto96 se expandió con siete sucursales y una cultura de crédito en Córdoba. El millón surgió en ese trecho. "La primera compra en Buenos Aires fue de 12 pares de Adidas -4 con tiras blancas, 4 negras y 4 rojas-, y llegamos a vender 17.000 al mes", detalló Ruda, que construyó una filosofía de trabajo amigable para empleados y clientes. Fue el comienzo y la gran escalada de Tarjeta Naranja, adquirida en 1995 por el grupo Galicia.
También la financiación fue una herramienta clave para Megatlon. El caso cumple con la teoría expuesta en Endeavor por el neurocientífico Facundo Manes: "El momento Eureka surge cuando el cerebro está en off". Fernando Storchi estaba jugando al fútbol cuando pensó en unir negocios y placer, osea, deporte. Meses más tarde, instaló tres canchas de fútbol, dos de paddle y un gimnasio en el Club Almagro, con fondos de familiares y amigos. Como ese, otros clubes de barrio necesitaban una renovación. "El resultado era win-win: con una mejor estructura, logramos que la comunidad volviera al club", explicó Storchi. La empresa alcazó el millón, pero "fue una consecuencia de hacer las cosas bien y no la misión", dijo su fundador. En el 99, ya en cuatro clubes, le puso nombre y concepto al negocio. Fue un momento crucial, aprovechado con innovación. "Megatlon fue pionero en la bancarización de cuotas; se vendían membrecías anuales a mitad de precio, y bajamos la estacionalidad [típica del rubro] a una diferencia de sólo 15% entre los meses de mayor y menor actividad", se explayó Storchi. La red multitarget, con 24 sucursales, 150 acuerdos corporativos y 10 gimnasios in company, proyecta facturar unos $ 562 millones este año.
Adquirir consumidores, suscriptores, usuarios o compañías -en la esfera de los B2B- es la plataforma de despegue hacia el primer gran caudal de ingresos. En Globant, recordó Guibert Englebienne, la primera venta fue un sitio para EMC, que cobraron US$ 5000. Tuvieron que esperar varios meses para demostrarse con el primer cliente de peso, que era posible hacer algo grande. "Empezamos a trabajar para LastMinute [un sitio de ofertas de viajes], y en cuatro meses pasamos de ser unos pocos a ser una firma de 70 empleados". El siguiente hito, continuó Englebienne, fue Google, un respaldo a su credibilidad, que los llevó mucho más lejos que el millón. Y sobre todo, considerando que el objetivo fue, desde el inicio, apuntar a clientes afuera de América latina. Con cinco años de existencia, el cuarteto fundador fue tentado con una propuesta de compra. "Bill Gates no hubiera sido Bill Gates si vendía su empresa". El consejo de un mentor de Harvard hizo que enfilaran hacia Wall Street, donde llegaron siete años de madurez más tarde. Lo cuentan con orgullo: en lugar de ser adquiridos, fueron ellos los que salieron de compras en los Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, Brasil y en India.
Los emprendedores exitosos se las rebuscan para construir con los recursos disponibles, y afrontar el miedo al fracaso que, según Manes, paraliza. "Imaginar el futuro -dijo- es propio de los líderes". La innovación tecnológica tiene mucho de eso.
En 2008, Matías Rozenfarb fundó Keepcon, un sistema automático de moderación de contenidos. Aquí también la firma cruzó la línea del millón cuando grandes compañías entraron en su cartera de clientes, algo que los empapó de sudor durante meses. El proceso para captar a uno de los grandes a nivel regional y a un enorme jugador global, implicó competir con las áreas tecnológicas de las propias compañías, pese a ofrecer una tecnología disruptiva. "Pasamos entre seis y nueve meses haciendo pruebas de concepto gratuitas, con toda la compañía trabajando para eso", detalló Rozenfarb. Ese tiempo transcurrió con el tic-tac de una cuenta regresiva en su tiempo de vida, a medida que consumían los fondos. Rozenfarb lo definió como una característica del emprendedor: la apuesta, aunque sea riesgosa, se impone a la salud financiera. "Es importante no mezquinar recursos cuando hay una oportunidad para impulsar el crecimiento", dijo. El esfuerzo valió para cazar a grandes presas, y el refuerzo de la facturación permitió destinar fondos a I+D que usó Keepcon para diversificarse y entrar a la arena del big data. Las primeras ventas en Brasil, Estados Unidos y España fueron por Skype. Otro ejemplo de exprimir al máximo lo que se tiene.
Desde la oficina de Jampp en Londres, Diego Meller relató sus diversas experiencias a LA NACION. El actual CEO de la compañía dedicada a la promoción de aplicaciones, tuvo que emanciparse a los 20 años para fundar Livra, su primera empresa, junto a Martín Añazco, todavía socio. Pasaron noches en la oficina, sintieron la adrenalina de emprender y aprendieron a pivotear. Livra dejó de ser un sitio para comparar precios, y se transformó en una encuestadora online que, finalmente, vendieron a Ipsos.
Pese a lo que habían hecho hasta allí, la vuelta a cero fue igualmente difícil. Jampp intentó sin éxito ser una compañía global de juegos, en pleno auge del social gaming. Les costaba tanto monetizar que pusieron la lupa sobre los clientes más activos, para revelar cuál era el target al que debían apuntar. Meller descubrió que la que más gastaba era su mamá. "Estamos en problemas", se dijo. Rascó la olla y, con lo último, en base a los propios problemas para posicionar los juegos, trabajaron en una solución para promocionar apps, antes de anunciar el cierre a los inversores. La dinámica de ingresos, esta vez, fue veloz. "Cerramos el primer deal con un gran cliente con un presupuesto muy grande, sin tener la capacidad para hacer ni el 10% de lo acordado y tuvimos que salir a contratar gente. Al principio, hay un juego entre lo que tenés y el potencial que ofrecés". Resultó. En marzo, Jampp levantó US$ 7 millones.
Hay más aventurados con fundamentos. Tomás Bermúdez creó junto a su hermana y otros socios la aplicación CookApp, para conectar a chefs y cocineros amateurs con comensales. "Si la gente duerme en casas de desconocidos, ¿por qué no compartir una comida?", se preguntó Bermúdez. Lanzarse al mercado los acercó al capital. En una de las cenas privadas que se ofrecen en la plataforma conocieron a uno de sus principales inversores ángeles. El camino al millón, comienza por intentarlo, incluso cuando implica crear un hábito.
La creatividad en el universo tecnológico vale igualmente para los clásicos. Tito Loizeau hizo de Barbie más que una muñeca al abrir una tienda. La novedad a nivel global atrajo a las pequeñas consumidoras y, con ellas, una suma caudalosa. El éxito se expandió a México, Perú y Uruguay, aunque no exento de adversidades. Las aperturas resultaron demasiado precipitadas, y hubo que recalcular. Las tiendas de los shoppings, que exigían 12 horas corridas, eran insostenibles, porque el horario escolar abarcaba la mayor parte del tiempo. Para Barbie Store, "los millones posteriores al primero fueron los más difíciles". Loizeau tuvo inicios menos felices, como el de Promored, un sitio de cupones de descuento que lo enfrentó a cientos de frustraciones. "De cada 100 propuestas, nos aprobaban una o dos". Los primeros $ 100.000 cobrados y ahorrados en esa empresa quedaron atrapados en el corralito. Más adelante, Promored fue renovada como agencia de promociones y vendida, y Loizeau, otra vez, volvió a empezar un nuevo sendero hacia el millón. Porque las fórmulas son de las ciencias exactas.
Fuente:www.lanacion.com.ar
08 de junio de 2015
Cómo ganar el primer millón: la fórmula de ocho empresas argentinas que lo lograron y las claves del decisivo punto de inflexión
Los primeros pasos, crecimiento y expansión de algunas compañías modelo en sectores tradicionales y en el tecnológico muestran diferentes recorridos con el mismo esfuerzo desde el momento eureka
Por Luján Scarpinelli | LA NACION
Blanca, un metro sesenta y seis, cualidades estándar. De no ser por los imanes de delivery, sería igual a cualquier otra. Pero no. La heladera que aparece en la pantalla del auditorio es lo que recibió un grupo de emprendedores como pago por el desarrollo de un sitio Web para una exportadora de frutas. Lo relata sobre el escenario Sally Buberman, una de las fundadoras de Wormhole IT, ahora, una compañía especializada en educación virtual que capacita en su plataforma a millones de personas, en una decena de países. Por simbolismo o por utilidad, años después de aquel trueque, Wormhole todavía conserva la heladera.
Las vivencias de fundadores de compañías dan cuenta del arduo camino hacia el primer millón de dólares. Ése que, según dicen, muchas veces resulta más difícil de alcanzar que los 100, e incluso los 1000. Parte de ese recorrido expusieron los oradores de Experiencia Endeavor, el evento de esa fundación que reúne cada año a grandes y nuevos entrepreneurs, realizado en la Usina del Arte porteña.
Vida austera; noches en la oficina; trabajos sin retribución; hombres o mujeres mantenidos; cambios, pruebas y nuevos cambios... El monto representa de algún modo un periodo de esfuerzo y validación de un modelo de negocios; un tiempo donde hay que empujar la rueda para que empiece a girar. En diferentes circunstancias personales, geografías y sectores, llegar al millón tiene una misma condición: la perseverancia.
"Es una ilusión que la plata está a la vuelta de la esquina", advirtió Buberman al público que integró años atrás y en el que despertó su vocación emprendedora. Inés Berton contaba, por entonces, que hasta los reyes de España y el Dalai Lama habían probado sus tés. Buberman empezó un proyecto con tres socios. Aunque soñaba con un alto impacto, sólo esperaba "juntar unos mangos" para ayudar en la casa. Obtuvieron premios, pero no convencieron a inversores. No quedó más que apelar a una estrategia que conocían desde la niñez. "Decidimos recortar nuestros gastos, que los dos técnicos renunciaran, y que lo que quedaba de lo que ganábamos los otros dos, fuera a un chanchito", contó. Así sentaron las bases de la empresa que cruzó la línea del millón cuando Microsoft, (cuya competencia habían ganado) empezó a entrenar personal en la plataforma.
Ni en el caso de Wormhole, ni en muchos otros, los emprendedores pudieron sopesar los diez kilos de billetes con la estampa de Benjamin Franklin. El primer millón tampoco les infló de fajos los bolsillos. En general, la cifra inmaterial se registró en los libros y volvió a la empresa en forma de nuevo personal, maquinaria, desarrollos, marketing, o lo que fuera necesario para apuntalar el crecimiento en un momento clave.
"Sala gadula menchicka bula. bibbidi babbidi bu ¿En qué idioma quiere que Salto 96 le ofrezca una cuenta corriente?". A David Ruda le divirtió la "música" de la frase y la incluyó en una publicidad de su tienda de artículos deportivos. Pero se quedó con las ganas de difundirla, ya que fue considerada un mensaje cifrado y prohibida en tiempos del Proceso. En ese contexto, el profesor de educación física creó e impulsó un negocio financiero que en los 80 recibió el nombre de Tarjeta Naranja. "Tuvimos que crear una tarjeta porque las fichitas de las cuentas de los clientes eran muy muchas", dijo el fundador de la firma que hoy es la principal emisora de Visa en el país. Todo fue producto de la iniciativa de dos profesores cordobeses que quisieron proveer material a la provincia donde "no se conseguía ni una colchoneta". "Lo intentemos", le dijo su todavía socio Gerardo Asrin. "La inversión inicial fue un pasaje en tren Córdoba- Buenos Aires, y la primera venta, a las Monjas Azules". Salto96 se expandió con siete sucursales y una cultura de crédito en Córdoba. El millón surgió en ese trecho. "La primera compra en Buenos Aires fue de 12 pares de Adidas -4 con tiras blancas, 4 negras y 4 rojas-, y llegamos a vender 17.000 al mes", detalló Ruda, que construyó una filosofía de trabajo amigable para empleados y clientes. Fue el comienzo y la gran escalada de Tarjeta Naranja, adquirida en 1995 por el grupo Galicia.
También la financiación fue una herramienta clave para Megatlon. El caso cumple con la teoría expuesta en Endeavor por el neurocientífico Facundo Manes: "El momento Eureka surge cuando el cerebro está en off". Fernando Storchi estaba jugando al fútbol cuando pensó en unir negocios y placer, osea, deporte. Meses más tarde, instaló tres canchas de fútbol, dos de paddle y un gimnasio en el Club Almagro, con fondos de familiares y amigos. Como ese, otros clubes de barrio necesitaban una renovación. "El resultado era win-win: con una mejor estructura, logramos que la comunidad volviera al club", explicó Storchi. La empresa alcazó el millón, pero "fue una consecuencia de hacer las cosas bien y no la misión", dijo su fundador. En el 99, ya en cuatro clubes, le puso nombre y concepto al negocio. Fue un momento crucial, aprovechado con innovación. "Megatlon fue pionero en la bancarización de cuotas; se vendían membrecías anuales a mitad de precio, y bajamos la estacionalidad [típica del rubro] a una diferencia de sólo 15% entre los meses de mayor y menor actividad", se explayó Storchi. La red multitarget, con 24 sucursales, 150 acuerdos corporativos y 10 gimnasios in company, proyecta facturar unos $ 562 millones este año.
Adquirir consumidores, suscriptores, usuarios o compañías -en la esfera de los B2B- es la plataforma de despegue hacia el primer gran caudal de ingresos. En Globant, recordó Guibert Englebienne, la primera venta fue un sitio para EMC, que cobraron US$ 5000. Tuvieron que esperar varios meses para demostrarse con el primer cliente de peso, que era posible hacer algo grande. "Empezamos a trabajar para LastMinute [un sitio de ofertas de viajes], y en cuatro meses pasamos de ser unos pocos a ser una firma de 70 empleados". El siguiente hito, continuó Englebienne, fue Google, un respaldo a su credibilidad, que los llevó mucho más lejos que el millón. Y sobre todo, considerando que el objetivo fue, desde el inicio, apuntar a clientes afuera de América latina. Con cinco años de existencia, el cuarteto fundador fue tentado con una propuesta de compra. "Bill Gates no hubiera sido Bill Gates si vendía su empresa". El consejo de un mentor de Harvard hizo que enfilaran hacia Wall Street, donde llegaron siete años de madurez más tarde. Lo cuentan con orgullo: en lugar de ser adquiridos, fueron ellos los que salieron de compras en los Estados Unidos, Reino Unido, Brasil y en India.
Los emprendedores exitosos se las rebuscan para construir con los recursos disponibles, y afrontar el miedo al fracaso que, según Manes, paraliza. "Imaginar el futuro -dijo- es propio de los líderes". La innovación tecnológica tiene mucho de eso.
En 2008, Matías Rozenfarb fundó Keepcon, un sistema automático de moderación de contenidos. Aquí también la firma cruzó la línea del millón cuando grandes compañías entraron en su cartera de clientes, algo que los empapó de sudor durante meses. El proceso para captar a uno de los grandes a nivel regional y a un enorme jugador global, implicó competir con las áreas tecnológicas de las propias compañías, pese a ofrecer una tecnología disruptiva. "Pasamos entre seis y nueve meses haciendo pruebas de concepto gratuitas, con toda la compañía trabajando para eso", detalló Rozenfarb. Ese tiempo transcurrió con el tic-tac de una cuenta regresiva en su tiempo de vida, a medida que consumían los fondos. Rozenfarb lo definió como una característica del emprendedor: la apuesta, aunque sea riesgosa, se impone a la salud financiera. "Es importante no mezquinar recursos cuando hay una oportunidad para impulsar el crecimiento", dijo. El esfuerzo valió para cazar a grandes presas, y el refuerzo de la facturación permitió destinar fondos a I+D que usó Keepcon para diversificarse y entrar a la arena del big data. Las primeras ventas en Brasil, Estados Unidos y España fueron por Skype. Otro ejemplo de exprimir al máximo lo que se tiene.
Desde la oficina de Jampp en Londres, Diego Meller relató sus diversas experiencias a LA NACION. El actual CEO de la compañía dedicada a la promoción de aplicaciones, tuvo que emanciparse a los 20 años para fundar Livra, su primera empresa, junto a Martín Añazco, todavía socio. Pasaron noches en la oficina, sintieron la adrenalina de emprender y aprendieron a pivotear. Livra dejó de ser un sitio para comparar precios, y se transformó en una encuestadora online que, finalmente, vendieron a Ipsos.
Pese a lo que habían hecho hasta allí, la vuelta a cero fue igualmente difícil. Jampp intentó sin éxito ser una compañía global de juegos, en pleno auge del social gaming. Les costaba tanto monetizar que pusieron la lupa sobre los clientes más activos, para revelar cuál era el target al que debían apuntar. Meller descubrió que la que más gastaba era su mamá. "Estamos en problemas", se dijo. Rascó la olla y, con lo último, en base a los propios problemas para posicionar los juegos, trabajaron en una solución para promocionar apps, antes de anunciar el cierre a los inversores. La dinámica de ingresos, esta vez, fue veloz. "Cerramos el primer deal con un gran cliente con un presupuesto muy grande, sin tener la capacidad para hacer ni el 10% de lo acordado y tuvimos que salir a contratar gente. Al principio, hay un juego entre lo que tenés y el potencial que ofrecés". Resultó. En marzo, Jampp levantó US$ 7 millones.
Hay más aventurados con fundamentos. Tomás Bermúdez creó junto a su hermana y otros socios la aplicación CookApp, para conectar a chefs y cocineros amateurs con comensales. "Si la gente duerme en casas de desconocidos, ¿por qué no compartir una comida?", se preguntó Bermúdez. Lanzarse al mercado los acercó al capital. En una de las cenas privadas que se ofrecen en la plataforma conocieron a uno de sus principales inversores ángeles. El camino al millón, comienza por intentarlo, incluso cuando implica crear un hábito.
La creatividad en el universo tecnológico vale igualmente para los clásicos. Tito Loizeau hizo de Barbie más que una muñeca al abrir una tienda. La novedad a nivel global atrajo a las pequeñas consumidoras y, con ellas, una suma caudalosa. El éxito se expandió a México, Perú y Uruguay, aunque no exento de adversidades. Las aperturas resultaron demasiado precipitadas, y hubo que recalcular. Las tiendas de los shoppings, que exigían 12 horas corridas, eran insostenibles, porque el horario escolar abarcaba la mayor parte del tiempo. Para Barbie Store, "los millones posteriores al primero fueron los más difíciles". Loizeau tuvo inicios menos felices, como el de Promored, un sitio de cupones de descuento que lo enfrentó a cientos de frustraciones. "De cada 100 propuestas, nos aprobaban una o dos". Los primeros $ 100.000 cobrados y ahorrados en esa empresa quedaron atrapados en el corralito. Más adelante, Promored fue renovada como agencia de promociones y vendida, y Loizeau, otra vez, volvió a empezar un nuevo sendero hacia el millón. Porque las fórmulas son de las ciencias exactas.
Fuente:www.lanacion.com.ar
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