by Ikujiro Nonaka and Hirotaka Takeuchi. Ikujiro Nonaka is professor emeritus at Hitotsubashi University. Hirotaka Takeuchi is a professor of management practice at Harvard Business School.
Image courtesy of Michael Austin/theispot.com
We live in a world of discontinuity and uncertainty, where norms are rapidly disintegrating and businesses are losing their footing. We live in a time of flux and fluidity, when mandates for growth are driving high-velocity, unrelenting change. We live in a messy world, where boundaries are becoming more porous and unprecedented complexity adds ambiguity and reduces predictability.
Our traditional approach to strategy, based on data and analysis, is at a crossroads in this era of unknown unknowns. The most well-trained AI, built on vast stores of data, information, and knowledge, could not have predicted how the COVID-19 pandemic would affect a world made more open and connected by digital technologies. Can strategy be reframed so that companies can thrive in the face of our current and future challenges?
We believe not only that strategy can be reconceived, but that it must be. In our 50 years of researching companies both in the U.S. and in Japan, our view of the organization has evolved from information processing machine (as influenced by Herbert Simon) to living organism continually creating new knowledge. We argue that to survive in today’s world, this living organism must be grounded in moral purpose and guided by the goals of offering value to customers, contributing to society, living in harmony with nature, and creating a better future.
The Soul of an Organization
Advances in neuroscience research in recent years have shed light on the biological factors driving humans’ sense of purpose. We now know that the most basic need we are compelled to meet is social connection — it has a stronger motivational pull than even food, water, and shelter.1 Neuroscientists have also found that the human brain exhibits a predisposition to seek the common good via egalitarian and altruistic behavior.2 And it is able to combine data from multiple sources of sensory input to plan future courses of action and to handle unexpected and novel situations.3
These findings suggest that our purpose as human beings is rooted in our universal tendencies to relate to and care for one another, that we share the ability to rapidly adapt to changing circumstances, and that we can imagine together how we might create a better world.
The same sense of purpose and set of capabilities exist in the living being that is the company. Kazuo Inamori, who founded Kyocera in 1959, believed that a company, as a collection of human beings, should strive to operate in a way that is good and right, just as individuals strive to work hard, think good thoughts, do the right thing, practice self-reflection and self-discipline, refine their minds, and elevate their character in everyday life. Inamori’s 2004 book, Ikikata (which translates to “how to live”), describes such conduct as living with the purpose of elevating our souls so that each day they are a little more beautiful, developed, and noble. These principles have guided Inamori, who is also a lay Buddhist monk, as a human being, as a CEO, and as a chairman, when he resurrected Japan Airlines from bankruptcy.
Similarly, Tadashi Yanai, CEO of Fast Retailing, which operates the Uniqlo stores, is guided by 23 management principles that he calls the “soul” of his company, and he believes that a soul is the most important thing we have in life. Influenced by running a single shop in the 1980s, Yanai’s first principle is “Meet customer needs and create new customers.” This is done a little at a time, he explains, by devoting your life to meeting customer needs a little better every day. Yanai’s second principle, “Put good ideas into practice, move the world, and change and contribute to society,” reflects his conviction that a company exists to serve society. These principles are integral to his leadership: At a 2010 meeting of his global management team, Yanai spent a day and a half going over the 23 principles so that executives could internalize them and put them into practice globally.
The underlying concept — the soul of an organization — has also shaped the vision of U.S. business leaders such as Microsoft chairman and CEO Satya Nadella and Salesforce cofounder Marc Benioff. Nadella explored the idea in his 2017 book, Hit Refresh: The Quest to Rediscover Microsoft’s Soul and Imagine a Better Future for Everyone. He identified his company’s higher purpose as helping every person and every organization on the planet achieve more. And he connected soul and strategy: Rediscovering the soul of Microsoft, he argued, will lead to getting its strategy right, which in turn will improve life for all customers, employees, partners, and members of society.
Benioff tied purpose even more explicitly to the organization’s role in society, writing in his 2019 book Trailblazer: “Today’s world is so rife with challenging economic, social, and political issues that it’s no longer feasible for a company to turn away and conduct business as usual. ... Over time, your employees and customers, not to mention investors, partners, host communities, and other stakeholders, will want to know your philosophy for doing business. They want to know if you have a soul.”
Strategy at the Crossroads
As the CEOs of two leading American companies talk openly and passionately about the idea that organizations are living beings with souls — invested in improving everyone’s prospects, not just their own — we expect that other business leaders will embrace that message. We believe more and more of them recognize that CEOs must start formulating strategy with their souls and then execute it with their brains. What do we mean by that? Let’s examine our terms a little more closely.
We use “soul” to describe the simple truths and principles that guide us to do what is right as human beings, representing a living philosophy born from experience and practice. Soul helps us find our way every day through uncertainty and hardship — it is a way of life.
We use “brain” to refer to the analysis that will help companies operate in a messy world and wend their way through its complexities and ambiguities. Today we have vast amounts of data available, and advanced technologies such as internet-connected sensors and AI allow us to gather, process, and interpret that data in ever more sophisticated ways. This means organizations can develop more complex scenarios and simulations, conduct more experiments, and overall respond much more adaptively to unforeseen events than they used to.
By starting with the soul, companies can crystalize how they are going to achieve their purpose of making a better future for everyone. Drawing on deeply held values, companies can imagine what kind of future they wish to create and then use their brains to make it happen. They have all the analytical tools they need to achieve their goal of generating superior returns. The key question then becomes, “How should companies use both souls and brains so that strategy becomes relevant to the world we live in?”
Six Practices That Infuse Strategy With Soul
Doing the ordinary things in life a little bit better every day elevates individuals. During the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, small things such as wearing masks, washing hands, and keeping social distance have all helped prevent the spread of the disease. Each small practice that makes our bodies a little healthier, our minds a little more peaceful, the air we breathe a little cleaner, and the places in which we stay a little more beautiful helps us connect to the goal of improving ourselves and our world.
Likewise, doing the ordinary things a little bit better every day in our jobs — such as working hard, making ethical choices, being kind, practicing self-reflection and self-discipline, being humble, and being thankful — elevates our work lives. This builds culture at the organizational level and character at the personal level. These behaviors have to be practiced every day so that they become a way of life — just like Toyota has built daily routines, or kata, into its famous Toyota Production System (TPS).
Kata is defined as “a means for keeping your thoughts and actions in sync with dynamic, unpredictable conditions.”4 It includes process-related practices such as “Ask why five times,” the kanban card that accompanies components sent along the production line, yokoten (best-practice sharing), jidoka (automation), mieruka (visualization), and the A3 reporting process (named after the paper size). It also includes conduct-related practices like OASiS, an acronym for saying ohayo (good morning), arigato (thank you), shitsurei-shimashita (pardon me), and sumimasen (excuse me; I’m sorry) on the shop floor. These practices ensure that things get done the right way in any company that follows the TPS.
Similarly, as we have learned over decades of studying organizations, companies can adopt six daily practices to elevate strategy to a way of life:
Cope with complexity.
Adapt to change.
Embrace dynamic duality.
Empathize with everyone.
Tell stories.
Live with nature.
This set of practices helps organizations connect to the goal of building better lives and futures for company stakeholders and other members of society. You may be familiar with each one, but the key lies in doing all of these things habitually, a little better every day; that’s how their impact will become greater than the sum of their parts. We will discuss one at a time, describing how each practice infuses strategy with soul and thus helps companies define and pursue business goals that support the common good.
Cope With Complexity. The growing complexity of our world and its many interrelated systems is widely acknowledged. To solve our most pressing problems, we must tap diverse perspectives and sources of expertise across multiple domains — no single approach or field of study will provide the answers. Likewise, we must bring all of our own diverse capabilities to bear: The ability to sit with a complex problem and tap both analytical and intuitive thinking to address it is increasingly crucial to organizations.
An aircraft represents the epitome of complexity at the product level. Take the HondaJet plane, which consists of some 200,000 parts. It took more than nine years and 200 million pages of documentation for North Carolina-based Honda Aircraft to receive U.S. Federal Aviation Administration certification for this plane.
Yet the breakthrough innovation that launched the company’s success was a simple idea that came to aircraft designer Michimasa Fujino one night in 1997 as he lay in the dark: Why not put the engine on the wing? He jumped out of bed, turned on the lights, and roughly sketched out his idea on the back of a calendar page because he had no other paper close at hand.
When he showed his sketch to his development team members the next morning, everyone laughed at him. These aviation experts “knew” that mounting the engines on top of the wings was taboo: It would kill the aircraft’s aerodynamics. Undeterred, Fujino dug into the complex problem and worked slowly but steadily to prove that the over-the-wing concept would produce less drag. Finding the precise place to mount the engines on the wings was a delicate process; move the engines four inches away from the sweet spot, in any direction, and the plane would not fly. Fujino finally figured out where to position them when he tested a scale model at Boeing’s wind tunnel facility. He had overturned conventional wisdom while coping with an extremely high level of complexity.
HondaJet made its maiden flight in 2003 in the U.S. and received rave reviews. However, Fujino was exhausted by his decades-long quest to create an industry-changing small jet: He had been working on the challenge since 1986, when Honda first assigned him to an R&D team working to develop an experimental aircraft. He confided to us that when he took a three-week vacation with his family in the Bahamas after the test flight, he considered quitting the company. Fortunately, an American executive staying in the same hotel told him how cool the jet looked and promised to buy one. According to Fujino, that’s when he understood what his superiors in Tokyo had always told him: that he was working for the customer, not for the company. The soul of the company rested in founder Soichiro Honda’s Three Joys principle — the joy of buying, the joy of selling, and the joy of creating.
The ability to cope with complexity allowed Fujino to successfully persevere and introduce a transformative innovation. But to keep moving forward long term, he had to be guided by the organization’s soul. By recalling the three joys and the idea of making things better for the customer, Fujino also recalled his essential purpose. When Honda finally decided to put the HondaJet into commercial production in 2006, Fujino was named president and CEO of its new Honda Aircraft group — and he went on to become one of the most lauded innovators ever in aeronautical research and design.
Adapt to Change. The rapid rate of change that characterizes the modern world — driven largely by accelerated technological progress — demands that leaders and organizations anticipate and adapt to new circumstances at a pace unprecedented in human history.
Microsoft’s renaissance under Nadella shows how a leader who begins by establishing a deeper purpose for the organization — and is guided by that purpose rather than a strategy of, for example, market dominance — can more clearly see emerging trends and cultural changes and successfully adapt to them. For example, Nadella understood that the technology world was shifting to ecosystems of partners linked with open systems and the proprietary approach that Microsoft had long favored would no longer confer advantage. He also understood that the company had to move beyond a strategy rooted in trying to preserve the past — that is, Microsoft’s dominance of the PC market via the Windows operating system. He recognized that the most important emerging areas in tech were cloud and AI, so he made major investments in both that have kept the company at the forefront in these areas.5
Being adaptive involves being humble, and Nadella’s leadership has been characterized by a humility rarely displayed by his predecessors. He has been quoted as saying, “From ancient Greece to modern Silicon Valley, the only thing that gets in the way of continued success and relevance, and impact, is hubris.”6 His example shows that grounding strategy in soul is linked to the ideal of servant-leadership, where the focus is on the greater good rather than oneself. Under his guidance, Microsoft has achieved great success while also shedding its reputation as a bully that used questionable tactics to dominate. Internally, he has been credited with overhauling outdated management structures and creating a more collaborative culture, where previously the culture had been shaped by performance management practices that fueled competition among employees and undermined cooperation. And he created internal hackathons that helped break down entrenched silos across the business and got more people working together.
Purpose — soul — has been at the core of Nadella’s ability to lead the organization through change. In an email to employees when he took the helm, he wrote, “This starts with clarity of purpose and sense of mission that will lead us to imagine the impossible and deliver it. We need to prioritize innovation that is centered on our core value of empowering users and organizations to ‘do more.’ … The best work happens when you know that it’s not just work, but something that will improve other people’s lives. This is the opportunity that drives each of us at this company.”7
Embrace Dynamic Duality. In the West, an intellectual tradition of dualistic thinking (drawing sharp distinctions between mind and body, self and other, humanity and nature) has led business executives to neatly divide knowledge into two categories: explicit knowledge, which can easily be articulated and shared, and tacit knowledge, which is more intuitive and gained from lived experience. They often value the former more highly than the latter. In contrast, the intellectual tradition in Japan has stressed oneness of body and mind, of self and other, of humanity and nature. This tradition has led Japanese executives to view explicit and tacit knowledge as mutually complementary, with the emphasis placed more on the latter. Tacit and explicit knowledge form a dynamic duality interacting with, and interchanging into, each other to create something new through life experiences.
After a six-year study of Toyota, we concluded that the company actively embraces and cultivates contradiction, opposites, and paradoxes, making dynamic duality an integral part of its culture. In 2008, three of us from Hitotsubashi University in Tokyo wrote a book that focused on how Toyota reinforces the culture of dynamic duality, making it a way of life.8 We identified six traits:
Toyota moves slowly, a little at a time, but takes big leaps once in a while.
It is frugal on a daily basis but splurges on key events.
It is efficient on day-to-day operations but redundant in its use of employees’ time.
It grows surely and steadily yet is constantly paranoid.
It is hierarchical but gives employees freedom to push back.
It simplifies internal messaging but builds a complex analog web of human relationships to share knowledge throughout the organization.
The current CEO, Akio Toyoda, sees himself at the center of this analog web, calling himself an oyaji (old man) of a small- to medium-sized enterprise (SME). In a 2016 interview, he said about himself: “An oyaji in a SME … sees straight into employees’ faces, feels their body temperatures, and comes close to empathize with them. I don’t want to say that I cannot do these things because I run a big company.”9 That is a duality he embodies. As our interaction with Akio Toyoda and the company that bears his name illustrates, Toyota keeps on pursuing dynamic duality — idealism and reality, analog and digital, unpredictability and stability — as a way of life.
Empathize With Everyone. Human survival has always depended on our ability to organize in mutually supportive groups for food and protection — which is why social connection is our top priority. At the root of connecting with others is empathizing with them. Facing today’s crises, political and business leaders should unite, using this unique quality that we humans have. To empathize on a deep level, we need to develop a keen understanding of others’ perspectives and cultivate compassion in our hearts.
That’s exactly what Eisai, a leading Japanese pharmaceutical company, is doing with its 10,000 employees in Japan and abroad. Each employee spends a few days a year with patients in health care facilities, learning about their specific ailments and developing empathy for what they are feeling deep inside. Haruo Naito, who has been CEO since 1988, explained, “We get to know how patients feel by spending time with them, which eventually moves all of us to tears. Our motivation comes from our desire to do something about the true needs we grasped then and there.”10
This ability of humans to perceive others’ feelings and sensitivities, to collaborate and build relationships, will be invaluable in a digital-led, highly automated world. Soulful companies that lead the way will make it part of their purpose to help employees, customers, and others develop a deeper understanding of and respect for one another in a future where a torrent of technology may otherwise dehumanize us.
Tell Stories. Effective business leaders understand the power of using stories to communicate the essence of their beliefs and ideals and to help the organization internalize strategy.
The recently retired chairman and CEO of Fujifilm, Shigetaka Komori, created two guiding narratives about the company.11 First, to help people envision a different future for the company at a time when the market was transitioning from photographic film to digital technology, Komori chose to reinterpret a famous quote from German philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk” became “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings at the beginning of a new age.” The original quote depicted knowledge (symbolized by the owl) as hindsight, arriving only when the day is done. In the reinterpretation, we see how knowledge can bring us into the future. Komori’s strategic narrative identified Fujifilm with the owl of Minerva taking off at the beginning of the new age of digitalization.
Second, Komori used stories to encourage all of his employees to use their “whole body” intelligence — not only their five senses but also the intuition that springs from lived bodily experience. He told this story to make his point: “If you are caught in a fire, which direction and how fast should you run to escape the flames? The difference between the people who escape to safety and those who don’t is not based on intelligence; it is a difference of instinct and intuition.”12
Indeed, Fujifilm escaped the “fire” that has destroyed other analog businesses. In 2018, it generated its highest revenue in its 87-year history. It had transformed itself from a photographic film company into one engaged in six core businesses: health care, graphic systems, highly functional materials, optical devices, digital imaging, and documentation. According to Komori, Fujifilm achieved that business success by extracting the experiential knowledge of all its employees (what he calls “muscle intelligence”) and by sharpening all their human capabilities (using what he calls “the whole body theory of business”). He warned, “If one element is missing, the totality will be reduced, results will not follow, and defeat will ensue. After all, it is through their capabilities as total human beings that top leaders are able to engage each individual employee and lead the company as a whole.”13
Live With Nature. Complex systems in nature — like Earth’s climate — predate Homo sapiens by more than 3 billion years, and we humans have been living with them since our species first appeared. Shinto priests at Ise Grand Shrine have been rebuilding the shrine every 20 years for the past 1,300 years, an act of renewal that honors the cyclical quality of nature. Shinto (which most Japanese view not as a distinct religion but as a “way,” or practice) teaches that gods (kami) dwell in all things in nature. The Japanese tradition of “oneness of humanity and nature” — also practiced by many indigenous cultures around the world — has taken on new relevance as humankind seeks to repair the damage to our natural environment caused by industrialization.
This concept also serves as the foundation of a course that one of us (Takeuchi) has been teaching since 2012. The course has included a visit to the Tohoku region of Japan, which was hit by the 2011 earthquake and tsunami, and by the subsequent nuclear accident at the Fukushima power plant that caused radioactive contamination of the air, land, and water. Local high schoolers who experienced the triple disaster, some of whom lost loved ones, have spoken with our students on the meaning of happiness and the role humans have in living in harmony with nature and preserving it.
Our students have visited the oyster farms in Tohoku to learn about symbiosis, a word derived from the Greek for “living together.” At the coastal town of Kesennuma in Miyagi Prefecture, the symbiosis between the forest and the sea was recognized — and restored — through the initiative of one fisherman running an oyster farm. Shigeaki Hatakeyama noticed that his oysters were turning blood-red due to the outbreak of red tide in the mid-1960s. When he realized that the tide was caused by the contaminated river water flowing into the bay, he convinced his fellow fishermen to start planting trees in the forest to protect and preserve the river basin. He was motivated by elders’ teachings that essential nutrients for the sea are carried by rivers from the forest.
Hatakeyama established a not-for-profit organization to do this work. Its name, roughly translated, means “The forest is the lover of the sea.” The name conveys its purpose, but the tagline makes the symbiotic relationship crystal clear: “The forest is longing for the sea. The sea is longing for the forest.” In other words, the people at the sea are saying, “We need the forest to make sure oysters live,” and the people on land are saying, “We need the oysters to make sure reforestation continues generation after generation.”
When the earthquake and tsunami hit Kesennuma in 2011, Hatakeyama lost his mother and his boats. His only solace came when he found later that there were enough healthy plankton in the bay to feed the oysters, and that is what kept him and his organization going. When we value living with nature, we care for the environment — and in turn preserve our livelihoods.
Surviving the Future
These six practices must become a way of life for companies to survive in this day and age of “unknown unknowns.” They must also become the modus operandi in the life of a strategist who seeks to meet the unprecedented challenges facing businesses and humankind. Observing leaders who consistently do these things has taught us the following lessons about strategy.
First, strategy must be driven by human beings. Strategy is as fundamental as thinking good thoughts, doing the right thing, and practicing self-reflection and self-discipline in everyday life. The six practices we discussed represent our philosophy of doing business — what we call soul. Our customers, employees, suppliers, communities, and shareholders want to know whether we have a soul, if we are to build mutual trust and connection.
Second, strategy is driven by wisdom. Mother’s wisdom (what elders have taught us) and practical wisdom (what lived experience has taught us) enable us to grasp the essence of a matter intuitively and, at the same time, cope with the fast-changing world. Companies have to continuously change to survive, so they should focus on becoming a little bit better every day rather than fixate on drawing up a precise plan. Practical wisdom enables managers to make judgment calls on how to act at certain times, under specific conditions, and to undertake the best action at each juncture.
Third, strategy is about future-making. The future is hazy and unpredictable, which is why leaders need to tell stories about where they are headed — it allows others in the organization to follow. Narratives illustrate a set of beliefs about what the company stands for and what kind of legacy it wants to leave behind for future generations. These stories bind the organization together and help strategy become a way of life for all employees.
Last but not least, strategy is about making choices. It is about choosing the future we want to make, and that future must extend beyond the narrow interests of the company. Only then will companies start thinking of themselves as social entities that have been charged with a purpose to create lasting benefits for society and to improve the human condition. No company will survive long term if it does not start with a moral purpose and end up offering value to customers, contributing to society, living in harmony with nature, and creating a better future — every day, as a way of life.
A foreign government has hacked a political party’s computers—and possibly an election. It has stolen documents and timed their release to explode with maximum damage. It is a strike against our civic infrastructure. And though nobody died—and there was no economic toll exacted—the Russians were aiming for a tender spot, a central node of our democracy.
Mallory Ortberg, aka Dear Prudence, is online weekly to chat live with readers. An edited transcript of the chat is below. (Sign up below to get Dear Prudence delivered to your inbox each week. Read Prudie’s Slate columnshere. Send questions to Prudence at prudence@slate.com.)
The idea that new babies are empty vessels waiting to be filled with knowledge of the world around them doesn’t sound unreasonable. With their unfocused eyes and wrinkly skin, tiny humans sometimes look more like amoebas than complex beings.
Yet scientists have built a body of evidence, particularly over the last three decades, that suggests this is patently untrue. “When kids are born, they’re already little scientists exploring the world,” said the filmmaker Estela Renner via a video conference from Brazil before a recent screening of her new documentary The Beginning of Life (streaming on Netflix) at the World Bank in Washington, D.C.
That’s something Renner, a Brazilian mother of three, discovered as she spoke with early-childhood experts and parents in nine countries around the world about the impact a child’s environment in the first few years of life has on not only her physical development, but her cognitive, social, and emotional development, too. “I didn’t know that kids were not blank slates,” she said. “It changed the way I look at babies.” If more people recognized that fact, the way communities and policymakers think about and invest in the early years of life might be different.
Exquisitely shot and hopeful-without-being-sugary, the film focuses on the day-to-day lives of babies and parents and on the opportunities for learning in even the most mundane activities. “Babies are the best learning machines in the universe,” Alison Gopnik, a psychology professor who has spent decades studying child development, said in the documentary. “They’re the world’s original inventors,” echoed Patricia Kuhl, the co-director of the University of Washington Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences.
As an adult, just watching a baby who is on the verge of crawling is exhausting. Again and again, he’ll try to rock and wiggle his way forward, tapping into a seemingly endless supply of determination. Give a toddler a spoon and she’ll drop it from her high chair over and over, testing to make sure it clatters each time and watching for her mom to pick it up and hand it back. “There’s this inborn drive for mastery,” said Jack Shonkoff, the director of the Center on the Developing Child at Harvard University. These moments are crucial for development, and parents and the other children and adults who make up a child’s world have an enormous role in creating an environment where children have both the freedom and support to learn.
Consider a father preparing breakfast for his toddler. It’d be easy, faster, certainly, to strap the baby into a high chair and tune out the babble for a few minutes. But give the kid an empty bowl and a spoon and he’ll create a whole imaginary meal alongside his dad, offering sample “tastes.” Ask what kind of sauce he’s making and maybe, like one tyke in the film, he’ll offer up “mango” as a reply.
Children with high self-esteem who feel loved and supported are willing to try new things and to fail a lot in the process, said Andrew Meltzoff, Kuhl’s co-director at the Institute for Learning and Brain Sciences, because they know they’ll be safe. Even preschoolers who shout “no” at tired parents are testing the supportive boundaries of their environments. Where people often suggest that toddlers, given their frenetic tendencies, have trouble paying attention, in reality, they have trouble not paying attention. Everything piques their senses, from the sight of a passing car, to the soft fur of a dog, to the sizzle bacon makes when it hits a hot pan. They need help processing, but also the physical and mental space to take it all in.
Like all people, if babies feel rooted in a community, if they feel a sense of belonging, they are more willing to explore and take risks that help them learn precisely because they know they have someplace and someone who serves as an anchor. The support they feel or don’t feel in the early years influences what they expect from the world around them in the years to come.
The first few years of brain development might be equated to the construction of the frame of a house, said Charles Nelson, who has studied how early experiences impact brain and behavioral development. Just as a house can’t stand without a sturdy frame, a child is unlikely to thrive without a supportive environment in the early years. Kids who spend their babyood in loving and enriching environments are more likely to stay in school and become productive adults. They are likely to be healthier. But when babies don’t have adults who engage with them, pathways in the brain that form a child’s “frame” can disintegrate. Similarly, when babies see bad behavior, say their parents fighting, they are more likely to think that behavior is the appropriate way to resolve a conflict because it’s what they know.
Helping children thrive doesn’t mean providing the best toys or the most expensive gadgets, though. Quite the opposite; learning happens when children create their own play worlds. A child who sees a ruler and a pen and turns them into an airplane is often using more of her imagination and stimulating more of her brain than a child who is handed an already-put-together toy. “Play is the major vehicle for children to learn,” Shonkoff said.
While the film is not explicitly political and is intended for a wide audience, it does point out that children thrive when they have parents who have time and resources to devote to their upbringing. Right now, the United States is one of the only countries that does not offer paid maternity leave and few fathers are able to take paternity leave, meaning many babies often spend just a few waking hours with their parents. A 2013 Pew Research Center report found that in dual-income households, mothers spend about 12 hours per week on childcare, where fathers spend only about seven. And while no one in the film is criticizing working parents, the documentary does point out that parents who are able to cultivate strong relationships with their children are ultimately helping shape more productive adults. “That love is an important part of the economy,” said the economist James Heckman.
But it’s not always viewed that way, with employers frequently expecting parents to return to the working world quickly and to work inflexible schedules that make parenting well difficult. Although the film does make note of this, its focus is primarily on parents and families, not on specific policies that might help people be good parents. While “children are not raised by government, they’re raised by people,” Shonkoff said, he also pointed out that governments need to support people who are raising children. And people raising children need to care about the future of more than just their own child. The future of society quite literally depends on it.
3. China nude pictures as IOU and collateral, link is safe for work…”…the lender would send the photo and her naked video footage to her family members if she could not pay back her 10,000 yuan borrowed on an annual interest rate of 24 percent within a week.”
In her article “Bog Butter: A Two Thousand Year History” in The Journal of Irish Archaeology, Caroline Earwood wrote, “It is usually found as a whitish, solid mass of fatty material with a distinctive, pungent and slightly offensive smell. It is found either as a lump, or in containers which are most often made of wood but include baskets and skins.”
Then there is this:
Given that level of preservation, most of the butter is actually edible. Irish celebrity chef Kevin Thornton, who owns the Michelin-starred Thornton’s Restaurant in Dublin, claimed to have tasted a 4,000-year-old sample of bog butter.
Some of you may recall James Farewell’s 1689 poem “The Irish Hudibras” — “butter to eat with their hog, was seven years buried in a bog”.
CUPERTINO, Calif.—It’s been quite a while since Apple unveiled a new device that made people say, “Ooh, I want to play with that.” A lot of people are going to play with the new Apple Watch, which was unveiled Tuesday in a massive event near the company’s headquarters.
At first glance—which is basically all anyone got of it—it has a shot of redefining an entire category of devices, wearables, much as the iPhone did for cellular phones.
I was able to heft the watch, try it on, and wear it for a few minutes—but not to actually use it for anything. The software was set to play a demo loop, and the gadget itself won’t actually be available for purchase until sometime early next year. That’s a downer for eager would-be buyers, and perhaps for short-term investors hoping it would be out in time for the Christmas buying season. But it’s similar to the playbook Steve Jobs used to launch the original iPhone: Announce in January, ship in June. And that seemed to work out for Apple.
A few quick observations:
The device is considerably thicker than a conventional watch—not a surprise given how much technology is packed into it. But I was surprised at how light it felt. The one I tried had an aluminum case that seemed much lighter than not only, say, the Samsung Galaxy Gear watch, but even the stainless steel conventional watch I was wearing.
Fashion is a key part of the experience. The Apple Watch will come in two sizes (38 mm and 42 mm tall), three “collections,” and a dizzying array of materials (aluminum, stainless steel, gold), bands, and looks. The starting price may be $349, but I’m betting it will top out in the stratosphere.
The screen on the 42 mm model I tried was very readable and super-bright—which raises the issue of battery life, something Apple said little about. Clearly, you’re gonna have to use the new induction-charging system every night; the question is whether you’ll need to take it along with you for a quick recharge during the day if you make heavy use of it.
In short, we still don’t know a great deal about the Apple Watch, and won’t for months yet. But yeah, I want to play with it. And that says a lot right there.
In the wake of the tragic police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, there has been much speculation and debate about what actually transpired. Lots of news commentators seem to believe that the Brown case would be resolved sooner—and there would be less civil unrest—had the officer who shot him been equipped with a body-worn camera. In fact, the Ferguson Police Department has now begun to implement this technology.
Actor Benedict Cumberbatch takes the Ice Bucket Challenge
The ALS Association's attempt to trademark the phrase "Ice Bucket Challenge" met with a chilly response from Internet critics. It has now withdrawn its applications with the United States Patent and Trademark Office.
On Friday, the ALS Association announced that since July 29, it has received more than $109.9 million in donations—a 3504% increase from the $2.8 million it received during same time period last year. Those invited to participate in the in the Ice Bucket Challenge have 24 hours to either donate money or take a shower under a bucket of ice filled water, optimally posting video proof of the challenge met on the Internet. As the donations and more than 1 million videos posted on YouTube and Facebook show, many chose to do both.
The origins of the ice bucket challenge are unclear, though its been utilized in benefit of other charities both before and during the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge's viral reign. The predecessor "Cold Water Challenge" that started making the rounds in mid 2013 was often issued to benefit cancer charities.
The ALS Overreaches
Other charities dedicated to support of sufferers and research of ALS (amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, also known as Lou Gehrig's Disease), benefited from donations inspired by social media phenomenon. The ALS Association however, received from the lion's share, and on August 26, the nonprofit filed two trademark applications with the USPTO. The first was for "ICE BUCKET CHALLENGE" and the second for ALS ICE BUCKET.
"This is why we can't have nice things," was one of the more, ahem, charitable criticisms repeated on Twitter after trademark attorney Erik M. Pelton posted about the ALS Association's USPTO filings on his firm's website under the pithy headline, "Let the ice bucket trademark challenges begin." Many, however, didn't spare the organization their own icy criticism:
On Friday, the same day the ALS Association thanked donors all over the world for their $100.9 million generosity, it also pulled its trademark applications. The ALS Association provided ReadWrite with the following statement:
The ALS Association filed for these trademarks in good faith as a measure to protect the Ice Bucket Challenge from misuse after consulting with the families who initiated the challenge this summer. However, we understand the public’s concern and are withdrawing the trademark applications. We appreciate the generosity and enthusiasm of everyone who has taken the challenge and donated to ALS charities.
In his trademark blog post, Pelton delineated the reasons he felt the ALS Association's trademark attempt was inappropriate. These criticism included the fact that the phrase "Ice Bucket Challenge" isn't associated exclusively with fundraising for the ALS Association. He also questioned whether if successful, the nonprofit would prevent others from using the ice bucket challenge for other charitable causes.
But Let's Consign These Guys To An Icy Hell
On the other hand, perhaps we should have taken the ALS Association at its word. It's hard to escape that feeling when you see how many outfits are trying to profit from the viral phenomenon. may very well wish to protect the the game that sent its donations skyrocketing from those who seek to profit from it personally. Look no further than the Ice Bucket Challenge Halloween costume for an example of why we really can't have nice things:
"ALS or Lou Gehrig's Disease is a serious illness that destroys nervous cells and lives," reads the description for this pile of plastic and tulle with a $40 price tag. "The Ice Bucket Challenge is the latest craze in "slacktivism" that helps raise awareness and donations to fund research in the ongoing struggle to end this terrible disease."
Google Play has a host of ALS Ice Bucket Challenge-themed apps. Amazon offers an ever-increasing inventory of "I Survived The Ice Bucket Challenge" apparel for everyone from infants to adults. There are stickers and magnets too, including the "Lindsay Lohan Photo Fridge Magnet, ALS Ice Bucket Challenge" ($2.99), which originally promised "side boob" but now merely assures the potential purchaser of "Highest Quality Magnet Available."
None of these product descriptions offer much indication that your purchase will benefit anyone but the profiteers offering them. It's enough—almost—to make you ask the ALS Association to reinstate its application.
Lead image of Benedict Cumberbatch taking the Ice Bucket Challenge via YouTube screencap
A few months ago, upon looking at a former elementary school photo and doing a cursory Google search of former classmates, I discovered that a former childhood friend of mine, who I’ll call “Sam”—a boy I hadn’t spoken to in more than 10 years, a boy who used to zip to school on his Razr scooter every morning, a boy who went to my bat mitzvah—is now a convicted child molester.
Partly out of morbid curiosity and partly out of an attempt to reconcile the floppy-haired boy I once wrote 'NSYNC parody lyrics with and the person he turned out to be, I spent many late nights combing through his court documents. I learned that he had molested his half-sister, a girl I remembered as a baby in her pretty mother’s stroller, on multiple occasions. I learned that he was part of a child porn file-sharing community and that the feds busted him at his mom’s house. He is currently serving a five-year sentence at a penitentiary in Texas.
I thought earlier this week about Sam when I came across a Forbes piece about child sex robots and how they could potentially be used as a therapeutic tool or outlet for pedophiles’ sexual desires. In response to a question by reporter Kashmir Hill, Ron Arkin, the director of Georgia Tech’s Mobile Lab, said that while he doesn’t approve of child sex bots being used for “recreational purposes,” he thinks they could be valuable for research purposes:
"Child-like robots could be used for pedophiles the way methadone is used to treat drug addicts. ... There are no presumptions that this will assuredly yield positive results—I only believe it is worth investigating in a controlled way to possibly provide better protection to society from recidivism in sex offenders. ... If we can save some children, I think it’s a worthwhile project."
In recommending that this future technology be used in a controlled research setting, Arkin’s cautiousness is understandable: Given how quick our society is to demonize pedophiles, as well as demonize those who suggest any mode of treatment for them short of execution or sterilization, the medical and scientific communities have always erred on the side of caution whenever subjects like “virtual,” or simulated, child porn (or, in this case, what essentially amounts to a child sex surrogate) enter the discussion.
The aversion to discussing the potential reality of child sex robots is also understandable. Without a doubt, the idea of pedophiles having the opportunity to have wide-eyed, pigtailed child sex dolls sent to their homes, the same way one would a bag of groceries or a bunch of books off Amazon, is incredibly horrifying. Furthermore, Hill makes the point that even though a future child sex bot prototype would probably be legal (simulated or cartoon sexual content that features children is technically legal in the United States, thanks to a 2002 SCOTUS ruling), the public’s ethical objections to such a product would likely prevent it from becoming a reality.
But in reading my former friend’s story, and in reading the stories of other pedophiles as well (this This American Life segment is a good starting point to considering the issue), I’ve become convinced that we need to stop getting caught up in our knee-jerk reactions to adults having sex with children—however despicable we might find it, however legitimate our horror at the idea may be—and start focusing on rational solutions. And what the current research on pedophilia indicates is that short of forced sterilization (which we all know has worked out so well in this country in the past), something like child sex robots might be a functional way to keep pedophiles from acting on their impulses, thus keeping an untold number of children safe.
When we talk about pedophilia, which is defined as a predominant attraction to prepubescent children, we need to get two things straight: 1) Not all pedophiles are child molesters, and some successfully control their impulses over the course of their lifetimes; 2) pedophilia is not a psychological aberration that can easily be tweaked with a little medication and cognitive therapy. Many researchers have argued it's actually a fixed sexual orientation.
This is an uncomfortable possibility for many to acknowledge, for obvious reasons. But the fact is that just as you hit a certain age and knew you were attracted to girls or boys or neither or both, pedophiles (for the most part) hit a certain age and knew they were attracted to children. And even though there’s some fluidity to this attraction—it’s not uncommon for pedophiles to form attractions to adult partners, and court records show that my friend Sam was involved with a woman his age before his arrest—like all sexual orientations, pedophilia is immutable and unlikely to change with medicine or therapy.
Pedophilia as a sexual orientation is also potentially far more common than most of us would like to accept. According to current estimates, between 1 and 5 percent of men have some semblance of sexual attraction to children. (There’s not nearly as much research on women and pedophilia, but the general consensus seems to be that the percentage of female pedophiles is much lower.)
On face value, 1 to 5 percent seems like a fairly low number. But when you think about the hundreds and hundreds of people you’ve encountered in your own life, the percentage takes on new weight. For instance, I have 1,145 Facebook friends; I’ve probably met 95 percent of them in person at some point in my life, so we’ll whittle that number down to 1,087 people. You don't have to be Nate Silver to deduce that that means somewhere between 10 to 54 of my Facebook friends might be attracted to children. And if you include all the people I’m not Facebook friends—including Sam, who dropped off my social media radar sometime around the Myspace era—that number likely gets even higher.
These figures are scary, but they get even scarier when you consider the incredible paucity of medical and mental health resources available to pedophiles. While most pedophiles don’t tell their doctors or psychologists about their urges, for fear of being met at their doorsteps by an angry, pitchfork-holding mob, those who do don’t really have another mode of recourse for treatment, short of sterilization.
“The best treatments we have available for pedophiles help them develop the skills they need to live a healthy, offense-free life and, in some cases, to block their sex drives (if they feel it would help them),” Dr. James Cantor, an associate professor of psychology at the University of Toronto, told the Atlantic last year. “We have not yet found a way to convert pedophiles into non-pedophiles that are any more effective than the many failed attempts to convert gay men and lesbians into heterosexuals.” Some therapists use an addiction-based model to treat pedophile patients, but Cantor says it’s been “very difficult” to gauge its effectiveness.
There is no evidence that child-sized sex bots, or “virtual” child porn, is any more effective as a means of curbing sexual desires toward children than any of the other treatments previously mentioned. (Although, given the demonstrated correlation between Internet pornography and reduced sex crimes, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was.) But there is also no evidence that it isn’t, either. We need to start thinking about pedophilia in a rational, rather than emotional, light; we need to start taking these proposed treatments, no matter how wacky or disgusting or ethically dubious we might find them to be. Doing so won’t lead to any easy answers about pedophiles or how we, as a society, should treat them. But it’ll certainly bring us a few steps closer.
When I first heard about Sam and the horrific things he did, I found it impossible to reconcile the shy, floppy-haired, Razr-scooting 10-year-old I knew with the 20-something bastion of evil he’d become. I thought of them as two separate people, and I wondered what kind of trauma he must have experienced in his youth for him to have become such a monster.
But from reading the court documents, what I came to understand is that there was a third person who was something of an amalgam of the two. This person was shy and underdeveloped for his age; this person wanted desperately to forge connections with anyone his own age, male or female, and was intimate with both. (A therapist testifying on his behalf said it’s fairly common among pedophiles to not discriminate between genders, both in adult sex partners and child victims.)
This person was lonely, and deeply repentant of his behavior, and deeply, deeply despairing of why he was the way he was, to the point where he attempted suicide. This person, at one point, realized he had this feeling inside him, and this person, at another point, made a terrible decision to act on it. And as horrible as this might sound, I don’t feel anger toward him, or even disgust. I just feel so incredibly sad, for him, and for all the little shy floppy-haired boys like him who recognized this darkness inside of them and, knowing the futility of trying to make it go away, threw their hands up and let it burn and twist and gain strength inside them.
As a sex writer, I think a lot about sexual desire, and what makes us want the things we want. I don’t know if something as outlandish as a child sex robot will help boys like Sam and make them want something different, or make them want the same thing, just a little less. But I think these are questions we need to keep asking ourselves, no matter how uncomfortable they might make us, no matter how ethically dubious we might find some of the answers. We owe it to ourselves. We owe it to the Sams. And we owe it to their victims.
Today, at the Four Seasons Hotel in downtown Seoul, South Korea, Google will put the future of artificial intelligence to the test. The post Google's AI Is About to Battle a Go Champion—But This Is No Game appeared first on WIRED.
