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olivia瓜瓜

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Part I: Speaker

                article 1    

Philip Zimbardo prescribes a healthy take on time

[rephrase1]
[Speech, 7:07]
Source: TED
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/zhcn/philip_zimbardo_prescribes_a_healthy_take_on_time.html?embed=true
                  

                           Part II: Speed        
                              article 2              

          Busy and Busier        　

Productivity expert David Allen talks with James Fallows about the future of getting things done.
[Time2]

In three decades as a writer, speaker, and consultant, David Allen has built a worldwide following for the approach to organization and “stress-free productivity” that he calls Getting Things Done, or GTD. His bookGetting Things Done has sold 1.5 million copies since its publication in 2001, and his Twitter account (@gtdguy) has more than 1.2 million followers.
Eight years ago in The Atlantic, National Correspondent James Fallows described his attendance at an Allen seminar and subsequent attempt to apply GTD principles to his life. Allen’s approach is based on the idea that stress arises from trying to keep track of obligations in one’s head, rather than finding a trusted system to capture them, whether on paper or electronically, for frequent review. Here, Fallows asks Allen about today’s always-on lifestyle and his forecast for where productivity goes from here.
James Fallows: I bet most people reading this discussion feel they’ve hit a crisis point in “busyness,” with e-mail, text messages, and all-hours connectivity. Are today’s stresses something new?
[179 words]

[Time3]

David Allen: Everybody’s going to top out at some point, where your psyche just can’t manage any more. I was just reading that J. S. Bach had 20 kids. People complain now, “I’m so busy with the kids.” Okay, have 20 kids and see what happens. If you’re a musician or a writer, you could always be doing more work. So I don’t know that it’s ever been different for someone with an open-ended profession or interest.
Another reason a lot of people are feeling overwhelmed is because people are not in true survival or crisis mode as often as they have been in much of our history. The interesting thing about crisis is that it actually produces a type of serenity. Why? Because in a crisis, people have to integrate all kinds of information that’s potentially relevant, they have to make decisions quickly, they have to then trust their intuitive judgment calls in the moment. They have to act. They’re constantly course-correcting based on data that’s coming up, and they’re very focused on some outcome, usually live—you know, survive. Don’t burn up. Don’t die.
But as soon as you’re not in a crisis, all the rest of the world floods into your psyche. Now you’re worried about taxes and tires and “I’m getting a cold” and “My printer just crapped out.” Now that flood is coming across in electronic form, and it is 24/7.
To cope, you need the executive skill and the ability to make rapid decisions about how you allocate limited resources. There’s nothing new under the sun about that. What’s new is how many morepeople have to be making those kinds of executive decisions now. You’ve moved the executive requirement down through all the ranks.
[333words]

[Time4]

JF:What about the sheer volume of information we have to cope with now? Isn’t that a difference in degree that becomes a difference in kind?
DA: Information overload is not the issue. If it were, you’d walk into the library and die. As soon as you connected to the Web, you’d just explode.
In fact, the most information-rich place in the world is the most relaxing: it’s called nature. It has more varied horizons, more detail, more input of all sorts. As a matter of fact, if you want to go crazy, get rid of all your information: it’s called sensory depravation.
The thing about nature is, it’s information rich, but the meaningful things in nature are relatively few—berries, bears and snakes, thunderstorms, maybe poison oak. There are only a few things in nature that force me to change behavior or make a decision. The problem with e-mail is that it’s not just information; it’s the need for potential action. It’s the berries and snakes and bears, but they’re embedded, and you don’t know what’s in each one.
Not only that, but e-mail has a trait that fits the core of addictive behavior, which is random positive reinforcement.
JF: What is that?
DA: So you get an e-mail from your mom, or you get an e-mail from your boss—they contain snakes or berries or bears, but they’re not self-evident until you look. Now, some part of you, subliminally, is constantly going, That could be meaningful, that could be meaningful, that could change what I’m doing, that might be something I don’t want to decide about … You multiply that by the hundreds, if not thousands, of items sitting there.
The degree and depth of the “busy trap,” where you’re always distracted and trying to catch up, is going to increase.
[338 words]

[Time 5]

All those things you’re not deciding about wear you down, and decision-making functions just like a muscle. If you’ve had half a day of a lot of decisions to make, you don’t have much willpower left the rest of the day. So then we walk around with what I call the GSA of life—the Gnawing Sense of Anxiety that something out there might be more important than what you’re currently doing. You don’t remember what it is, but it might be more important than whatever you’re doing, so you’re not present anywhere. You’re at work worrying about home, and you’re at home worrying about work, and you’re neither place psychologically when you’re there physically. That’s hugely undermining of your productivity, and certainly adds hugely to the stress factor.
What’s different these days? Nothing is different really, except how frequently this occurs. You and I have gotten more change-producing and priority-shifting inputs in the past 72 hours than your parents got in a month, some of them in a year. I was reading that in 1912, someone was complaining about the telephone, exactly the same things you hear people say about e-mail: “Oh my God, it’s going to ruin our quality of life”; “conversations are going to become surface-only and not meaningful”; “all the interruptions and distractions!” It reads like right now. I am hearing the same things I did when I first got into these issues, at Lockheed in 1983. In those days, if you even had a pocket Day-Timer, you were considered something of a productivity geek. The difference is that rather than a small minority of people experiencing this stress, it’s a much larger group of people, at every level
[322 words]

                                                               

[Time 6]
And as organizations have gotten a lot flatter, you see more “executive responsibility” at every level. In the military, how many decisions does a corporal need to be able to make in the field right now? What if it’s Black Hawk Down and CNN gets in my face with a microphone, and I’m a junior officer—what the hell do I need to be aware of? That’s why [at the Air War College] they’re teaching even the kids the global politics and situational awareness that used to be just for generals. The flatter we’ve become, the more [we require] a much higher percentage of our professional workforce to have the kinds of skills we’re talking about right now.
JF:How will we handle “busyness” in the future? Better, because of technology? Worse, because of overload? Both?
DA: I think the degree and depth of the “busy trap,” where you’re always distracted and trying to catch up, is going to increase, because more people will be affected by it.
Things on your mind need to be externalized—captured in some system that you trust. You capture things that are potentially meaningful; you clarify what those things mean to you; and you need maps of all that, so you can see it from a larger perspective. With better technology, I’d like a set of maps—maps of my maps. Then I could say, “Okay, which map do I want to work on right now? Do I want to work on my family map, because I’ve got family members coming over for dinner?” Then you can drill down into “Oh, my niece is coming. She likes this food, her favorite color is pink, her dog is named …” Then you can back off and say, “That’s enough of that map. What’s the next map I want to see?” Or: “I’d just like to read some poetry right now.”
These issues are very old. But we may find better tools to put the brain on steroids.
[376words]

Source ：The Atlantic
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/busy-and-busier/309111/

                                                                        
     Part III: Obstacle

article3    

     

                   It’s complicated
    Management thinkers disagree on how to manage complexity
                           

   
            
[Paraphrase 7]

There can be few better places to talk about complexity than Vienna. This was the capital of the most complicated political organization yet seen: the Austro-Hungarian Empire. It was also the center of some of the most convoluted cold-war spy games. On November 14th and 15th hundreds of management enthusiasts converged on the Austrian capital to debate the subject. They had little interest in the complexities of the Habsburgs or the cold war. They were preoccupied instead by two points: that business is more complicated than ever before; and that managing complexity is at the top of businesspeople’s agenda.
Whether they were right about the first point is debatable. In the 18th century it took six months for letters to travel from East India House in London to Calcutta and back. Today, supply chains can be managed in real time, and masses of data can be crunched instantly at the touch of a button. But they were right about the second. Businesspeople are confronted by more of everything than ever before: this year’s Global Electronics Forum in Shanghai featured 22,000 new products. They have to make decisions at a faster pace: roughly 60% of Apple’s revenues are generated by products that are less than four years old. Therefore, they have a more uncertain future: Harvard Business School’s William Sahlman warns young entrepreneurs about “the big eraser in the sky” that can come down at any moment and “wipe out all their cleverness and effort”.

The Vienna conference—the fifth in an annual series to celebrate Peter Drucker’s work—produced two starkly different solutions to the complexity problem (Schumpeter is, of course, simplifying to avoid unnecessary complexity). The first is to recognise and accept that complexity is just a misnomer for a new sort of order. Don Tapscott, of “Wikinomics” fame, argued that the information revolution is replacing one kind of management (command-and-control) with another (based on self-organizing networks). John Hagel of Deloitte talked about the growing disconnect between “linear institutions and the non-linear world that is developing around us”.

Organizations built for this new world may look complex and unwieldy but they have an inner logic and powers of self-organization. Global networks such as Kiva, a crowd funding website, and Crisis Commons, which musters tech volunteers to help out in disasters like the Philippines typhoon, can mobilize thousands of people with little top-down direction. Accelerate, a call-center company, employs 20,000 people but has no call centers: they work from home. Such outfits suffer from complexity only when managers apply command-and-control techniques to them.

The second, rival solution to dealing with complexity is to impose simplicity. The bosses of Tupperware Brands and Tata Consultancy Services could hardly face more different challenges. Tupperware has 3m freelance salespeople, working everywhere from plush Austrian suburbs to Indian slums. TCS employs almost 300,000 people to solve complex technological problems. Rick Goings of Tupperware and Natarajan Chandrasekaran of TCS agreed that the only way to avoid being blinded by complexity is to concentrate on the few simple things that can give their businesses focus and their workers direction.

What to make of these two contrasting views of complexity? The first argument contains a kernel of truth. Massive computing power and fast internet speeds make it easier to create networked, devolved organizations like Kiva and Crisis Commons. But it is easy to get carried away. The most striking development of the past couple of decades is how well monolithic companies have survived the technological storm: the internet is now dominated by a handful of giant problem-solvers like Google, with its mission to organize all the world’s information.

The second view is more persuasive. It is striking how many of the world’s most successful businesses thrive on simplicity of some sort. German Mittelstand companies are doing well by focusing on narrow niches. Built-to-last companies, such as Coca-Cola, are masters of distilling their corporate identity into a simple formula which employees can internalize and customers can easily recognise. McDonald’s is a global success because its business model is so simple and replicable. Tim Brown, the boss of IDEO, argues that design companies like his are enjoying success by showing organizations how to “design complexity out”.

Simplistic about simplicity
The pursuit of simplicity can certainly be taken too far if it is applied in a simple-minded way. Focusing on simple targets can be counter-productive: for example, British police, told to improve their overall clear-up rates, have been criticised for devoting too much time to relatively minor offences such as speeding rather than more difficult crimes such as sexual assaults and gang-related killings. And applying the simplicity mantra to some kinds of businesses can be silly: there is no way that Boeing can engineer the complexity out of producing its Dreamliner jet.
However, there are good reasons why sensible CEOs like Mr Goings think as they do. The biggest threat to business almost always comes from too much complexity rather than too much simplicity. The conglomerates of the 1960s crumbled because they tried to manage too many businesses in too many different industries. Enron imploded because the company abandoned old-fashioned command-and-control in favor of fashionable ideas about running energy companies as if they were financial organizations. The banks were so bedazzled by complex mathematical formula(and corrupted by greed) that they lost sight of the simplest principles of banking. That old US Navy saying, “Keep it simple, stupid”, is not a bad rule for management too, simple-minded though it may sound.
[946words]

Source：Economist
http://www.economist.com/news/business/21590341-management-thinkers-disagree-how-manage-complexity-its-complicated