SIMPLICITY

An excellent example of how to do it........www.commoncraft.com

Blogs in Plain English

 

Investing Money in Plain English

Gever Tulley teaches life lessons through tinkering

Gever Tulley uses engaging photos and footage to demonstrate the valuable lessons kids learn at his Tinkering School.


When given tools, materials and guidance, these young imaginations run wild and creative problem-solving takes over to build unique boats, bridges and even a rollercoaster! It helps kids develop critical thinking to solve problems.

Arthur Benjamin's formula for changing math education

Someone always asks the math teacher, "Am I going to use calculus in real life?" And for most of us, says Arthur Benjamin, the answer is no.


He offers a bold proposal on how to make math education relevant in the digital age.

Are we in control of our decisions?

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely, the author of Predictably Irrational, uses classic visual illusions and his own counterintuitive (and sometimes shocking) research findings to show how we're not as rational as we think when we make decisions.

Behavioral Economics Introduction

Standard Economics vs. Behavioral Economics 




Visual and decision illusions






 

Behavioral economist Dan Ariely studies the bugs in our moral code: the hidden reasons we think it's OK to cheat or steal (sometimes). Clever studies help make his point that we're predictably irrational -- and can be influenced in ways we can't grasp.

 

 Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Introduction From Injury to Behavioral Economics

  


Predictably Irrational Chapter 1 - Everything is Relative  

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 2 Supply and Demand?  

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 3 The Cost of Zero  

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 4 The Cost of Social Norms 

Predictably Irrational Dan Ariely Chapter 5 The Influence of Arousal 

Chapter 6 The Problem of Procrastination 

Chapter 7: The High Price of Ownership

 Chapter 8: Keeping doors open

 

Chapter 9: The effect of expectations

 Chapter 10: The power of price

Chapters 11 and 12: The context of our character

Chapter 13: What is behavioral economics?

First Decisions Matter a Lot

The Temptation of Free

Social vs. Financial Exchanges

We Don't Recognize Ourselves

Self-Control Mechanisms

 

 

High Cost of Attachment

 

Keeping Options Open

Expectations Color Experiences

You Get What You Pay For

Dishonesty: Everyone Cheats a Little Bit

The promise of Behavioral Economics

Preschoolers and Nature vs. Nurture

With affection and humour, parents, caregivers and childcare experts discuss raising the young jungle animals known as preschoolers.

The topic: Preschoolers and Nature vs. Nurture


Nature endows us with inborn abilities and traits; nurture takes these genetic tendencies and molds them as we learn and mature.

Researchers agree that the link between a gene and a behavior is not the same as cause and effect. While a gene may increase the likelihood that you'll behave in a particular way, it does not make people do things. Which means that we still get to choose who we'll be when we grow up.

Question: What would be your favourite example to illustrate nature via nurture?

Answer: My favourite is a study from Dunedin, New Zealand, conducted between 1972 and 1973. Researcher Terrie Moffitt and her colleagues investigated differences in the promoter (or 'switch') region of the brain's serotonin transporter gene which can affect the way people react to stressful life events – things like divorce or bereavement. (Serotonin is a neurotransmitter, a chemical 'messenger' that allows communication between nerve cells.)

The study found that people with one or two copies of the short version of the serotonin promoter showed more symptoms of depression following at least three stressful life events than people with two copies of the long version. For one or two events there was no difference.

In other words, your genome does not make you depressed, but makes you more susceptible to environmental pressures; in this case it makes you more likely to be depressed when you suffer several external setbacks. And that has to be how things like intelligence are determined. A clever person is not born clever, they're born more able to take in teaching, they're born capable of learning.

So it's not a gene for intelligence, it's a gene for learning. A tennis player or scholar may not have been much better at tennis or study to start with, but was innately drawn to doing a lot of tennis or study and practice that made him or her perfect. So the nature sought out the nurture.

Katherine Fulton: You are the future of philanthropy

President of Monitor Institute, Katherine Fulton is also a strategist, author, teacher and speaker working for social change.

Katherine Fulton sketches the new future of philanthropy -- one where collaboration and innovation allow regular people to do big things, even when money is scarce. Giving five practical examples of crowd-driven philanthropy, she calls for a new generation of citizen leaders

Billions of dollars are spent on philanthropy each year, but the way they are spent is changing rapidly. Katherine Fulton’s team at Monitor Group has been tracking these changes, and she has become an eloquent advocate for the “New Philanthropy,” surprising audiences with her insights on an underreported phenomenon of momentous significance.



As president of Monitor Institute, she works with today’s most imaginative, entrepreneurial leaders (not just in philanthropy, but also in business and government) to pioneer breakthrough next practices in how complex social problems are framed, confronted, funded and ultimately solved.



As a result of her efforts, she has been awarded both a Nieman Fellowship at Harvard University and a Lyndhurst Foundation prize for community service. Her innovative course design at Duke University was featured in Time magazine and her work on the future of journalism in Columbia Journalism Review. She is also co-author of several books, among them Investing for Social and Environmental Impact: A Blueprint for Catalyzing an Emerging Industry, Looking Out for the Future: An Orientation for Twenty-First Century Philanthropists and What If? The Art of Scenario Thinking for Nonprofits.
 

Geoff Mulgan: Post-crash, investing in a better world

The Young Foundation and Geoff Mulgan have published a number of reports and books on social innovation, public sector innovation and public strategy. They are also working actively on recession responses.

Previously he was:

• Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street (under British Prime Minister Tony Blair)
  

• Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (formerly known as the Performance and Innovation Unit)
  

• Co-founder and Director of the London based think tank Demos (from 1993-98)
  

• Chief adviser to Gordon Brown MP in the early 1990s
  

He has written a number of books including:

• Communication and Control:networks and the new economies of communication (1991),
• Politics in an Anti-Political Age (1994),
  
• Connexity (1997) and
  
• Good and Bad Power: the Ideals and Betrayals of Government (Penguin 2006).
  

He has written numerous Demos reports and pamphlets.

His current base, the Young Foundation, mainly works on social innovation - design and launch of new social organisations, but also produces some publications, including recent ones on social innovation and the state of British society.

 He has lectured and advised governments around the world on policy and strategy - including China, Australia, the United States, Japan and Russia.

He is profiled in two books - The New Alchemists (1999 by Charles Handy) and Visionaries (2001 by Jay Walljasper). He is a trustee of the Design Council and the Work Foundation.

Geoff Mulgan (born 1961) is director of the Young Foundation based in London and Visiting Professor at University College, London, the London School of Economics and University of Melbourne as well as being the chair of Involve.

He obtained his Ph.D. in telecommunications from the University of Westminster. He was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained a First Class degree from Balliol College, Oxford. Mulgan was also trained as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka , but instead worked in local government and academia in the UK, and became an influential writer on social and political issues in various newspapers and magazines in the 1990s. He was made a CBE in 2005.

Geoff Mulgan poses a question:

Instead of sending bailout money to doomed old industries, why not use stimulus funds to bootstrap some new, socially responsible companies -- and make the world a little bit better?

Nicholas Negroponte takes OLPC to Colombia

The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. 



Now he's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.


It's an education project, not a laptop project. Inexpensive, durable, networked laptops are important to better education everywhere in the world, empowering children and communities, and sharing access to modern skills with every child on the planet.

We follow Nicholas Negroponte to Colombia as he delivers laptops inside territory once controlled by guerrillas. His partner? Colombia's Defense Department, who see One Laptop per Child as an investment in the region.

Why are you so unhappy?

Why are you so unhappy?

Because 99.9%

Of everything you think and

Of everything you do

Is for yourself

And there isn’t one

The words of the poet Wei Wu Wei, who diagnosed the ills of an over individualised, under socialised society more crisply than I could, and through the lens of eastern philosophy.

Between the years 1958 and 1974 eight books and articles in various periodicals appeared under the pseudonym "Wei Wu Wei" (a Taoist term which translates as action that is non-action). The identity of the author was not revealed at the time of publication for reasons outlined in the Preface to the first book Fingers Pointing Towards the Moon (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1958).

Social entrepreneur JULIA MOULDEN

Social entrepreneur JULIA MOULDEN is a life coach who is making it her life's work to help others transform their careers while finding social meaning and financial security.




Julia coined the phrase “New Radicals” to describe people who are leveraging skills acquired in their careers and putting them to work on the world’s greatest challenges.

 Her personal experiences coaching a fascinating and innovative group of social entrepreneurs led to the publication of her first book We are The New Radicals - which details their journeys. Julia has defined the group of Baby Boomers determined to use their intellect, talent and influence to change the world through their own journey of transformation as The New Radicals.

Her book, We Are The New Radicals: A Manifesto for Reinventing Yourself and Saving the World was released internationally by McGraw-Hill, New York. Her first book, Green is Gold, an environmental primer for business, was translated into six languages.
 

Julia has a weekly column on the HuffingtonPost; “The Giving Life” appears each Saturday. Her byline has also appeared in a diverse range of publications, including the Globe and Mail, Toronto Life, and Ms magazine.

A speechwriter for CEOs, cabinet ministers, and celebrities for more than 20 years, Julia’s clients include North America’s leading organizations, such as AstraZeneca, Four Seasons Hotels and Resorts, and Rogers Communications.  Born in Toronto in 1956, Julia has lived in Europe, the U.S., and Mexico. She kayaks as often as possible on Georgian Bay.

GERI BERHOLZ realised the power of mentoring children

The concept is to identify kids with leadership potential and match them with a mentor who helps them reach a long-term goal. The results have been nothing short of astonishing.



Since its inception in 2002, the lives of over 1300 kids have been transformed.




As a schoolteacher, GERI BERHOLZ realized the power of mentoring children. The creation of a Canadian chapter of Future Possibilities For Kids was a natural next step.
One success story is Kid Coach Yvon, a former at-risk teen, who, because of his work with Geri, is now the first member of his family to graduate high school, graduate college and now attend university. Yvon is well on his way to fulfilling his life-long dream of becoming a peace negotiator for the United Nations.






Future Possibilities For Kids

A Social Venture Model - Toronto

DAN TISCH and KATHRYN WORTSMAN exemplify the qualities of a new kind of professional - the Venture Philanthropist.

They are two of the founding members of Social Venture Partners Toronto, a group of 43 successful professionals who commit their time, money and expertise to not-for-profits. This year their goal is to focus on poverty reduction.


Here's how it works. They solicit bids for business proposals from not-for-profit and charity organizations who meet their criteria. Each member donates $5,000 every year and that pool of money goes a long way and makes a big impact. The winning organizations get funding up to $75,000 over three years, along with invaluable business mentoring from the experienced team of Social Venture Partners.

Dan Tisch

Daniel Tisch is President and CEO of Argyle Communications, one of Canada’s most respected public relations firms.

Dan’s clients include major consumer brands, financial services leaders, technology firms, public companies, all three orders of government in Canada, and several foreign governments. His public relations campaigns have earned him more than 40 awards from the International Association of Business Communicators and the Canadian Public Relations Society.

Before joining Argyle, Dan was vice president of Environics Communications, Canada’s largest management-owned public relations firm. Earlier, he held senior roles in the Canadian government, including serving as Executive Assistant and Senior Policy Advisor to Canada’s Minister of Foreign Affairs.

Born in Madrid, Spain, and raised in Toronto, Dan speaks English, French and Spanish. He holds two degrees from Queen’s University — a Bachelor of Arts in Political Studies and a Master of Business Administration. Dan has been a regular guest lecturer at Queen’s School of Business for 12 years. In 2007, Report on Business magazine named him one of 16 ‘star alumni’ from Canada’s leading executive MBA programs.

Dan is a member of the Queen’s University Council, a governor of Toronto’s North York General Hospital and a founding partner of Social Venture Partners Toronto.

Kathryn Wortsman

Kathryn Wortsman has worked in the private equity industry for over 10 years with direct experience in both Canada and the US. She is currently Vice President and Principal with Succession Capital Corporation, a boutique private equity firm that focuses on acquiring 100% ownership of companies that are involved in retirement succession planning. She selects targets, analyzes financial opportunities and leads the post-transaction work. Prior to Succession, Kathryn held several senior positions at eVentures at MetLife Inc, where she led investments in technology companies, and at Constellation Ventures, a New York based $350MM venture fund that focused on early stage media technology investments.

Investing in the community is a big priority for Kathryn. In 2001, she became a founding partner of Social Venture Partners New York City. In this role, she not only contributed financially, but joined the grant-making committee and volunteered directly for the grantee agency. Kathryn continued to stay actively involved with SVP New York City until leaving the City in 2004. In 2004, Kathryn spent a number of months in Telluride, Colorado. While in Telluride, Kathryn consulted to the Telluride Foundation to improve the granting and reporting processes. Specifically, Kathryn assisted in creating and leading the marketing campaign for a new community Fund focused on investing in local programs for early childhood development. Kathryn also developed a new community philanthropic program which encouraged local businesses to be strategic in their giving.

Upon returning to Toronto, while volunteering for various charities, Kathryn searched for an opportunity that combined her desire to make an impact on the community and develop a network that could provide a platform for a new generation of philanthropists. As a result, she has recruited a team of young professionals to launch SVPT.

Kathryn holds a BA in Economics from the University of Western Ontario and an MBA from Columbia University in New York.

A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy - Paul Brest

Paul Brest visits Google to present his book "Money Well Spent: A Strategic Plan for Smart Philanthropy".

This event took place on July 14, 2009, as part of the Authors@Google series.









Why you should listen to Paul Breast?
It's good to give a little something back. If you plan or care about a social investment, Paul Brest and Hal Harvey's book can advise you on how to develop a strategy to ensure that your money is well spent. It addresses potential and practising donors eager to know how to improve the effect of their philanthropic activities. And, with its clear view on how to strategically approach a philanthropic mission and an abundance of insights and examples from the experience of two philanthropy professionals, it does so successfully.


While there have been seminal contributions on philanthropy and strategic giving in recent years (for example by Peter Frumkin and Joel Fleishman), Brest and Harvey set out to boil this thinking down to practice, doing for philanthropists what books on business strategy do for business entrepreneurs and executives. They cover the whole range of strategic social investment, introducing readers to the pertinent topics and terminology of the field like theory of change and logic models, programme-related investments and the SROI concept, and the eternal questions surrounding social impact measurement.





Their presentation is engaging, too. For example, they present a three-dimensional model for categorizing philanthropic goals and go on to talk about 'philanthropy in the small cube' (addressing short-term, small-scale problems that affect people's quality of life) and 'philanthropy in the big cube' (the fight against long-term, life-threatening and global problems). They also invent Sally Holder, president of a hypothetical medium-sized foundation, and invite the reader to share a day in her life.

The authors discuss key issues (like specifying goals and tracking progress) repeatedly and from different perspectives, giving examples and discussing pitfalls. Reading all or only part of the book, therefore, the potential donor will gain both knowledge of, and a good feeling for, what really matters in strategic philanthropy.

Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus

In 2006, the Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to Muhammad Yunus and Grameen Bank for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.




Why you should listen too Muhammad Yunus? "Lasting peace can not be achieved unless large population groups find ways in which to break out of poverty. Micro-credit is one such means. Development from below also serves to advance democracy and human rights." In his new book, Professor Yunus describes the role of business in promoting social reform and his vision for an innovative business model that would combine the power of free markets with a quest for a more humane, egalitarian world that could help alleviate world poverty, inequality, and other social problems.


Portrait of Muhammad Yunus (10 Minutes)












A look at the work of Muhammad Yunus, 2006 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate, and his efforts with Grameen Bank to provide micro-credits for the less fortunate of Bangladesh.

Click here to watch:








Muhammad Yunus - A new business model (5:30 Minutes)

Alan Kay shares a powerful idea about ideas

With all the intensity and brilliance for which he is known, Alan Kay envisions better techniques for teaching kids by using computers to illustrate experience in ways -– mathematically and scientifically -- that only computers can.

Why you should listen to him:

"The best way to predict the future is to invent it." Alan Kay not only coined this favorite tech-world adage, but has proven its truth several times. A true polymath, as well as inventor, he has combined engineering brilliance with knowledge of child development, epistemology, molecular biology and more.

In the 1960s, Kay joined the computer team at XeroxPARC, where he worked on world-changing inventions like the graphical interface, object-oriented programming, and the personal computer itself. Later, at Apple, Atari, HP, Disney, and now at his own nonprofits, he has helped refine the tools he anticipated long before they were realized.

As the industry has blossomed, however, Kay continues to grapple with the deeper purpose of computing, struggling to create the machine that won't only recapitulate patterns in the world as we know it but will teach both children and adults to think, to see what otherwise is beyond them.

"One of the computer industry's most prolific inventors."

Electronic Engineering Times

Keys to Social Innovation

The Young Foundation and Geoff Mulgan have published a number of reports and books on social innovation, public sector innovation and public strategy. They are also working actively on recession responses.

Previously he was:

• Director of Policy at 10 Downing Street (under British Prime Minister Tony Blair)
  

• Director of the Prime Minister's Strategy Unit (formerly known as the Performance and Innovation Unit)
  

• Co-founder and Director of the London based think tank Demos (from 1993-98)
  

• Chief adviser to Gordon Brown MP in the early 1990s
  

He has written a number of books including:

• Communication and Control:networks and the new economies of communication (1991),
• Politics in an Anti-Political Age (1994),
  
• Connexity (1997) and
  
• Good and Bad Power: the Ideals and Betrayals of Government (Penguin 2006).
  

He has written numerous Demos reports and pamphlets.


His current base, the Young Foundation, mainly works on social innovation - design and launch of new social organisations, but also produces some publications, including recent ones on social innovation and the state of British society.



He has lectured and advised governments around the world on policy and strategy - including China, Australia, the United States, Japan and Russia.

He is profiled in two books - The New Alchemists (1999 by Charles Handy) and Visionaries (2001 by Jay Walljasper). He is a trustee of the Design Council and the Work Foundation.

Geoff Mulgan (born 1961) is director of the Young Foundation based in London and Visiting Professor at University College, London, the London School of Economics and University of Melbourne as well as being the chair of Involve.

He obtained his Ph.D. in telecommunications from the University of Westminster. He was a Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and obtained a First Class degree from Balliol College, Oxford. Mulgan was also trained as a Buddhist monk in Sri Lanka , but instead worked in local government and academia in the UK, and became an influential writer on social and political issues in various newspapers and magazines in the 1990s. He was made a CBE in 2005.

Substitute the word Laptop, with the word Education

The founder of the MIT Media Lab, Nicholas Negroponte pushed the edge of the information revolution as an inventor, thinker and angel investor. Now he's the driving force behind One Laptop per Child, building computers for children in the developing world.



It's an education project, not a laptop project. Inexpensive, durable, networked laptops are important to better education everywhere in the world, empowering children and communities, and sharing access to modern skills with every child on the planet.







Substitute the word Laptop, with the word Education, and you have much of the answer. XOs make it possible to collaborate, learn, teach, and publish at no cost. They inspire new forms of learning, and attention to education. And the provide access to digital texts in places too remote to send and update physical books in a cost-effective way.





Why you should listen to him:


A pioneer in the field of computer-aided design, Negroponte was perhaps best known for founding and directing MIT's Media Lab, which helped drive the multimedia revolution and now houses more than 500 researchers and staff. An original investor in WIRED (and the magazine’s "patron saint"), for five years he penned a column exploring the frontiers of technology -- ideas that he expanded into his 1995 best-selling book Being Digital. An angel investor extraordinaire, he's funded more than 40 startups, and served on the boards of companies such as Motorola and Ambient Devices.


But his latest effort, the One Laptop per Child project, may prove his most ambitious. The organization is manufacturing the XO (the "$100 laptop"), a wireless Internet-enabled, pedal-powered computer costing roughly $100. Negroponte hopes to put millions of these devices in the hands of the children in the developing world by 2010.


"If Nicholas Negroponte can achieve his ambition of distributing $100 laptops to the world's disadvantaged children, he will help redefine philanthropy and see his name added to a list alongside the likes of Carnegie, Ford and Rockefeller."

Technology Review

Bill Gates unplugged

A passionate techie and a shrewd businessman, Bill Gates changed the world once, while leading Microsoft to dizzying success. He plans to do it again with his very own style of philanthropy.



Bill Gates hopes to solve some of the world's biggest problems using a new kind of philanthropy. In a passionate and, yes, funny 18 minutes, he asks us to consider two big questions and how we might answer them.

 

Happiness as your business model

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi: Creativity, fulfillment and flow

Mihaly Czikszentmihalyi asks, "What makes a life worth living?"

Noting that money cannot make us happy, he looks to those who find pleasure and lasting satisfaction in activities that bring about a state of "flow."

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi says creativity is a central source of meaning in our lives.

A leading researcher in positive psychology, he has devoted his life to studying what makes people truly happy: "When we are involved in [creativity], we feel that we are living more fully than during the rest of life."

He is the architect of the notion of "flow" -- the creative moment when a person is completely involved in an activity for its own sake.

Csikszentmihalyi teaches psychology and management at Claremont Graduate University, focusing on human strengths such as optimism, motivation and responsibility. He's the director the the Quality of Life Research Center there. He has written numerous books and papers about the search for joy and fulfillment.

Chris Anderson (Wired): Technology's Long Tail

Chris Anderson, the editor of WIRED, explores the four key stages of any viable technology: setting the right price, gaining market share, displacing an established technology and, finally, becoming ubiquitous.

Before Chris Anderson took over as editor of WIRED, he spent seven years at The Economist, where he worked as editor of both the technology and business sections. Anderson holds a degree in physics and has conducted research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory, and has done stints at the leading journals Nature and Science.

(He is not, however, to be confused with the curator of TED, who has the same name.)
He's perhaps most famous for coining the term "the long tail," a whiteboard favorite that describes the business strategy of pursuing many little fish (versus a few big fish), as typified by both Amazon and Netflix.

Anderson first introduced the term in an article written for WIRED in 2004; the book-length version, The Long Tail: Why the Future of Business Is Selling Less of More, became a bestseller. He maintains a blog, The Long Tail, which he updates with impressive regularity.

Richard St. John: Marketer, success analyst

Why do people succeed?

Is it because they’re smart?

Or are they just lucky?


Neither. Analyst Richard St. John condenses years of interviews into an unmissable slideshow on the real secrets of success.

Richard St. John knew how he had found success -- through his marketing company, the St. John Group, which boasted clients like Nortel and BlackBerry/Research in Motion.

But he couldn't get away from the question: Why him? He thinks of himself as an average guy, not talented at school, not terribly handsome or particularly lucky. So he spent more than a decade interviewing 500 people he defines as successful -- from architect Frank Gehry to non-celebrities successful in their own lives.

The resulting book, Spike's Guide to Success: Stupid, Ugly, Unlucky and RICH, has spawned a new avenue of success for St. John as a motivational speaker and talk-show star. His newest book is 8 to Be Great: The 8 Traits that Lead to Great Success.

Jeff Skoll: Making movies that make change

Jeff Skoll was eBay's employee number 2 and president number 1. He left with a comfortable fortune and a desire to spend his money helping others.



Film producer Jeff Skoll (An Inconvenient Truth) talks about his film company, Participant Productions, and the people who've inspired him to do good.

Participant Productions, makes movies to inspire social change, including Syriana; An Inconvenient Truth; North Country; Fast Food Nation; Good Night & Good Luck, Charlie Wilsons War; Dafur Now…


The Skoll Foundation, established in 1999, invests in, connects and celebrates social entrepreneurs -- offering grants to people who build businesses, schools and services for communities in need. Every year, it presents the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship at Oxford, and runs Social Edge, a networking site for social entrepreneurs.


His production company, Participant Productions, is what Skoll calls a "pro-social media company," making features and documentaries that address social and political issues and drive real change. His film North Country, for example, is credited with influencing the signing of the 2005 Violence Against Women Act. Participant's blockbuster doc, An Inconvenient Truth, is required viewing in classrooms around the world, and has unquestionably changed the debate around climate change. Upcoming for Participant are two films about Afghanistan, and a documentary about Jimmy Carter's controversial 2006-7 book tour.