A new harvard study has found what everyone who has ever worked in an open plan office knows, it's bad for productivity and communication. I was a fan of cubicles, maybe they could make a comeback :-p
Karla Thomas posted a fantastic helper post on medium for organisations looking to welcome diversity, by actually doing the work and not just saying "We welcome diversity". The post describes initiatives that companies need to adopt such as anti-bias training, HR policy reviews, holiday celebration and assessment tools.
The Holistics blog posted about the OLAP cube, the mainstay of enterprise data management for so many years, which is now falling out of favour and being replaced by more efficient parallel processing architecture and column store data warehouses.
With the new year upon us, some may have felt the affects of blue Monday this week. Thankfully, Seth Godin comes to the rescue with some straight and to the point advice for the year ahead; own your priorities, your boat, your compass.
Atlantic Philathropies, the organisation setup by Chuck Feeney to give away his huge fortune, has published their final report titled Zero Is The Hero. The report gives an overview of the amounts invested around the world in different industries. The fascinating story of Chuck Feeney is told excellently in the book The Billionaire Who Wasn't (affiliate link) by Conor Clery.
Toyota are planning to build a prototype city of the future called Woven City on 175 acres at the base of Mt. Fuji. The city will be fully powered by hydrogen fuel cells and it will feature segregated transport links for different type of autonomous zero emissions vehicles and state of the art robot filled smart residences made of wood using traditional Japanese wood joinery. The first population set of 2000 people will be employees, retirees and industry partners. Ground breaking is due to start in 2021.
Working in software, I sometimes run into problems convincing project stakeholders about the purpose and limitations of project specs. This blog post from Seth Godin about defining the problem first and aiming to solve it, rather than aiming to write a spec for it, is absolute gold.
Backlinko published a comprehensive guide on the latest local SEO techniques for local businesses. 46% of all Google searches have local intent and 29% of Google SERPs now contain a local map pack in the results. The guide also states that 74% of uses that search for something local on their phone end up visiting a store that day. To optimise your local results listings, your Google Business Profile and NAP (Name, Address and Phone Number) citations are all important.
