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Latest Read: HBR Guide to Critical Thinking

HBR Guide to Critical Thinking by Harvard Business Review. The ‘HBR Guide’ series offers articles addressed in multiple sections. This is not a single author’s interpretation.

HBR Guide to Critical Thinking by Harvard Business Review

This offers a fresh restart to critical thinking. I welcome opportunities to make a re-start with new ideas and approaches in our pandemic world. This indeed provides a good starting point in developing skillsets. The ultimate goal of critical thinking by Helen Lee Bouygues is to think reflectively, objectively, and analytically about situations and problems.

I found Section One: Get in the Right Mindset – Article 3: Act Like a Scientist very engaging. We basically are testing assumptions. How can organizations address employees or customers who suggest underlying practices are out of date, costly or even obsolete? By investing in data analytics.

Like a scientist, you must become a knowledge skeptic. As we continue to confront the impact of the pandemic, remote work and large changes in business operations over the last three years, perhaps ‘the established way’ is no longer relevant. Add upon legacy practices are the new realities of regulatory and compliance mandates faced by organizations. this becomes challenging to confront the ‘why we believe this’ or searching to confirm if the evidence supports or challenges commonly held ideas and practices within your organization.

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Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: HBR Guide to Remote Work

HBR Guide to Remote Work by Harvard Business Review. The ‘HBR Guide’ series offers articles addressed in multiple sections. This is not a single author’s interpretation.

HBR Guide to Remote Work by Harvard Business Review

This title was published during the pandemic when employees were already remote. This guide is addressing a very large change in human behavior and the need for organizations to respond.

More importantly, this addresses new, unique challenges when confronting the simple day to day aspects of working outside the office. Perhaps within your family, the new remote office is the kitchen. For managers, your direct reports are certainly confronting new challenges in delivering their workflows.

Enter the Zoom era. New organizational elements were quickly changing. How to ensure employees are staying focused despite all the new distractions from home.

This Guide is indeed providing insightful tips and advice. So, how does an organization shift their operations from 100% face to face to the new remote work? Many employees quickly embraced working remote in casual clothing. In fact, this helped their bottom line saving money on gasoline and lunches.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: The New Jim Crow

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander. Michelle is an Associate Professor of Law at Ohio State University, writer and civil rights activist. She earned a J.D. from Stanford Law School.

The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness by Michelle Alexander

Previously, Michelle was a member of the faculty of Stanford Law School. Then as Director of the Racial Justice Project of the ACLU of Northern California. Today she is an opinion columnist for The New York Times.

This is in fact a stunningly 10th Anniversary Edition including a new preface. Michelle is again addressing black men, violence, and a new way forward. Across these initial sixty pages arises a new, strong message. While the book’s message may appear simple, the research data delivers a complex analysis. Since the end of World War II the government has established laws targeting the incarceration of black men.

Yet, gains during the civil rights movement became in fact, the target of a ‘law and order’ mindset. The crack cocaine wars of the 1980s were certainly not even in place when President Reagan’s War on Drugs was launching nation wide. This was a build up from the Nixon Administration, even accelerated by President Clinton’s 1994 crime bill. In addition, the book asserts prisons are creating cages to hold and punish young black men as a control method.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: Hackers

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy. The former chief technology correspondent for Newsweek, today Steven is an editor at Wired and author of eight books including Crypto, which won the Frankfurt ebook award for best non-fiction book of 2001.

Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution by Steven Levy

So, the best way to introduce this release from 1984 is to simply define the term Hacker as ‘a person skilled in information technology who uses their technical knowledge to achieve a goal or overcome an obstacle, within a computerized system by non-standard means.’

How times have certainly changed. Today popular culture has certainly morphed this term into someone who is able to subvert computer security for malicious purposes. This person should be more accurate defined as a cyber criminal. Needless to say there is a big difference since it will surprise many to discover the first computer game was written in 1961.

In fact, Steve provides a historical view of hackers dating back to 1946. At MIT, an on-camps model railroad club, the Tech Model Railroad Club (TMRC) was the first hacker club in America.

Indeed, a model railroad club on campus allowed talented introverts access to a locked room to construct HO scale railroad layouts. This makes the model railroading of my childhood seem like Dorthy in the Wizard of Oz.

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Education Reading

Latest Read: No Place to Hide

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald. Glenn is an American journalist, author, and former lawyer with a J.D. from New York University School of Law.

No Place to Hide: Edward Snowden, the NSA, and the U.S. Surveillance State by Glenn Greenwald

Glenn initially founded a law firm concentrating on First Amendment litigation. He later began writing for Salon and then for The Guardian. He contributed to their 2014 Pulitzer Prize. Glenn was also one of three reporters who won the 2013 George Polk Award.

In 2014, he cofounded The Intercept until his resignation in October 2020. He has since began self-publishing on Substack. Glenn’s book is a focus to the request made by Edward Snowden to contact Glenn in 2013 regarding US surveillance.

So Glenn documents how was initially contacted and actually did not respond thinking the outreach was a fake attempt. Edward only allowed himself to be an anonymous source with evidence of US government spying.

In fact, after Snowden reached out repeatedly through encrypted channels, Glenn did agree to travel to Hong Kong. This turned out to be the digital version of The Pentagon Papers leak by Daniel Ellsberg.