Why Your Meetings Stink—and What to Do About It | The Science of the Sniff: Why Dogs Are Great Disease Detectors | Chipotle tests automation for burrito bowls and salads | How People Analytics Can Help You Change Process, Culture, and Strategy

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Why Your Meetings Stink—and What to Do About It - Harvard Business Review

Research shows that leaders consistently rate their own meetings very favorably—and much more positively than attendees do. When managers assume that their meetings are going well, they are less apt to solicit feedback and seek opportunities to improve. As a result, frustrations that attendees commonly cite (such as irrelevant agenda items, overly long duration, lack of focus) persist, leaving people disgruntled and disengaged.

This article helps managers learn to diagnose their meeting problems, better prepare for and facilitate the gatherings they lead, and seek feedback to further hone their skills.

Dave, a senior VP at a large U.S. bank, was a strong one-on-one manager. However, 360-degree feedback revealed that he struggled in one critical area: leading effective meetings. Multiple employees described his meetings as “a time suck.” They complained that he asked them to meet too often, allowed a few people to dominate conversations, and failed to create an environment where attendees really wrestled with ideas and engaged in critical thinking. These comments took Dave by complete surprise. He’d thought he was doing a good job with meetings—better than most of his peers, anyway.

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Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

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The Science of the Sniff: Why Dogs Are Great Disease Detectors - WIRED

In November 2016, a team of scientists from the Medical Research Council in Gambia visited primary schools armed with hundreds of beige-colored nylon socks. Handing them out to children there aged five to 14, the researchers instructed them to wear the socks overnight, only taking them off if they were washing their feet for prayer. The next day they returned to collect the dirty laundry, sort it, and put it in the mail to a British charity that would spend the next four months using the material to train dogs to recognize an odor imperceptible to the human nose: the molecular signature of malaria.

Dogs possess a sense of smell many times more sensitive than even the most advanced man-made instrument. Just how powerful is a pupper schnoz? Powerful enough to detect substances at concentrations of one part per trillion—a single drop of liquid in 20 Olympic-size swimming pools. With training, dogs can sniff out bombs and drugs, pursue suspects, and find dead bodies. And more and more, they’re being used experimentally to detect human disease—cancer, diabetes, tuberculosis, and now, malaria—from smell alone.

On Monday, researchers presented these latest results at the American Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene annual meeting in New Orleans. In double-blind lab tests, two canines proved able to correctly pick out the scent of children infected with malaria parasites 70 percent of the time. While all the schoolchildren appeared healthy, blood tests administered on-site discovered that 30 children were actually carrying the disease. This work is just a proof of concept, but the hope is that one day biodetection dogs could be deployed at airports, ports of entry, or other border crossings, to prevent asymptomatic carriers of the parasite that causes malaria from bringing it back into areas where the disease has been eradicated.

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Chipotle tests automation for burrito bowls and salads - CNBC

Chipotle Mexican Grill is testing whether automation can make customers' burrito bowls and salads.

It's the second time the burrito chain has publicly announced testing automation at its innovation center. Chippy, Chipotle's first foray into automation, is a robot that makes tortilla chips. The company began testing Chippy at a California restaurant a year ago after it passed the first round of testing.

Restaurants ranging from Sweetgreen to Starbucks have been investing in automation to cut down on labor costs and improve order consistency and speed. But robotics and artificial intelligence software can be expensive, so it will likely be years before the technology pays off for restaurants.

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How People Analytics Can Help You Change Process, Culture, and Strategy - Harvard Business Review

It seems like every business is struggling with the concept of transformation. Ultimately, this is about changing a system of systems, all made up of the most complex system of all — people. For this reason, organizational transformation is uniquely suited to the analysis, prediction, and experimental research approach of the people analytics field. Those working in this field in Microsoft’s Workplace Analytics department find that there are three types of transformations that can benefit from people analytics: process transformation, cultural transformation, and strategic transformation.

It seems like every business is struggling with the concept of transformation. Large incumbents are trying to keep pace with digital upstarts., and even digital native companies born as disruptors know that they need to transform. Take Uber: at only eight years old, it’s already upended the business model of taxis. Now it’s trying to move from a software platform to a robotics lab to build self-driving cars.

And while the number of initiatives that fall under the umbrella of “transformation” is so broad that it can seem meaningless, this breadth is actually one of the defining characteristic that differentiates transformation from ordinary change. A transformation is a whole portfolio of change initiatives that together form an integrated program.

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