For anyone trying to make sense of the new order in American politics, heres a dramatic concept to process: powerful white business leaders and politicians genuflecting, in essence, before Colin Kaepernick. Taking the knee has surpassed knee on neck in a manner that is imperious, glacial, Gandhian. The roar of peaceful uprising has been cathartic. Its impact is global.

COVID-19 is teaching us to empathize better with one another; but the speed of hegemonic reversal has caught the chatterati unawares. Nike, having landed on the right side of history as far as Kaepernick is concerned, is looking like a reality show participant who has been declared safe for a week.

Other brands and their partner agencies, implicated to different extents in historically regressive practices, are scanning the horizon anxiously and hoping the situation doesnt escalate, go full-on French Revolution. They are making all the right noises by talking up anti-racism, rushing to declare Juneteenth a holiday and advertising their wokeness through Blackout Tuesday. Their social media accounts are protesting many thingsbut especially their innocence. Nice try, but they had better watch out: cancel culture is the equivalent of the old royals getting their heads lopped off.

Time for cultural strategy to take charge

Its one thing for brands and agencies to have left bare minimum interventions until the last possible second and quite another to be subsequently grandstanding. To offer a football analogy: imagine Brazil falling 7-0 behind against Germany and then anticipating applause and crowd support for pulling one back. Now more than ever before, brands must understand cultural flows; or they will meet their end quicker than Tony Soprano.

Any consumer who connects consumption with virtue wants brands to address three kinds of values: 1) universal measures of decency that empower humanity 2) causes that fit the ecosystem in which the brand operates 3) principles that matter to consumers and their families.

From Ben & Jerry's message on its website

Brands must also grasp that there are three windows of engagement: a) before the world catches on, by doing what Ben & Jerrys or Patagonia does, supporting tectonic cultural shifts quietly of their own initiative; b) spotting a trend early, like Nike did, and getting behind it; and c) succumbing, like the NFL, to panic and the need to catch up with a moment that is threatening to get away entirely.

These two factorsthe values matrix and the phase of applicationmust work together as a gear system to create moments of opportunity, with some responses eliminated and others elevated.

Cultural strategists must reimagine the disruptive capacity of residual, dominant and emergent codes but beyond that, also consider the issue of ethics and sustainability. Semiotics is often applied as a predictive tool to anticipate the next iteration or the next step for a trend. But its most advantageous use lies in understanding what sets of values are culturally sustainable and not a flash in the pan.

How do we extend the gains we have made? What fresh cultural or subcultural phenomenon might a brand bring to long-term prominence after Black Lives Matter in a way that doesnt feel like a marketing stunt?

Purpose is not the fix we need

Cultural strategy is steadily growing indispensable, but as an art it is still finding its range. Meanwhile the advertising, public relations and market research industries function like a Gramscian enforcer of the status quo, in the guise of an old boys' club (with a dinosaur serving as mascot). The back-slapping has long reverberated in echo chambers, which is why at times there is such a bizarre disconnect between output and reception. Times have changed; problem is, not everyones got the memo. Perhaps inertia rather than malice is to blame. The effect at any rate remains the same: too few see that obsolete solutions must urgently make way for new ones.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions; one of those being the fashionable ideology of purpose, which is designed to maximize efficiency by encouraging adherents to draw inspiration from core truths. Knowing what drives a brand brings clarity to all stakeholders. On the other hand, this serves a crafty agenda: to create a cult of believers willing to evangelize on behalf of a company's dogma. Purpose transforms brand comms into a siren call. Some companies are fueled by idealism, but many deploy purpose cynically. Rank and file workers are left to bear the brunt of capitalisms excesses.

Unconscionably, purpose keeps minorities in check. Minority talent already feels like it must outperform everyone to prove that it belongs. Now it must take things up a notch and perform a hysterical enthusiasm. Little surprise minorities feel reluctant to bring their whole selves to work: who wants to feel like an outsider? They lean in at the cost of their moorings.

Purpose is a wonderful starting point, and merits a place in business discourse. But it is a dangerous means to an end, and a poor substitute for self-awareness. Its moment is passing.

Lessons in authenticity from Marvin Gaye

For brands to find their moral authority, their most trenchant principles, their deepest voice, they must learn what it means to act grown-up. A company that embodies maturity takes on a whole form that is irreducible even in the face of gimmicks like purpose.

Its worth recalling how the Marvin Gaye album, Whats Going On, strikes the perfect balance between commerce and truth-telling. It was considered so unusual at the time for a Motown singeror any singerto be tackling themes like the Vietnam War, urban poverty and environmental pollution that impresario Berry Gordy insisted the eponymous track be scrapped. Gaye was adamant, and a masterpiece that resonates to this day was born.

Nobody dreams of connecting that kind of authenticity to marketing. When brands prioritize an equilibrium between ambition and goodwill, the profit margin practically takes care of itself. We stand at a fork in the road. The time for epiphanies is now. If brands are to really matter, they must stop trying so hard to sound human, and instead signal an understanding of what it means to be humane.

Vijay Parthasarathy is a New York-based semiotician and columnist who is managing partner at Stardust Insights, a global cultural consultancy.

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Talkin' bout a revolution | Advertising - Campaign Asia

If theres one thing women who have sex with older men love more than having sex with older men, its tweeting about it.

I know this because I am one of them.

When I first began having sex with men old enough to be my father like, old enough to have intentionally fathered me, not just old enough to have been a teen baby daddy I was a senior in college. The man I was seeing at the time had a daughter a few years younger than me, and I remember looking at all the 18-year-olds in my advisors freshman seminar and thinking, I could literally be fucking any of your dads right now. No sooner had this thought crossed my mind than I felt compelled to tweet it. It made me feel powerful, smart and a little smug, not just because I had a dirty secret, but because it felt like I was somehow cheating a system.

Im not alone in this. While women dating significantly older men is obviously nothing new, in recent years, dating older men seems to have become a distinct online brand thats part self-satire, part earnest feminist revision of a long-running patriarchal dynamic in which much older men have historically held the power over the younger women they date.

This ironic I date older men internet persona can be read as a product of a broader societal moment Ive taken to calling Daddy culture. Last year, I described this culture as a pouty-lipped Lolita fantasy rebranded for the 21st century driven by a pervasive Lana del Rey-esque energy. Daddy culture took many forms: It was the appropriation of the word Daddy or at least this usage of it from the kink community by vanilla bedrooms near you. It was the early-2010s boom in sugar dating after Seeking Arrangement and other dating-with-benefits apps went mainstream. It was Lana, yes, and it was, as Ive suggested, at the heart of Dating Older Men Twitter.

But in the aftermath of the Chris DElia sexual misconduct scandal last week, which saw the comedian accused of harassing and grooming multiple women when they were underage, the tone surrounding relationships between young women and older men has shifted dramatically. DElia is just the latest in a string of high-profile sexual misconduct cases involving older men and underage girls (see also: R. Kelly, Jeffrey Epstein), and as more survivors come forward, its becoming harder to ignore that this kind of predatory fetishization of young girls isnt just a series of individual tragedies, but an epidemic. While Dating Older Men Twitter has always involved women who, while considerably younger than the men they date, are of legal age, conversations have increasingly begun to consider whether this culture, however ironic or tongue-in-cheek, might be a symptom of something more insidious.

The hallmark of Dating Older Men Twitter, which tends to find its most notable figures in twenty-something female comedians like Dana Donnelly and Anya Volz, is a dry, sometimes self-deprecating humor. Guys really like it when u constantly bring up that you were 12 when they were in grad school, tweeted Cosmopolitan editor Carina Hsieh in 2018, while earlier this year Donnelly tweeted that her exes should be more concerned about her well-being amid the pandemic because at age 24 i am the oldest girlfriend many of them have ever had.

These are women who know they are performing a schtick. They are aware, as the internet is often fond of reminding anyone whos taken to aligning themselves with a particular interest, that dating older men is not, in fact, a personality. The humor in this particular brand of internet identity comes from its self-awareness. It is a willful self-caricature.

And if these women arent above satirizing themselves, they certainly arent afraid of poking fun at the older men involved in these dynamics. As a recent tweet from Philadelphia-based stripper who goes by the name Marla on Twitter reads, Girls in their 20s love dating stupid older men please dont try to take that away from us.

Indeed, these women are often criticized or at least the relationships theyre in are. Look no further than the backlash surrounding every relationship Leonardo DiCaprio has been in for the past decade or so. In general, this criticism holds that the men involved, even when the women they pursue are technically of legal age, are exploiting a sexist, ageist and ultimately predatory culture that values very young women solely because they are very young. The women involved, if not victims, are then also complicit in fueling this toxic dynamic.

But the women of Dating Older Men Twitter are not doe-eyed Lana del Rey types helplessly romanticizing a regressive culture of patriarchal romance. These women openly mock the men they date for the very preferences which attracted those men in the first place. This ironic approach ridicules men for their role in perpetuating a sexist culture in which very young women are disproportionately valued over their arguably more age-appropriate counterparts, and in doing so redistributes the presumptive power dynamics. Its a modern revision of one of many age-old patriarchal dynamics in which men leverage power over women. Except this time, women are the ones doing the leveraging.

Not only does this ironic subversion of the traditional hetero May-December dynamic find men mocked for dating young women by the very young women they date it also finds them mocked for apparently not even being aware of it. Dating older professional men who arent interested in social media so you can continue your 9-5 of shit talking men in peace while being wined & dined after hours>, reads a viral tweet from 2018, by a user who goes by Michelle Amoree.

Older men dating younger women isnt anything new, of course. But with social media, the young women in these relationships finally have a platform generations of young women before them didnt, and one from which, to a certain extent, older generations are excluded.

But however subversive or tongue-in-cheek this schtick may be, many of its most prominent voices have recently spoken out about the larger culture of predatory fetishization that such dynamics foster, even when both parties are technically of legal age.

While I still contend that there is a spirit of feminist revision underlying much of the great 2010sDaddy renaissance, 2020 is not 2019. Lana del Rey and her regressive romanticizing have been quasi-canceled, and as mass unrest continues amid Americas great racial reckoning, society is increasingly reconsidering other patriarchal power structures and institutions as well, including the one that routinely puts older men in bed with much younger women.

We can laugh all day about the hack jokes made on here by women about older men being shitty, but IT IS HACK FOR A FUCKING REASON, tweeted comedian and writer Anya Volz, who just a few months ago questioned the pervasive criticism often hurled at men dating younger women, arguing that such criticism, while well-intentioned, has a tendency to strip the women involved of their agency.

In a recent Twitter thread, however, Volz points to the predatory fetishization of young girls as the result of a cancer in our society that does not begin or end with underage victims. Its insidious as fuck and seeps into our culture from all angles. Its in movies with all leading men being 50 and their girlfriends being 22. Its in porn with the #1 search result being teen or young, she wrote. Its in every single beauty standard that women are held to: bouncy, clear skin; perky tits; no gray hair; thin in a way that is normally only found naturally in..prepubescent children!!!

While I have previously argued that relationships between young women and much older men are not inherently predatory (and that common criticism painting them as such tends to unnecessarily victimize adult women who are more than capable of pursuing older men as willfully and actively as older men pursue them), it seems that I, and other women like me, have recently begun to reconsider the role we play in perpetuating a culture that preys upon underage girls.

Donnelly, a prominent voice of Dating Older Men Twitter who had initially agreed to speak with me for an article about the internet schtick, ultimately pulled her commentary after the DElia allegations broke, explaining that she, like many women, felt extremely triggered.

Stop sexualizing barely legal start sexualizing definitely legal beyond a shadow of a doubt, reads one of her recent tweets.

Perhaps what I have long read, in myself and in women like me, as the willful, empowered, self-aware pursuit of older men has always been little more than a defense mechanism. If, as many, many women have recently attested, all women encounter this kind of predatory fetishization of their youth in some form or other, then this kind of self-fetishization veiled in satire functions as an attempt to reclaim that narrative. You cant hunt us if we willfully hand ourselves over. You cant hunt us if we convince you and ourselves that were the ones hunting you.

In taking a pronounced interest in much older men, however sardonically, I recognize that I am complicit not only in fostering a culture that puts young women and underage girls in danger, but also in perpetuating a system that will one day be my own undoing.In a dynamic where youth is the currency of power, you are only on one side until you are on the other. As 20-something women having sex with 40-something men, we know that in 20 years, those 60-somethings will probably still be having sex with women half their age or younger, and we wont be.

What will we be doing? We have no way of knowing, because society doesnt seem particularly interested in letting us or anyone know what women over 40 are up to, unless it happens to involve being a celebrity who looks good for her age, in a bathing suit, in which case they might throw her a People magazine spread or a Page Six headline that refers specifically to her age.

This too, as Volz noted in her thread, is a symptom of the sexist and ageist culture that makes underage women the prey of older men. This insidious culture, she writes, is embedded in the way that women are not valued in a mainstream way after showing any sign of aging whatsoever. Not even just sexually, which is fucked up in itself, but in ANY WAY, she wrote. I remember my mom telling me she felt herself becoming invisible when she started getting gray hair.

As a 21-year-old college student looking at my fellow students and realizing I could be fucking any of their dads, I felt like I was cheating a system because I was for a little while, anyway. I felt like I had figured out something most other women my age hadnt: that youth was our most valuable asset and if we didnt exploit it or let others exploit it while we had the chance, wed be sorry.

The problem is well be sorry either way. As women born into a sexist, ageist society, we are playing a losing game from day one. Even if we play it perfectly, even if we think were winning at 21, age will catch up with us. We will watch our returns diminish year by year.

A dude replied to my thread about our cultures obsession with young girls & womens bodies that I was just complaining about being old, Volz tweeted shortly after completing her thread. Im 24. I rest my fucking case.

I realize that in trying to leverage this bullshit dynamic to my advantage for the very brief window of time I can, I am complicit in perpetuating it. In being a willful participant in Daddy culture, in dating older men and tweeting about it, however self-deprecatingly, I am complicit in fueling the very system that will one day, not so very long from now at all, render me invisible.

More:
Is This the End of "Daddy" Culture? - InsideHook

How often have you heard people mutter, Oh, Im not a creative type? Perhaps youve thought this yourself. This is a falsehood because to be human is be hardwired to be creative. To be a phenomenal lawyer, manager, doctor, engineer, or plumber requires immense amounts of creativity. Creativity is the nonnegotiable ingredient in developing the most amazing tech app, healing the sick, and leading dynamic enterprises. Yet our educational system teaches out creativity, and our boardrooms reference it as an afterthought. No wonder so many people who are pursuing innovation fail to actually innovate.

People throw around the word innovation all the time; sometimes we end up talking around each other without getting to the real definition. What do we mean by innovation? Innovation is invention converted into financial, social, and cultural value. And the engine for innovation is creativity. That means that if we truly want to innovate, then we must design systems, processes, and experiences in our work environments that allow us to be creative. Taking the leap to build an organization-wide creative capacity is the single best way continually innovate.

Creativity is not a mystical, magical process only accessible to a fewnamely, artists, musicians, actors, and novelists. But, like innovation, people struggle with understanding what exactly creativity is. I define creativity as the ability to toggle between wonder and rigor in order to solve problems and deliver novel value. Wonder is our capacity to exercise awe, pause, dream, and ask audacious blue-sky-thinking questions. Rigor is our capacity to exercise discipline and deep skills, to pay attention to detail, and to spend time on task for mastery. Both are necessary for creativity to thrive. In our age of augmented reality, artificial intelligence, and rapidly evolving technologies, a hybrid approach to creativity that incorporates wonder and analytical rigor is absolutely vital to business success.

The best way to navigate complexity is through creativity. Applying creativity simplifies complex problem-solving by juxtaposing and recombining previously unexplored ideas. Creativity leaps are the only way to solve the complex problems of our time and to innovate for the future. Since creativity itself is a complex system, the most effective tactical means to achieve creativity are the open-ended creative techniques of inquiry, improvisation, and intuition.

Inquiry is rooted in curiosity, which results from an information gap. You want to know more about something that you currently dont understand. Inquiry is the practice of honing your ability to frame and reframe questions, to use questions as a way of thinking through and processing. Inquiry is the root of wisdom and the precursor to empathy.

Improvisation is about building on ideas with minimal constraints. There is freedom to experiment, but there are also rules and fluid structures that help you to correct course and embrace mistakes. It is a deeply observant and adaptive process. Examples of great improvisation show up in jazz, rap, comedy, sales pitches, and scientific experimentation.

Intuition is the universal visceral, internal wisdom that allows for unconscious pattern recognition and insights for decision-making. Harriet Tubman, Albert Einstein, and Steve Jobs are examples of famous innovators and leaders who relied on and valued their intuition, coupling it with their rational intellect to make decisions.

So, how can you stress the importance of creativity as a core competency throughout your organization and encourage everyoneyourself includedto invest in becoming more creative? Here are a few practices and tactics to get you started:

Seek out opportunities for lateral thinking. Lateral thinking is the ability to learn from sectors and practices both adjacent to you and far away from the way you typically do business. For example, if you are a tech firm, you might explore theatrical productions to learn about project management. Lateral thinking opens possibilities for new landmarks and new benchmarks, while expanding your awareness of trends outside your industry that you should be paying attention to.

Welcome inquiry and build trust by leading with questions. To admit that you do not know something requires humility, self-awareness, andin these timescourage. When you put yourself out there to reveal that you have a question or an uncertainty, the environment must be primed for trust. When a leader asks questions, employees feel the courage to share not only what is on their mind, but also whats in their imagination.

Get comfortable with working together through chaos. Collaboration doesnt come from a bunch of meetings. True collaboration and creative synergy come through our ability to improvise with one anotherespecially when work is messy or messed up. By openly stating and owning whatever is going wrong, team members will build their capacity to adapt, learn, grow, and respect each others ideas.

Dare to listen to your gutand heart. In business, it often takes courage to stand up for your intuition in the face of data and rationale. But in a world of ambiguity and uncertainty, where wicked problems are everywhere, trusting your intuition is necessary. In fact, intuition is often how you make the leap from observation to plausible explanation. As internal a process as it is, intuition consistently requires us to pay deep attention to the world around us. Be brave and welcome your employees to join you in bridging gaps by having conversations across disciplines and boundaries.

Commentary by Natalie Nixon. Heres what youve missed? Highest Paying Creative And Media Jobs. Highest Paying Business Jobs. Highest Paying Engineering Jobs.

Excerpt from:
Creative Competency: Why to Make It Everyone's Priority for Your Business - CEOWORLD magazine

By Gayle Tzemach Lemmon, adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and author

When I applied to business school, I came across this question in the application: "Are your parents graduates of the Harvard Business School?"

I proudly checked "no." Naively, I thought it counted against you if you answered "yes." After all, why would the nation's best universities want to serve as finishing schools for the elite rather than launching pads for the determined?

Children whose parents are in the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile.

And why would the children of alumni require any boost in the first place? Why would they need anyone to cup their hands together as a step stool to launch them over the class barricade and into the Ivy League if they were born into it?

On the undergraduate side, around 15 percent of Harvard's Class of 2022 are so-called legacy students, according to The Harvard Crimson. The Wall Street Journal reported in 2018 that selective universities often accept legacies at double the rate of the overall applicant pool, while at Princeton University they're admitted roughly four times more often.

What I saw up close once I enrolled at Harvard Business School my first private school experience since local Montessori preschool was that those students given a lift by their legacy status didn't have more intelligence or ingenuity or resilience than those like me who came from homes without any college degrees. They simply had more access.

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The irony is that one great benefit of an Ivy League education is, also, access. Admission to Harvard Business School or any of its peers is the equivalent of Willy Wonka's golden ticket. Those who work hard and emerge from the gates of elite colleges and graduate schools go on to elite companies and elite government positions a reality illuminated once again by data recently obtained from the State Department.

We all are worse off if these gates open only a crack to people who don't already come from the economic and social high ground. Those who care about building structures and institutions of power that reflect and respond to all of America not only gated-community America could start by giving less of a leg up to those already enjoying the benefits of access.

Many of the Ivy Leaguers around me intuitively knew what I initially didn't, coming from a land of union-belonging single moms working two jobs: that graduating from an Ivy League institution communicated to others what those with less privilege don't always know how to translate. It said that you were smart enough to get into the elite institution, that you belonged to high-status networks from which talent was selected for prime posts and that you thus merited their assistance in finding opportunities.

So it is in the State Department, as Nahal Toosi's reporting in Politico shows. "Foreign Service employees with degrees from Ivy League schools have significantly better odds of earning a promotion early in their careers than colleagues who lack such credentials," Toosi writes. "At one point in the department's career hierarchy, their odds are more than 20 percent higher."

The media are similar to the State Department in embracing Ivy League grads. As FiveThirtyEight put it, "There's no definitive data on where reporters went to school, but the newsrooms of influential media outlets in New York and Washington, D.C., are full of graduates from Ivy League or similarly selective colleges." The writer, Ben Casselman, had enough self-awareness to note that his outlet was "just as bad" as everywhere else: "The vast majority of our editorial staff, including me, went to elite, selective colleges. (I went to Columbia.)"

And then there is corporate America. In its top ranks, Ivy League representation remains well above its proportion of the population. Richard Zweigenhaft of Guilford College found that in 2011, although far less than 1 percent of Americans had ever earned undergraduate or postgraduate degrees from Harvard, 14.1 percent of those who sat on Fortune 500 boards of directors had.

It's no surprise that the Ivy League finds itself heavily populated by America's 1 percent. This is changing, as Yale University pointed out in February, but only slowly. According to a 2017 National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, children whose parents are in the top 1 percent are 77 times more likely to attend an Ivy League college than those whose parents are in the bottom income quintile.

This reality leads us to a closed system in which the few have the most. And this deprives the places that matter, that shape the country, its economy and its stories, of depth of experience. It shortchanges the nation of leaders who have seen want and known adversity and understand what it's like to fight and fight and fight for a shot. It seeds unfairness and entrenches a status quo, and it leaves us all poorer.

Let me be clear: There is nothing wrong with wealth. Quite the contrary. A shot at wealth is what every single mom working two jobs wants for her children. What is wrong is a playing field that is tilted away from those trying to teach their children that merit matters most and that access to opportunity is shared equally and depends entirely on hard work.

It shortchanges the nation of leaders who have seen want and known adversity and understand what it's like to fight and fight and fight for a shot.

Where I grew up, on the wrong side of the Washington, D.C., suburban class divide, earning your spot mattered it is what our mothers burned into us. Get up, go to work, do your best, do it again the next day. "Life is hard," my mother told me if I complained about getting up at 6:30 a.m. and being the first one dropped off at day care so she could get to work at the telephone company on time. In the evening, she sold Tupperware. "On a scale of major world tragedies, yours is not a three."

It matters that institutions that share America's story represent and reflect America's citizenry. And not just in the State Department, but across the government, the private sector and the media. We are stronger as a country when we draw upon those from all different experiences to drive us to the best outcome and the most creative solutions.

Access to opportunity matters. And it is in our shared interest to spread not hoard it. "Legacy" is not a synonym for "merit." And no one who comes from a family steeped in the Ivy League needs a helping hand when they were already born with a winning one.

Gayle Tzemach Lemmon is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations. She is the author ofNew York Timesbestsellers "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana" and "Ashleys War: The Untold Story of a Team ofWomen Soldiers on the Special Ops Battlefield."

Continued here:
Gayle Tzemach Lemmon: Protests on race and injustice should make us look at how the Ivy League enables inequality - NBC News

2020 has proven to be a game-changing year, where the voices of our youth globally and locally have become louder. The status quo is being challenged and we, Trace, a youth-focused brand are all for it!

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Under the new brand mission, we challenged ourselves to build an ecosystem that empowers youth in everything that we do. Through core values of authenticity, innovation, diversity and of course empowerment, we have been able to provide a voice for youth not only in South Africa but around the globe through employment opportunities, content, music and film.

In film, we partnered with the Gauteng Film Commission to create the Trace x GFC Filmmaker competition, an opportunity for young creative filmmakers to win funding towards their documentary of choice that would educate and inspire. We also launched Your Voice, a new social TV show, that gives youth a mic to express themselves and see themselves on Trace TV channels.

We are also currently working with several governments, academic institutions, businesses and celebrities to create the Trace Academia platform. Through the platform we aim to help educate and entertain at the same time, Africas missing middle, those who cannot afford to go further than grade 10 due to socio-economic challenges.

Trace will continue providing the best Afro-urban music and entertainment but we will do it differently. We will embed our empowerment purpose in our existing media and activities and we will launch empowerment platforms and programmes, using the power of afro urban entertainment, to provide engaging vocational training, entrepreneurship, soft skills and wellbeing tools so that all our people can get real jobs and have a better life.

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#YouthMonth: Encouraging our youth to stand up and shine - Bizcommunity.com

Type Fives are known as the Investigators of the Enneagram. Inquisitive, objective, and analytical, Fives are private, intellectual types who love learning and acquiring new knowledge. Because they are mentally focused and can live in their head, it can take Fives a longer time to process emotions and express intimacy, which can come off as detached.

In a Five-One partnership, the Fives find value in the Ones' independence, curiosity, and similar mutual interests. Likewise, the Ones appreciate Fives' lack of judgment and steadiness which gives them comfort. The partnership can build a strong foundation of dependability and trust.

In a Five-Two partnership, this is a true meeting of opposites. The Fives' objectivity and strong boundaries are attractive to porous Twos, who have trouble stating boundaries. The independent Fives crave alone time and don't always want the Twos to overextend and help, which pushes Twos to take care of themselves. In return, the people-oriented Two can add cozy domesticity and a bustling life into the dynamic.

Read more:
Here Are The Enneagram Types That Pair Best Together In Relationships - mindbodygreen.com

Mental health issues are alive and kicking in your family, friends, patients and team; maybe even you, Anthony Gedge says.

On todays frantic treadmill, in our stressed-out world, a new threat is at large. Its like the silent, invisible and deadly disease under the gums. At one of my mastermind meetings, former England Rugby coach Stuart Lancaster told a group of practice owners: When we beat the All Blacks, we had the energy and the attitude, but that day we put the top six inches on.

I want to talk about the top six inches, and our and others brains and its not just the psyche. The emerging and expanding and onerous threat is not only under our skulls and in our hearts, but it touches everybody around.

You may have guessed Im talking about mental health in your workplace. Its a hot topic at the minute, but this article is like no other. It gets straight to the real truth. As you will discover, I have interviewed a five-years-sober recovering drug and alcohol-abusing wet-fingered dentist. Ill reveal his heartrending story trying to run his practice with shame and guilt. Ive also chatted with a mental health counsellor who specialises in helping dentists get back on track. I guarantee the following is like no other textbook article.

First, let me ask you do you have team members who feel they cant cope after returning from lockdown? If yes, then read on.

In my daily dentist conversations, Im learning that some therapists on furlough are scared to use AGP, and are delaying getting back to work, claiming their indemnity may not cover AGP. A few nurses are also dragging their feet. The carrot might work for a while, but there will be a few sticks being wielded, as practice owners livelihoods are at stake.

And, added to that, a three-month hygiene bottleneck is now halting new patient high-profit AGP work. That is the gold stuff keeping you afloat. It may be necessary to bus in hygiene and nurse locums. But this time around it wont be Arthur Scargill and his coal miners shouting scab. It just might be your existing hygienists if they refuse to step up to the plate and muck in. Margaret Thatcher was far harder in the 80s than Boris Johnson is now. There is a surplus of talent, but the A players are often already with the best practices, whose castles were built on the solid ground of putting their people first, patients second, and profit naturally flowing thereafter.

During your closure, did the conversations with yourself increase and get more aggressively negative, fearful, angry, and frustrated, even slipping into being a hopeless PLOMV poor little old me victim? If yes, then you are reading the right information. If no, carry on reading; you too may have a mental health issue, because thats not normal thinking either. But, then, what is normal thinking?

As you may know, Im a recovering alcoholic. Ive been sober nearly four years, and my life dramatically changed when I stopped picking up drinks.

I met R, the first recovering dentist that I came across in 15 years of strategic consulting in dentistry. Although, over the years, Ive mentored a few dentists to give up alcohol, drugs and other addictions. It was fascinating to actually meet somebody who really engages in an Alcoholics Anonymous for Doctors and Dentists group and The Dentists Health Support Trust (for mental health).

This is a short version of his story. You will see how alcohol and drugs can easily spiral out of control. But, more importantly, how mental health problems in general can easily spiral out of control. I truly believe we are only ever two steps away from being homeless and an addict.

Now, on to the story about the recovering drug and alcohol-addicted dentist. He has become a friend, whom Ill call R, who nursed a 500-a-day cocaine habit and drank like a fish.

I really hit rock bottom, he recalls. And at that point, having spent two years, probably, in real pain every day, realising probably a year or two before that, Id crossed the line they talk about, where I had to have a drink. Now, thats when fear, shame, and guilt would kick in. And the only way to get rid of those emotions and those feelings was to drink and use more.

I knew what I was doing was wrong. I didnt feel that it was right. And I thought I was the only dentist in the country this was affecting. And [I was] thinking about it every day. How can I get out of this?I can do it myself. I can do it myself. Its too shameful to admit itWho do I ask? Who do I speak to? How can I get help?I cant possibly admit it.

Next, I interview Rory from The Dentists Health Support Trust, a mental health counsellor talking about loss. His insights are highly instructive, especially for clinicians.

What is loss? I think in the beginning of lockdown, there was a loss of the freedom to choose what to do. However small or large that was, there was a loss of freedom. Now, I think what came out of it was maybe more of a we for a period of time. We are all in this together, but now as were emerging out of this, there is more of a sense of perhaps its less about us and its more about I.

So there is essentially a lack of togetherness about it. Thats just a comment that we may or may not relate to loss, but I think its worth making. I think the losses [are] the loss of freedom to make choices, the loss of income, the loss of routine, the loss of getting up in the morning and going into the surgery, and then the loss of connecting with people.

Because if you like what you do and you havent got connection, then there is a sense of isolation. There is a loss of certainty, whether thats financial certainty or professional certainty, but the loss of certainty of whats going to happen. I think the hardest thing with mental health is getting people to have a sense of acceptance of it. So their self-awareness goes with it. But if you have somebody thats mindful in that way, then simple things that can make a difference would be regular exercise, sensible eating patterns and the capacity for self-reflection. To be able to see whats going on in my life, to be able to step back and look at it.

I think often when youre a practice owner or somebody in that setting, sometimes its quite difficult to more or less take a helicopter view of whats going on, to look down on what is happening. But that capacity to be able to step back sometimes and do a sort of mental check How am I doing? How am I? Whats different? maybe, dare I even say, a gratitude list, things feel tight, things feel difficult, Are there things I could be grateful for? So, in summary, the element of self-awareness, being able to have a check on where they are, and doing good things like exercise, healthy eating, good sleep hygiene, stuff like that. So, rather than self-medicating, medicate in a different way, which is a healthy way.

Just think about that in the context of how much time you give to other people in a day. I think the idea of taking care of self allows us to be able to take care of others or to give to others. And if we dont spend that little bit of time in a 24-hour day on ourselves, where does it leave us? Eventually burnt out and exhausted. Some may say that occasionally having a day off or a rest day is ok. But if youre paying a high price for it, then maybe being a bit addicted to doing all the time is not so bad and actually helps you. But always remember that self-care requires just a small amount of time. And we often give a lot to others, so a small amount of time for ourselves is a good thing.

Heal yourself first, before you heal others. If you are healed or healing, then heal your people. They need you now more than ever. How to spot if someone has a mental health issue? As dentist R says: Look out for people who are a bit late, more isolated than normal.

Your practice future, at this precarious moment in time, solely depends on engaging your team and monitoring their mental health. Then yes, youve absolutely got a strong chance to get back into profit ASAP. But its going to be an uphill struggle. To grow your practice over the next 42 days and beyond, or even stabilise your practice over the next 42 days, weve really got to focus harder than ever before on our culture.

You can also pick up mental health issues in your monthly 10-minute one-on-ones. It is up to you as a practice owner and, indeed, as a team member to create a dentistry workplace culture people can jump out of bed for. I explain more about this and my complimentary *suite of back-to-work tools, strategies, resources in a special and relevant 2.5-hour video I just recorded on How to prepare your peoples, your patients and your own hearts and minds for the first 42 days of opening and beyond at http://www.TripleNetProfit.com.

Mental health issues are not just for the clinically insane. Mental health issues are alive and kicking in your family, friends, patients and team; maybe even you.

Get in touch with 35 years sobriety dentist Kevin and counsellor Rory for mental health support through this private and confidential email address, [emailprotected], or highly confidential phone line, 0207 224 4671. Mention this article and they will welcome you with open arms. Rory mentioned a heart-warming phrase three times in our conversation, concerning anyone who thinks they may have a mental challenge: we will walk together.

Dentists Health Support Trust dentistshealthsupporttrust.org/contact-html.

Free back to work video training: *complimentary suite of back-to-work tools, strategies, resources in a special and relevant 2.5-hour video I just recorded on how to prepare your peoples, your patients and your own minds and hearts for the first 42 days of opening and beyond at http://www.TripleNetProfit.com.

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How to prepare your teams mental health for the first 42 days of opening - Dentistry.co.uk

By: Lifestyle Desk | New Delhi | Published: June 24, 2020 2:10:50 pm A new survey reveals how professionals are opting for mindfulness practices to overcome stress amid the pandemic. (Source: Getty Images/Thinkstock)

The current pandemic has affected us all in numerous ways. From work-from-home to changing our perspective towards health and immunity, it has demanded a complete overhaul in our lifestyles. Reinforcing how the COVID-19 pandemic has had an impact on how professionals deal with mental health, especially stress, a new survey underlines how they are tackling the unprecedented times.

Data from over 200+ working professionals aged between 30 and 45 in India over the three months of COVID lockdown, revealed that approximately 40 per cent chose mindfulness to manage stress. However, the rest of them chose actions that suppressed their emotions, which steered them to different forms of addictions.

White Ray Coaching, a brand that specialises in leadership coaching, recently conducted the lockdown survey with an aim to understand how lifestyles have changed during the period. As per the survey, 40 per cent of respondents said that practicing relaxation exercises, which could trigger internal reflection such as mediation, and silence has been their go-to strategy. Nearly 30 per cent said they watched Netflix, read a book, or made a phone call to a friend or relative to switch their attention. About 20 per cent chose to smoke or drink, stating that it eased the strain in their nerves, while 10 per cent were those who said that it depended on the situation.

Commenting on the findings of the survey, Shalini Bhattacharya, founder, White Ray Coaching, said that even though all of us talk about stress and anxiety every day, one way to manage stress head-on is by practicing mental resilience, which can help prevent disorders. This research is part of our ongoing efforts to build a better understanding of mental resilience. We should not wait for adversity to hit us and cause permanent damage to our mental well-being. We need to become more self-aware, think out of the box, and resist the urge to give averse instant reactions. The key is to adapt yourself to think differently.

ALSO READ | Coronavirus: How to address mental health issues faced by medical workers

As per the organisation, when it comes to mental resilience, theres a lot of information out there, from how to manage stress and be more mindful of boosting happiness. During the lockdown, managing mental well-being is more important than ever before, as we adapt to the way we work, live and meet people. The organisation further advised people to assess how they are responding during a crisis, and then walk the journey of the 5As for practicing resilience awareness, acceptance, authenticity, agility, and action.

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40% professionals believe mindfulness is a key to manage stress in current times: Survey - The Indian Express

Would you trust an artificial intelligence algorithm that works eerily well, making accurate decisions 99.9% of the time, but is a mysterious black box? Every system fails every now and then, and when it does, we want explanations, especially when human lives are at stake. And a system that cant be explained cant be trusted. That is one of the problems the AI community faces as their creations become smarter and more capable of tackling complicated and critical tasks.

In the past few years,explainable artificial intelligencehas become a growing field of interest. Scientists and developers are deploying deep learning algorithms in sensitive fields such as medical imaging analysis and self-driving cars. There is concern, however, about how these AI operate. Investigating the inner-workings of deep neural networks is very difficult, and their engineers often cant determine what are the key factors that contribute to their output.

For instance, suppose a neural network has labeled the image of a skin mole as cancerous. Is it because it found malignant patterns in the mole or is it because of irrelevant elements such as image lighting, camera type, or the presence of some other artifact in the image, such aspen markings or rulers?

Researchers have developed various interpretability techniques that help investigate decisions made by variousmachine learning algorithms. But these methods are not enough to address AIs explainability problem and create trust in deep learning models, argues Daniel Elton, a scientist who researches the applications of artificial intelligence in medical imaging.

[Read: Everything you need to know about recurrent neural networks]

Elton discusses why we need to shift from techniques that interpret AI decisions to AI models that can explain their decisions by themselves as humans do. His paper, Self-explaining AI as an alternative to interpretable AI, recently published in thearXiv preprint server, expands on this idea.

Classicsymbolic AI systemsare based on manual rules created by developers. No matter how large and complex they grow, their developers can follow their behavior line by line and investigate errors down to the machine instruction where they occurred. In contrast, machine learning algorithms develop their behavior by comparing training examples and creating statistical models. As a result, their decision-making logic is often ambiguous even to their developers.

Machine learnings interpretability problem is both well-known and well-researched. In the past few years, it has drawn interest fromesteemed academic institutions and DARPA, the research arm of the Department of Defense.

Efforts in the field split into two categories in general: global explanations and local explanations. Global explanation techniques are focused on finding general interpretations of how a machine learning model works, such as which features of its input data it deems more relevant to its decisions. Local explanation techniques are focused on determining which parts of a particular input are relevant to the decision the AI model makes. For instance, they mightproduce saliency mapsof the parts of an image that have contributed to a specific decision.

Examples of saliency maps produced by RISE

All these techniques have flaws, and there is confusion regarding how to properly interpret an interpretation, Elton writes.

Elton also challenges another popular belief about deep learning. Many scientists believe that deep neural networks extract high-level features and rules from their underlying problem domain. This means that, for instance, when you train aconvolutional neural networkon many labeled images, it will tune its parameters to detect various features shared between them.

This is true, depending on what you mean by features. Theres a body of research that shows neural networks do in factlearn recurring patterns in imagesand other data types. At the same time, theres plenty of evidence thatdeep learning algorithms do not learn the general featuresof their training examples, which is why they are rigidly limited to their narrow domains.

Actually, deep neural networks are dumb- any regularities that they appear to have captured internally are solely due to the data that was fed to them, rather than a self-directed regularity extraction process, Elton writes.

Citing apaperpublished in the peer-reviewed scientific magazineNeuron, Elton posits that, in fact, deep neural networks function through the interpolation of data points, rather than extrapolation.

Some research is focused on developing interpretable AI models to replace current black boxes. These models make their reasoning logic visible and transparent to developers. In many cases, especially in deep learning, swapping an existing model for an interpretable one results in an accuracy tradeoff. This would be a self-defeating goal because we opt for more complex models because they provide higher accuracy in the first place.

Attempts to compress deep neural networks into simpler interpretable models with equivalent accuracy typically fail when working with complex real-world data such as images or human language, Elton notes.

One of Eltons main arguments is about adopting a different view of understanding AI decision. Most efforts focus on breaking open the AI black box and figuring out how it works at a very low and technical level. But when it comes to the human brain, the ultimate destination of AI research, weve never had such reservations.

The human brain also appears to be an overfit black box which performs interpolation, which means that how we understand brain function also needs to change, he writes. If evolution settled on a model (the brain) which is uninterpretable, then we expect advanced AIs to also be of that type.

What this means is that when it comes to understanding human decision, we seldom investigate neuron activations. Theres a lot ofresearch in neurosciencethat helps us better understands the workings of the brain, but for millennia, weve relied on other mechanisms to interpret human behavior.

Interestingly, although the human brain is a black box, we are able to trust each other. Part of this trust comes from our ability to explain our decision making in terms which make sense to us, Elton writes. Crucially, for trust to occur we must believe that a person is not being deliberately deceptive, and that their verbal explanations actually maps onto the processes used in their brain to arrive at their decisions.

One day, science might enable us to explain human decisions at the neuron activation level. But for the moment, most of us rely on understandable, verbal explanations of our decisions and the mechanisms we have to establish trust between each other.

The interpretation of deep learning, however, is focused on investigating activations and parameter weights instead of high-level, understandable explanations. As we try to accurately explain the details of how a deep neural network interpolates, we move further from what may be considered relevant to the user, Elton writes.

Based on the trust and explanation model that exists between humans, Elton calls for self-explaining AI that, like a human, can explain its decision.

An explainable AI yields two pieces of information: its decision and the explanation of that decision.

This is an idea that has been proposed and explored before. However, what Elton proposes is self-explaining AI that still maintains its complexity (e.g., deep neural networks with many layers) and does not sacrifice its accuracy for the sake of explainability.

In the paper, Elton suggests how relevant causal information can be extracted from a neural network. While the details are a bit technical, what the technique basically does is extract meaningful and present information from the neural networks layers while avoiding spurious correlations. His method builds on current self-explaining AI systems developed by other researchers and verifies whether explanations and predictions in their neural networks correspond.

Structure of self-explainable AI (source: arxiv.org)

In his paper, Elton also discusses the need to specify the limits of AI algorithms. Neural networks tend to provide an output value for any input they receive. Self-explainable AI models should send an alert when results fall outside the models applicability domain, Elton says. Applicability domain analysis can be framed as a simple form of AI self-awareness, which is thought by some to be an important component for AI safety in advanced AIs.

Self-explainable AI models should provide confidence levels for both their output and their explanation.

Applicability and domain analysis is especially important for AI systems where robustness and trust are important, so that systems can alert their user if they are asked work outside their domain of applicability, Elton concludes. An obvious example would be health care, where errors can result in irreparable damage to health. But there are plenty of other areas such asbanking, loans, recruitment, and criminal justice, where we need to know the limits and boundaries of our AI systems.

Much of this is still hypothetical, and Elton provides little in terms of implementation details, but it is a nice direction to follow as the explainable AI landscape develops.

See the rest here:
The advantages of self-explainable AI over interpretable AI - The Next Web

Monkey D. Luffy may not look like much at first glance on One Piece, but he's one of the best shonen heroes out there (even if he sometimes fails).

Per statistics and fan reviews; its safe to say that One Piece has already claimed the Shonen throne. Yes, some might disagree with that statement, but in this reality of ours, nothing can ever gain a hundred percent approval from the masses, and thats just a fact.

RELATED:One Piece: 10 Luffy Quotes that Still Inspire Us

With that cleared off the table; lets delve into the topic at hand, the future pirate king, Luffy. From the perspective of a bystander, thats to say a non fan, Luffy might appear to be nothing less of a generic, man-child Shonen protagonist; and to some extent, they are actually right. But what they will never realize is that whatever they think they know about Luffy is merely the tip of the iceberg. Theres more than what meets the eye with Luffy, and every fan knows that.

Headstart here means a clear cut edge over his counterparts. Because as far as we are concerned, the gomu gomu no mi is not even remotely close to being one of the strongest devil fruits out there. Any fan can effortlessly name at least 10 devil fruits that are stronger than the gomu gomu no mi.

This symbolizes that all of Luffys achievements thus far were the results of his own hard work/talent, rather than reliance on hacks.

The guy wears his feelings on his sleeves; its almost as if he is incapable of hiding his feelings. If Luffy didnt like a character, you better bet that he will let that character know it. It doesnt even matter if they asked, they will know it.

While this might seem rather harmless, the pirate world is full of schemes. A simple-minded approach would only get him so far.

Self-confidence is a double-aged sword; if used correctly, one would prevail. Otherwise, the only result is self-destruction if its misused. Did Luffy ever doubt himself? Probably not; did he ever doubt his chances of defeating certain individuals? Absolutely.

The good thing is, Luffys self-confidence did not cross the danger-zone. Well, at least for now.

Stubbornness and self-confidence are two elements that feed off each other. Has Luffy not been so confident, chances are, he would not have been so stubborn at times. While it might be clear that, as a captain, Luffy has to have a firm stand; Most of the time his stubbornness kicks in, it does for dumb reasons.

Nonetheless, this stubbornness has yet to show severe side effects on Luffy and the gang, but it's almost certain that if his methods don't change, it will come back and bite him.

Being calm at all times is the duty of a captain; if the captain gets flustered, the crew will almost certainly collapse. Luckily for the strawhats, Luffy rarely loses his cool regardless of the severity of the situation.

RELATED:One Piece: 10 Badass Monkey D Luffy Moments

Usually, Luffy just goofs around the ship with no real purpose; but when a captain situation arises, he steps forward and handles it in spades.

Recklessness is nothing new to the Shonen, but Luffy takes that to a whole new level. You would think that as a captain, the least he could do is rack his brain a little before acting. But Luffy is the kind that acts first and thinks never.

Frankly, when Luffy prematurely attacked Kaido, nobody knew what he was thinking- not even he himself. No matter what angle you look at it, it still comes down as a dumb and reckless decision.

Typical Shonen Protagonists are derived by many factors of which include Self-righteousness. They would go out of their way to serve justice, even when it's uncalled for. This type of mentality, while not necessarily bad, is unrealistic on many levels.

It's true that Luffy is a man controlled by his emotions, but it's not to the level of him going around, saving everyone just for the heck of it.

By this point in the series, it's pretty obvious that Luffy's brain game is a little flawed. He is borderline incapable of processing complex thoughts.

RELATED:One Piece: 10 Awesome Fan Art Of Characters Drawn In Different Anime Styles

We have seen instances of dumb Shonen Protagonists, but the knowing ones could count on one hand those who are dumber than Luffy.

Now, you might be wondering how an idiot like Luffy could even shape up the most basic form of self-awareness. And the truth of the matter is, nobody truly knows how he did it.

Luffy is well aware of his own position; he very well knows that he is a pirate and that he might as well be a 'bad guy'. But he couldn't care less, nor does he even try to sugar-coat it.

A little bit of optimism never hurts; in fact, it could even positively affect those around you and attract positive vibes. But as a wise man once said: "nothing good ever comes from the excess of anything".

For example, Luffy -on his quest to save Ace- never once thought of the possibility of Ace's demise. He just went out, fully believing that he could save his brother. And the results were horrific, to say the least.

NEXT:One Piece: 5 Reasons Why Luffy Should End Up With Boa Hancock (& 5 Reasons Why It Should Be Nami)

Next The 10 Best Tournaments From Shonen Anime & Manga

Suliman is a writer, or so he likes to think. his hobbies are gaming, reading, writing...etc; all that you would expect from a self-proclaimed writer.

Link:
One Piece: 5 Times Luffy Proved To Be The Best Shonen Protagonist (& 5 Times He Fell Short) - CBR - Comic Book Resources