The Best Way To Predict The Future Is To Create It

In Africa, Ubuntu is a philosophical principle that emphasizes the essence of community, interconnectedness, and the well-being of individuals in society. Ubuntu is often translated as "humanity towards others" or "I am because we are." It is rooted in the idea that a person's humanity is shaped and defined by their relationships with others.

Ubuntu promotes values such as compassion, empathy, respect, solidarity, and inclusiveness. It recognizes the importance of collective decision-making and consensus building within a community. It encourages individuals to consider the impacts of their actions on others and to promote harmony and equality.

Palaver is a related concept that emphasizes the process of peaceful and inclusive dialogue, negotiation, and reconciliation in African societies. It involves bringing people together to discuss and resolve conflicts or disputes within a community. The aim is to reach a consensus and restore harmony among the individuals involved.

Palaver and Ubuntu are closely related because both concepts emphasize the importance of community, dialogue, and reconciliation. They promote the idea that individuals are interconnected and have a responsibility not only towards themselves but also towards others in their community. Ubuntu provides the ethical framework for how individuals should relate to one another, and palaver provides the practical mechanism for resolving conflicts and maintaining social cohesion.

Applying the concept of palaver to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict involves creating a space for open dialogue, empathy, understanding, and reconciliation between the parties involved. Here are some steps that could be taken:

1. Establish a neutral and safe environment: Create a neutral space where both Israeli and Palestinian representatives can come together without fear or bias. This could be facilitated by the involvement of respected mediators or facilitators who can ensure fair and constructive dialogue.

2. Encourage active listening: Encourage all parties to actively listen to each other's perspectives and experiences without interruption or judgment. This helps to build empathy and understanding by allowing each side to voice their concerns, fears, and aspirations.

3. Foster empathy and understanding: Through palaver, emphasize the importance of recognizing each other's humanity and finding common ground. By sharing personal stories, exploring shared histories, and acknowledging the pain and suffering experienced by both sides, empathy and understanding can be nurtured.

4. Seek consensus and compromise: Encourage the participants to look for common values, interests, and goals. Through open and honest dialogue, the aim should be to find areas of agreement and identify potential solutions that address the concerns of both Israelis and Palestinians.

5. Focus on reconciliation and healing: Palaver should not only aim at resolving immediate conflicts but also work towards long-term reconciliation and healing. This may involve processes such as acknowledgment of past wrongs, restorative justice, and community-building initiatives that foster trust and mutual respect.

6. Involve broader communities: Extend the principles of palaver beyond the negotiating table. Engage civil society organizations, religious leaders, and grassroots communities to encourage dialogue, bridge divides, and promote peacebuilding efforts at the grassroots level.

Cars with pine trees on their roofs

As I made my way back home from the cabin in Kyburz to Sacramento earlier today, I couldn't help but notice a distinctive sight along the road. Cars adorned with pine trees on their roofs and pickup trucks carrying fresh-cut pines in their beds became increasingly prevalent. It was a clear indicator that Thanksgiving had come and gone, signaling the start of the Christmas season.

While the festive atmosphere filled me with excitement, it also left me with a tinge of melancholy. As I glanced at the young pine trees strapped to the tops of cars, I couldn't help but feel a sense of sadness for these once vibrant beings. They had been torn from their natural habitat in the forest and were now destined to live out their final weeks as temporary decorations in someone's living room.

Don't get me wrong, I understand the joy and tradition behind decorating a Christmas tree. The beauty and magic that emanate from their branches as they are adorned with ornaments and lights are truly captivating. But in that moment, I couldn't help but reflect on the fleeting nature of their existence. After the holidays, their fate would be to end up discarded on the streets, stripped of their embellishments, and taken away for disposal.

I pondered the circle of life and the sacrifice made by these young pine trees. They offered their beauty and fragrance to enhance the Christmas spirit, only to be discarded shortly afterward. It made me appreciate the need for sustainable alternatives and the importance of finding balance between our traditions and the well-being of nature.

For @Cristina Palmaka, diversity is more than just gender and sustainability is more than just trees. Read her SAP Pioneers story:

Diversity Is More Than Just Gender;...

For Cristina Palmaka, diversity is more than just gender and sustainability is more than just trees. Read her SAP Pioneers story.

An SAP Insights survey finds that companies are linking sustainable products and processes to revenue growth and greater efficiency. Learn why #sustainability belongs in your business strategy:

Bridging the Gap Between Sustainability &...

Sustainability has become a tool for improving business performance. Now it must be integrated with financial metrics to guide decisions.

After getting lost while walking off into what was for him anonymous territory, one winter afternoon in north-central Australia, author Barry Lopez, used a simple technique of awareness that had long been his way to open a conversation with any unfamiliar landscape, intimacy—the tactile, olfactory, visual, and sonic details of what, to most people in his culture, would appear to be a wasteland. “Who are you? How do I say your name? May I sit down? Should I go now?” Over the years, the author found this way of approaching whatever was new to him consistently useful: establish mutual trust, become vulnerable to the place, then hope for some reciprocity and perhaps even intimacy. “You might choose to handle an encounter with a stranger you wanted to get to know better in the same way,” he wrote. “You must, at the very least, establish a truce with realities not your own, whether you’re speaking about the innate truth and aura of a landscape or a person,” he added. The goal in these conversations, from a traditional point of view, is to put off for a good while arriving at any conclusion, to continue to follow, instead, several avenues of approach until a door no one had initially seen suddenly opens. Barry Lopez wrote that he had felt for a long time that the great political questions of our time—about violent prejudice, global climate change, venal greed, fear of the Other—could be addressed in illuminating ways by considering models in the natural world.

“Evidence of the failure to love is everywhere around us. To contemplate what it is to love today brings us up against reefs of darkness and walls of despair. If we are to manage the havoc—ocean acidification, corporate malfeasance and government corruption, endless war—we have to reimagine what it means to live lives that matter, or we will only continue to push on with the unwarranted hope that things will work out. We need to step into a deeper conversation about enchantment and agape, and to actively explore a greater capacity to love other humans. The old ideas—the crushing immorality of maintaining the nation-state, the life-destroying belief that to care for others is to be weak, and that to be generous is to be foolish—can have no future with us.

It is more important now to be in love than to be in power. It is more important to bring E. O. Wilson’s biophilia into our daily conversations than it is to remain compliant in a time of extinction, ethnic cleansing, and rising seas. It is more important to live for the possibilities that lie ahead than to die in despair over what has been lost.

Only an ignoramus can imagine now that pollinating insects, migratory birds, and pelagic fish can depart our company and that we will survive because we know how to make tools. Only the misled can insist that heaven awaits the righteous while they watch the fires on Earth consume the only heaven we have ever known.”

In this trembling moment, with light armor under several flags rolling across northern Syria, with civilians beaten to death in the streets of Occupied Palestine, with fires roaring across the vineyards of California, and forests being felled to ensure more space for development, with student loans from profiteers breaking the backs of the young, and with Niagaras of water falling into the oceans from every sector of Greenland, in this moment, is it still possible to face the gathering darkness, and say to the physical Earth, and to all its creatures, including ourselves, fiercely and without embarrassment, I love you, and to embrace fearlessly the burning world?

https://lithub.com/barry-lopez-love-in-a-time-of-terror/

It’s called the  Ivy Lee Method:

1. Start at the end of each day. Write down the six most important tasks that need to be completed tomorrow. Though you may have more tasks you’d like to add to your list, limit it to six. 2. Review your tasks and rank them in order of how important they truly are. What is most pressing for you to get done? That becomes number one. 3. When you start working the next day, do your number one ranked task first. 4. Don’t do anything else until it is completed. Make sure it receives your full attention. Once you complete it, you can move on to the second task. 5. Complete as much of the list as you can the same way: by focusing only on the task in front of you. If at the end of the day there are any uncompleted tasks, they go back on your list for the next day.

                                                                                                                          Digital transformation manifests in different ways for different companies. For some, it is a push towards developing a mobile strategy, while for others it is all about embracing new technologies as a way to improve and revolutionize operations. It can also be confusing and disorienting, as change often is. These TED Talks will help explain the role of digital transformation and organizational change in general.

Monica Araya: A Small Country With Big Ideas to Get Rid of Fossil Fuels

“And you might be thinking that it was good luck, but it wasn’t. There was a pattern of deliberate choices.”

This TED Talk is about the way Costa Rica was able to adopt mostly clean energy. You might be wondering what fossil fuels have to do with finance. While the two subjects are unrelated on the surface, dig deeper. Leading the charge at your company to embrace digital transformation could take some big conversations – but that is exactly what needs to happen for a true transformation.

Kenneth Cukier: Big Data Is Better Data

“How do you think we have self-driving cars? …It’s because we changed the nature of the problem.”

In this TED Talk, the speaker looks at the role that Big Data plays in the modern world and how reframing of common problems is what has enabled different technological advancements to come to fruition. He talks about how the nature of work is changing, too, and how some of that change is extraneous, while other aspects could be misused. It will help you understand how digital transformation could impact your company and its operations.

Philip Evans: How Data Will Transform Business

“Business strategy has always been premised on assumptions about technology… those assumptions are changing.”

This TED Talk speaker explains the nature of business strategy and how our existing notions of strategy are predicated on our understanding of technology. As technology advances and changes, business strategies also have to adapt. He talks about the ways that technology is disrupting the value chain as we know it and the way that business models in general are changing in response. Finance leaders will appreciate the links the speaker draws.

Jim Hemerling: 5 Ways to Lead in an Era of Constant Change

“When it comes to self-transformation, you can’t help but get a sense of the excitement. But there’s another type of transformation that occupies a very different emotional space: The transformation of organizations.”

The speaker in this TED Talk is focused on transformation itself. He starts by comparing how energetic people often are about changes in their personal lives compared to apathy that often accompanies organizational change. The speaker argues that people need to accept change as a constant that can be managed.

Martin Reeves: How to Build a Business That Lasts 100 Years

“We need to think more modestly and subtly about when and how we can shape, rather than control, unpredictable and complex situations. It’s a little like the difference between throwing a ball and releasing a bird.”

This TED Talk comes from a strategist who applies concepts from biology to organizations. The speaker talks about how companies can learn from living organisms how to build companies that are resilient in the face of a changing environment. Digital transformation is one of these adaptations or evolutions of which he speaks.

SAP Academy is an award-winning onboarding & training program for college graduates and young professionals (up to 5 years of experience) who are joining SAP in a commercial sales, presales, or sales role.

San Francisco is filled with fun, intriguing and inspiring sights. Some are best explored on foot, like the Mission district’s murals or the 16th Avenue Tiled Steps in the Sunset. But some spots take just a bit too long to get to on a hike (for me, at least) and too aggravating to try to visit by car. On two wheels, though, you can jump from road to trail, walking your bike when needed and snapping photos whenever the moment strikes. Whether you’re a longtime resident or a newcomer, biking to these five spots will spark your love for the city all over again.

Mount Davidson Cross

The 103-foot-tall Mount Davidson Cross sits atop San Francisco’s highest point, Mount Davidson. The cross itself has an interesting history. Its current concrete iteration was erected in 1934 after arsonists burned down earlier wooden versions. Purchased by the Council of Armenian American Organizations of North America in 1997, it’s now a memorial to the Armenian Genocide.

To get to the cross, you must first navigate to the trailhead at 39 Dalewood Way, south of Portola Drive. Fair warning: you will have some steep hills to climb. From there, you head up a dirt fire road (which is bike friendly) through a 40-acre eucalyptus forest to an opening in the trees where the cross resides. At its peak, you can enjoy stunning cityscapes from this vantage point. The space feels solemn and quiet.

Legion of Honor

Located in the far northwestern corner of San Francisco, the Legion of Honor is a “long” drive or Muni ride away. On a bike, it’s a regular part of what’s known as the “Butterlap,” a 19-mile loop around the city’s northern perimeter and through Golden Gate Park (the “Half Butterlap” is a shorter, 11-mile alternative).

The Legion of Honor is an art museum focusing on ancient and European art, but outside, it also has beautiful architecture, statues and stunning views of the Golden Gate Bridge. It was originally built to commemorate California soldiers who perished during World War I. Bring a lock for the racks outside if you want to visit the museum during business hours.

Heron’s Head Park

Heron’s Head Park in Bayview is a 22-acre wildlife habitat at SF’s far southeastern edge — and you probably never knew it existed. Viewed from the air, the park’s shape resembles that of a great blue heron, which is how it got its name. From ground level, its main trail is one mile out-and-back to its tip (perfect if you’d rather keep the hills and sweat to a minimum on your bike ride), with a dedicated bike lane heading toward the park.

If you’re interested in birding, the Port of San Francisco offers a handy guide of 100 bird species you can spot at this park. The EcoCenter here offers more information about this saltwater marsh as well as restoration efforts, with bike racks and picnic tables to complete your trip.

Golden Gate Park’s Hidden Treasures

Golden Gate Park is laced with numerous trails and pathways that link together its many, many sights. You can hit them up by foot, but by bike, you can explore so much more — and so much faster.

For example, if you head to the park’s center, take a leisurely lap around Stow Lake, then cross over the bridge to Strawberry Hill. There you can ride its paths to see Huntington Falls (the Park’s oldest artificial waterfall) up close or wind your way to the top of the hill. Further west, just off John F. Kennedy Drive before you hit Great Highway, look right, and you’ll spot the Murphy Windmill and Queen Wilhelmina Tulip Garden. But don’t forget to stop and say hi to the bison in the Bison Paddock on your way there.

Mount Sutro

Tucked between Cole Valley and the Inner Sunset is Mt. Sutro, the forested San Francisco hill with the iconic red-and-white tower at its top. Also known as the Interior Greenbelt, it will make you feel like you’ve completely left San Francisco. Some of its trees are more than 200 feet tall, and many stretch to over 100 feet.

How to stop worrying. 

You are not your thoughts. Sometimes they’re downright ridiculous. Just because you think it, doesn’t make it true. 

Observe, don’t judge. Acknowledge the thoughts, but let them float by. Don’t wrestle with them. 

Don’t distract, immerse. Do not check your email for the 400th time. Take in the world around you. Turn to your senses. That’s real. Your thoughts and the stories you tell yourself about the world aren’t. 

Note or label intrusive thoughts. Yeah, the thoughts fight back. Acknowledge them. Give the intrusive ones a funny name. 

Return to the senses. Really pay attention to the world around you. 

Though a recent blog post described how catching up on sleep on the weekends AKA binge sleeping isn't so good, a new study completely contradicts that. Research shows that sleeping in on the weekends is good for you and does not mean you are a failure at #adulting. In fact the study found that people who sleep less during the week and then catch up on the weekends have lower BMIs. This may have to do with people who sleep in on the weekends just getting more sleep in general which helps you be a healthier person overall but this is just great news because now you can sleep until noon and not feel guilty!