Approach leadership as lifelong learning. No matter how experienced, remain a student ready to grow and see things freshly. Changemakers practice cognitive, emotional and dispositional adaptability. Specifically cultivate dispositional flexibility to update how you work. Build resilience to stay strong when facing inevitable hurdles and setbacks. Deliberate practice across mental, physical, emotional and spiritual realms compounds strength. Continual learning enables continual growth.

Students Always

<ul><li>Effective leaders balance confidence with humility. Data shows humble leaders perform better on revenue, engagement and more. </li><li>Seek win-win solutions by collaborating at the sweet spot between advocating your needs and meeting others' interests. Gain trust by giving trust first and empowering others. </li><li>Get off the leadership merry-go-round of ego and control. Let go of always needing to be right and in charge. </li></ul>

Foster psychological safety so team members feel respected, trusted and able to take risks without rejection. Google found it most important for team success. Combine self-awareness of biases with humility to keep improving as an inclusive leader. Seeking diverse perspectives increases innovation but requires equity and inclusion. Give the leadership you wished you had.

Becoming the Leader You Wish You Had

Adopt a servant leadership mindset that puts ethics first and focuses on empowering others. It's never too late to embed service and ethics into your work. Take a long-term view versus seeking quick wins - changemaking is a marathon requiring sustained effort over years. Don't fear an ambitious vision to inspire people to join you. Keep a clear why but flexible how to adapt over time. Lifting others benefits all.

Beyond Yourself 

The most successful changemakers see the world as something that they can shape rather than something that is shaped for them.

Microleadership means seizing tiny leadership moments anytime, wherever you are. You don't need a title or permission to practice microleadership. Break leadership down into its most basic and profound unit - the brief interaction. Invest in relationships, apply empathy and create safety to influence honestly. Small moments compound into massive change.

Microleadership


Increasingly, change comes through networks versus individual heroes. Embrace collective and network-based leadership to build sustainable movements. Anchor in your values when facing hard choices rather than compromising. If unsure how to lead, focus on asking great questions to unlock others' wisdom. Seek diverse perspectives for better solutions. Distribute leadership to many hands versus centralizing control.

Reinventing Leadership 

<ul><li>Ideas need action. </li><li>Before launching initiatives, reframe obstacles as opportunities and examine if resources can be redeployed. </li><li>Test ideas early, often and small through lean startup's build-measure-learn approach. </li><li>Data and experience can spark ideas. Engage collaborators, approval-givers and skeptics to grow support. </li><li>Move boldly but incrementally from idea to action.</li></ul>

Sparking Change



<ul><li>People resist change. Engage champions early to delegate and advocate. Hear out sceptics but make smaller asks to build buy-in. </li><li>Lead culture change through formal and informal norm entrepreneurship from any seat. </li><li>Overcome status quo bias with extra effort. Expect obstacles and be adaptable but persistent to drive change adoption.</li></ul>

Leading Change When Change Is Hard

<ul>
<li>To spark change, challenge the status quo with curiosity rather than blindly accepting the norm.</li>
<li>Being willing to see the world differently unlocks new possibilities.</li>
<li>Changemaking requires taking smart risks in new directions, not just more risks.</li>
<li>When everyone heads one way, consider diverging and brainstorming alternate paths and opposite approaches. This divergent thinking generates ideas.</li>
<li>Then use convergent thinking to evaluate and select the best course.</li>
<li>Avoid following the herd without conscious evaluation.</li>
</ul>

Question the Status Quo

Becoming a Changemaker is a book written by Alex Budak, a UC Berkeley faculty member, speaker, and changemaker educator. The book provides an in-depth look at how to become an effective changemaker and covers topics such as understanding the power of storytelling and leadership, developing a network of support, and creating a vision and plan of action. The book also provides practical advice on how to develop a mindset of resilience and courage and how to communicate effectively with stakeholders. 

“… A catalyst for a new generation of leaders committed to changing the world for the better.”--Dan Heath, co-author of Switch and Made to Stick. In Becoming a Changemaker, Alex Budak provides a fresh, inspiring and research-backed guide to developing the mindsets and leadership skills needed to navigate, shape, and lead change and to make a positive impact in our lives, career, and communities.    Through a diverse series of case studies, and brand new insights from his original research on the traits the most successful changemakers have in common, Alex provides an actionable, inclusive guide for people of all backgrounds, levels, ages, and industries to get unstuck and to start leading change from wherever they are.   The book is based on Budak’s wildly-popular class of the same name at UC Berkeley’s Haas School of Business that changemakers like Olympic athlete Alicia Wilson describe as "life changing."   Accessible and energizing concepts like Microleadership show how each of us can lead from where we are, and principles like “Confidence without Attitude,” “Question the Status Quo,” and “Beyond Yourself'' provide a framework for stepping into our own unique changemaker potential.

teamwork

Teamwork

books

Books

leadershipandmanagement

Leadership & Management

Alex Budak

Becoming a Changemaker

Knowing someone in common is the strongest form of social proof you can offer. If you have any direct connections, mention them. A mutual friend means you are no longer a stranger.Lacking that, if you have any authority, credibility, or social status that is relevant to this person and your request, mention it quickly — a line or two should do it. The more “important” you are, the more likely you are to get a response.

Validate yourself

Remember that people will go much further to <a href="http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/09/your-money/overcoming-an-aversion-to-loss.html?_r=0&pagewanted=all">avoid pain than to acquire pleasure</a>. If you’ve done your research and found a major pain point for the recipient, and you can offer relief, highlight that.If you can’t solve a problem, give people something they want. Offer to connect them with someone they’d like to meet — that stands out, since almost no one gives before they ask. But your gift needs to feel appropriate, from one stranger to another.

Alleviate your audience’s pain or give them something they want.

S<a href="http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1709943">hort emails are more likely to be read</a> than long ones. And emails that request clear, specific action <a href="https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/Web/People/kiesler/publications/2005pdfs/2005-Dabbish-CHI.pdf">get a much higher response rate</a>. Long-winded, rambling cold emails suck.One of the best ways to keep things short and direct is to <a href="http://www.paulgraham.com/talk.html">write the way you’d talk</a>. I would recommend reading your email out loud before you send it.

Keep it short, easy, and actionable.

By expressing gratitude and some vulnerability, you give them the feeling that they are a good person if they choose to help. You also give them a little rush of power and status, because you’re approaching them.

Be appreciative — and a little vulnerable

<ul><li>Personalization means that you’ve thought about who this person is, how they see the world, what interests them, and what they want — you’ve developed a <a href="http://www.iep.utm.edu/theomind/">“theory of mind”</a> about the recipient. This shows them you have put work into understanding them.</li><li>You also make it clear why you are emailing them as opposed to anyone else. Research shows that <a href="http://psycnet.apa.org/index.cfm?fa=buy.optionToBuy&uid=1994-33384-001">people are far more motivated to help others when they feel uniquely qualified to do so</a>. </li></ul>

Tailor the message to the recipient

An effective cold email does five things.

marketingandsales

Marketing & Sales

writing

Reading & Writing

communication

Communication

A Guide to Cold Emailing

Any data that connects back to a real human need additional protection around:<ul><li>View: Only the customer themselves and employees with administrative rights should be able to view PII(personally identifiable information).</li><li>Storage: All PII should be encrypted when it's stored.</li><li>Transfer: Data, especially PII, should travel in and out of your product in an encrypted manner</li><li>Privacy: Customers should have self-service access to all the data they generate, they should know how that data is used, and they should be able to request its removal without breaking your product.</li></ul>

Protect and privatize valuable information

When you start tracking them, give them a status--a simple identifier that they've begun their journey. As they move, keep updating that status : Maybe they tried a demo, signed up for an email newsletter , whatever it may be. Update that status all the way through to purchase, then track more data as they use the product. Track how often they use it, for how long, which features they use, and anything else that might give you a sense of where they find the most value.When customers start to lose interest, you can take action to recapture their attention.

Keep tabs on each customer's progress

Your customers are the most important data set you have, and your most valuable asset, so spend the most time making sure you capture that value.

The first step of any technical development is a mindset shift. When your platform is the core of your business, you're not building software for users, you're creating a product for customers. This small shift in mindset influences everything from capturing customer information to developing the user experience and user interface.

Don't think in terms of software and users

A customer is a customer before they use your product it's the moment they decide that your business is worth a look. It's also when the clock starts ticking for you to capture everything you need to know in order to close the sale. Your goal is to save that customer to your database, preferably with a way to contact them. A customer is still a customer long after they lose interest in your product and that one database record might be enough to rekindle their interest. A customer prospect email address or mobile number is always a valuable thing, even when it's not immediately valuable.

Track customers earlier and longer than you would track users

This is the first step to building a successful high-tech business.

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Cybersecurity

product

Product & Design

How to Turn App Users Into Paying Customers

Just like its organic search results, Google wants to provide the most relevant ads for its individual users. According to Google U.S. patents on ad quality, machine learning can be used to improve an “otherwise weak statistical model.”This means that Ad Rank can be influenced by a machine learning system.

Ad Quality & Targeting Improvements

Google has been making steady progress in the way it connects users to the content they’re searching for, including these nine ways we know search engines are using machine learning right now.

Google And How It Uses AI

Capable of autonomously learning and solving problems, general AI (AGI) takes machine learning to the next level. 
This AI is powered by deep learning processes designed to mirror the human brain’s neural networks, allowing the algorithm to make decisions without instruction.

General or Strong AI

Google’s end goal is to use technology to provide users with a better experience. They don’t want to automate the entire process if that means the user won’t have the experience they are looking for.So don’t assume machine learning will soon take over all search ranking; it is simply a small piece of the puzzle search engines have implemented to hopefully make our lives easier.

The Real Use Of AI

While companies like OpenAI and Conversion.ai are moving toward developing general AI for natural language processing, there are currently no clear-cut examples of AGI.To progress from ANI to AGI, deep learning will be the key to creating stronger AI capable of using deductive reasoning to analyze complex, unstructured data and make independent decisions.

ANI(Normal AI) To AGI(General AI)

People don’t always speak like a machine would expect them to. We play with language to come up with new turns of phrases.BERT is designed to replicate human recognition as closely as possible to decode those contextual nuances by learning how users interact with the content and matching search queries with more relevant results.As language develops and transforms, machines are better able to predict our meanings behind the words we say and provide us with better information.

How Users Interact With Machines

Every second, approximately 1087 photos are uploaded to Instagram, and 4000 are uploaded to Facebook. That’s hundreds of millions of photos being uploaded to those two social networks alone every day.Analyzing and cataloging that many submissions would be an arduous (if not impossible) task for a human, but it’s perfect for machine learning.Machine learning analyzes color and shape patterns and pairs them with any existing schema data about the photograph to help the search engine understand what an image actually is.

Image Search to Understand Photos

Back in 2016, Google declared its intention to become a “machine learning first” company. Since then, they’ve made steady strides toward that goal, launching Google AI in 2017 and rolling out BERT in 2019.They want to not only make our lives easier but also use AI to find “new ways of looking at existing problems, from rethinking healthcare to advancing scientific discovery.”

Google: The AI Mission

This type of AI is designed to perform specialized tasks that must be “taught” to the algorithm (think Google’s search algorithms). 
While extremely specialized in scope, narrow AI (ANI) is able to quickly recognize patterns and perform tasks in a way that outpaces human ability.

The Three Types Of AI: Narrow or Weak AI

There are many reasons to fire up a search engine. Users may be searching to buy (transactional), research (informational), or find resources (navigational) for any given search.By analyzing click patterns and the content type that users engage with (e.g., CTRs by content type) a search engine can leverage machine learning to determine the intent behind the user’s search.

Query Clarification

At the moment, artificial superintelligence (ASI) still lands fully in the category of science fiction. 
This type of AI would, theoretically, be capable of outperforming human capabilities to solve the “unsolvable” problems of our time.

Artificial Superintelligence

It’s important for a search engine to be able to recognize how similar one piece of text is to another. This applies not just to the words being used but also their deeper meaning.Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers – BERT, for short – is a natural learning processing framework that Google uses to better understand the context of a user’s search query.

Natural Language Processing and BERT

Google’s current privacy policies discuss how the search engine currently creates personalized search results based on a user’s behaviour.Google’s personalized search patent states that:“…personalized search generates different search results to different users of the search engine based on their interests and past behaviour.”We can clearly see this in action. Often used in conference presentations, proving this process is as simple as typing a string of queries into Google in one sitting and seeing how the results change depending on what you last searched.

Real-Time Personalization Of Search Results

A huge influx of capital by tech giants, especially search engines, means that AI computing power is making rapid advancements in a range of sectors from healthcare to construction to marketing and search engine optimization.However, before we get into the implications of machine learning for SEO professionals, let’s define what we mean by AI.

Search Engines And AI

RankBrain is the machine learning algorithm developed by Google that not only helps identify patterns in queries, but also helps the search engine identify possible new ranking signals.Before RankBrain, Google’s algorithm was coded entirely by hand. It depended on a team of engineers to analyze search query results, run tests to improve the quality of those results and implement the changes.

Identification of New Signals

While machine learning isn’t (and probably never will be) perfect, the more humans interact with it, the more accurate and “smarter” it will get.This could be alarming to some, creating visions of Skynet from the “Terminator” movies.However, the actual result may be a better experience with technology that solves complex problems and allows humans to focus on driving creativity and innovation

The Bottomline

When you see search results that don’t include the keyword in the snippet, it’s likely due to Google using RankBrain to identify synonyms.When searching for [forest preservation], you’ll see various results with the word “protection” as it can be used interchangeably with “preservation” in this case.

Giving You What You Searched For But Didn't Type

Low-quality content typically has distinct similarities, such as:<ul><li>The presence of several outbound links to unrelated pages.</li><li>Lots of uses of stop words or synonyms.</li><li>The occurrence rate of identified “spammy” keywords.</li></ul>Machine learning recognizes these patterns and flags them.Even though Google still uses human quality raters, utilizing machine learning to detect these patterns drastically cuts down on the amount of manpower necessary to review the content.

Pattern Detection

Deep-dive into google's machine learning models and how it relies more on logic than data

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Computer Science

artificialintelligence

Artificial Intelligence

softwareengineering

Software Engineering

technologyandthefuture

Technology & The Future

Machine Learning With Google

We know that search engines are using machine learning in these 9 ways. Here’s what it means for SEO and digital marketing.

How Search Engines Use Machine Learning: 9 Things We Know For Sure

Ask your developers what happens after an outage. <ul><li>Is the person to blame or the process?</li><li>Are people encouraged to learn quickly, even at the risk of making mistakes?</li><li>Do you provide venues for learning from each other and even take risks by giving younger leaders the reins to parts of the business?</li></ul>

The Aftermath

An open learning environment is where the company is receptive to not having all the answers, is comfortable with uncertainty, and strives to get better every day.It means being flexible instead of rigid and having a culture where people continually seek the truth. You want knowledge and truth to win, not politics.

An Open, Learning Environment

<ul><li>Off-the-shelf software is for general purposes and does not give an edge over your competitors. </li><li>Businesses need to become more software orientated to gain that edge. You need to build your own software or die.</li><li>To stay on top of competitors, you need to innovate. To innovate, you need to experiment. Experimentation is the prerequisite to innovation.</li><li>You need to ensure that there's tolerance for failure - both personally and organizationally - it's the primary key to unlocking innovation.</li></ul>

Innovation At Hyperspeed

A company's structure built on teams of around ten people is a way to scale up a company without losing the urgency, focus and quality of talent that characterises a startup by building a large company out of what are essentially many startups.<ul><li>"Single-threaded" leaders have only one thing on their mind - how their team can win.</li><li>They are empowered to make their own decisions and be responsible for them.</li></ul>

Small Teams

Make sure your customer feel you're on their side. Encourage developers to talk directly with customers, listen on a call or attend a meeting with customers regularly to get a human connection with the customer and understand their problems better.Ask your developers what customer problems are they solving/working on?

Wearing The Customer's Shoes

<ul>
<li>Great product managers are not a layer between customer needs and developers. They actually remove layers, eliminate preconceived solutions and erroneous presumptions, and streamline communications.</li>
<li>Great product managers facilitate the understanding of customer problems, not only for developers but for all people involved in building the product or feature.</li>
<li>Good ideas can come at any time, from anywhere, not necessarily when management requires it.</li>
</ul>

Removing Layers, Not Adding More

The key to getting business people and developers to work well together, and building a world-class engineering culture, is for the business people to share problems, not solutions, with the developers. 
So bringing developers into the big issues you're trying to solve and leveraging their full skills.

Why Developers Matter

The core of Agile is the ability to move quickly and easily, change direction quickly and respond to changing inputs.A Product Manager or leader needs to question the following: <ul><li>Ask your developers whether they want product managers to be gatekeepers or facilitators of customer interaction? Do PMs view their role similarly?</li><li>Do they collaborate to groom road maps coming from a shared customer understanding, or do they divide and conquer where PMs know the customers and engineers know the code?</li></ul>

An Agile Environment

Jeff Lawson, software developer turned CEO of Twilio, creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems and drive digital transformation. From banking and retail to insurance and finance, every industry is turning digital, and every company needs the best software to win the hearts and minds of customers. The landscape has shifted from the classic build vs. buy question, to one of build vs. die. Companies have to get this right to survive. But how do they make this transition? Software developers are sought after, highly paid, and desperately needed to compete in the modern, digital economy. Yet most companies treat them like digital factory workers without really understanding how to unleash their full potential. Lawson argues that developers are the creative workforce who can solve major business problems and create hit products for customers—not just grind through rote tasks. From Google and Amazon, to one-person online software companies—companies that bring software developers in as partners are winning. Lawson shows how leaders who build industry changing software products consistently do three things well. First, they understand why software developers matter more than ever. Second, they understand developers and know how to motivate them. And third, they invest in their developers' success. As a software developer and public company CEO, Lawson uses his unique position to bridge the language and tools executives use with the unique culture of high performing, creative software developers. Ask Your Developer is a toolkit to help business leaders, product managers, technical leaders, software developers, and executives achieve their common goal—building great digital products and experiences. How to compete in the digital economy? In short: Ask Your Developer.

Jeff Lawson, developer turned CEO of Twilio (one of Bloomberg Businessweek's Top 50 Companies to Watch in 2021), creates a new playbook for unleashing the full potential of software developers in any organization, showing how to help management utilize this coveted and valuable workforce to enable growth, solve a wide range of business problems, and drive digital transformation.From banking and retail to insurance and finance, every industry is turning digital, and every company needs the best software to win the hearts and minds of customers. The landscape has shifted from the classic build vs. buy question, to one of build vs. die. Companies have to get this right to survive. But how do they make this transition?Software developers are sought after, highly paid, and desperately needed to compete in the modern, digital economy. Yet most companies treat them like digital factory workers without really understanding how to unleash their full potential. Lawson argues that developers are the creative workforce who can solve major business problems and create hit products for customers—not just grind through rote tasks. From Google and Amazon, to one-person online software companies—companies that bring software developers in as partners are winning. Lawson shows how leaders who build industry changing software products consistently do three things well. First, they understand why software developers matter more than ever. Second, they understand developers and know how to motivate them. And third, they invest in their developers' success. As a software developer and public company CEO, Lawson uses his unique position to bridge the language and tools executives use with the unique culture of high performing, creative software developers. Ask Your Developer is a toolkit to help business leaders, product managers, technical leaders, software developers, and executives achieve their common goal—building great digital products and experiences. How to compete in the digital economy? In short: Ask Your Developer.

Jeff Lawson is an accomplished writer whose work has resonated with readers around the world. Jeff Lawson has published several books that explore a range of topics, from fiction to nonfiction, and has received critical acclaim for the ability to weave compelling narratives. Jeff Lawson's writing style is known for its depth and authenticity, and has earned quite a loyal following of readers.

Becoming a Changemaker

A Guide to Cold Emailing

How to Turn App Users Into Paying Customers

It's time to
Read like a Pro.

How Search Engines Use Machine Learning: 9 Things We Know For Sure

CURATED BY

Becoming a Changemaker

A Guide to Cold Emailing

How to Turn App Users Into Paying Customers

It's time to Read like a Pro.

How Search Engines Use Machine Learning: 9 Things We Know For Sure

CURATED BY

It's time to
Read like a Pro.