How ‘Strategic Silence’ Helps Employees The highest-performing employees know when to speak and when to stay quiet, according to new research from Wharton’s Michael Parke that looks at how employees engage in “strategic silence.” ........ some of the highest-performing employees intentionally withhold information, ideas, or concerns until the time is right to speak up. ....... research findings challenge the predominant view that silence at work is inherently harmful. ......... employees who use strategic silence most effectively consider three factors in deciding when and how to speak up: issue relevance, issue readiness, and target responsiveness. ......... they wait until the recipient — usually a manager — is in the right cognitive (not too busy) or emotional state (not in a bad mood) to hear the message (i.e., responsiveness). ......... what they share is now perceived as deliberate, thoughtful, and well-timed. ........ employees trying to navigate the social and professional norms of their workplace, or even the mood of a mercurial boss. ....... building trust will enable more meaningful conversations, and he encouraged leaders to “check in” with their employees more frequently to establish open lines of communication. ........... Experts’ ideas should be challenged, and there should be room for healthy debate. ........ there has to be patience for low-quality voice ........ task-related strategic silence as opposed to silence on social issues, such as concerns related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). ........ organizations must ensure that employees feel confident and free to discuss DEI without fear of backlash or retaliation. ......... faking voice, where someone offers a little bit of input without full feedback or disclosure, and voice leakage, where employees talk to each other about a problem rather than directly to the managers capable of addressing it. .
Why the Medium Shapes the Message in Marketing What is the best medium for communicating with consumers? It depends on the content, according to the latest research from Wharton marketing professor Jonah Berger. ........ companies, consumers, and other marketplace actors are constantly communicating. ......... A range of marketplace actors is constantly communicating with various audiences in one way or another. ......... whether this seemingly subtle shift — speaking versus writing — might shape what we communicate. Whether the medium we communicate through might shape the message. .......... written reviews were much less emotional. ...... They use less highly emotional words and use a little bit more cognitive language explaining what something does or describing it even in positive terms. ............ Writing involves more deliberation or thinking about what to say, and that makes what we share less emotional. ......... we don’t think a lot about how the mode we’re communicating through — speaking versus writing — is changing that content. ........ The means we communicate ideas through actually change what we end up communicating by the nature of those mediums. ......... You can even think about the same idea in terms of negotiating. The more notes and things you write down ahead of time, the more organized you can be in your thoughts. ........... when you’re speaking to your boss, you’re producing content. When you’re a financial service agent talking to a prospect, you are producing content. .......... The advent of the typewriter or the computer made it easier to have written communication. Most recently, text messages made it much easier to shoot off quick missives to other people, and now even companies use those to interact with clients.............. It’s not that speaking is better than writing, and it’s not that writing is better than speaking. It depends on what you’re trying to achieve with that interaction. If you want to be more careful and reasoned, writing is pretty good. It gives you the time to construct and find what you’re going to say. On the other hand, we have a lot of data in this paper that suggests that emotional content is often more impactful in a positive way. So, if you want to be impactful, speaking can be good to be persuasive to change others’ minds. ............ If I’m a brand, for example, and I’m encouraging people to create product reviews, it might be better to get them to speak because they will be more emotional. And in many product categories, that might be more persuasive. ......... If I’m a doctor or a lawyer, you could say, “I want to reason through my arguments first. I want to write them down.” But if I want to be particularly persuasive, maybe I need to be sure that’s not sucking out all of the emotion because that may make it feel lifeless when I communicate it. .
How DAOs Could Bring Organizational Trust and Transparency Decentralized autonomous organizations -- DAOs -- hold much promise, but practitioners and governments must be aware of risks, says Wharton’s Kevin Werbach, co-author of a DAO Toolkit that was released at this year’s World Economic Forum....... “There are now hundreds, if not thousands, of these DAOs that have been created with many billions of dollars of digital assets in their treasuries ...... It raises all kinds of fascinating questions about what it means to have an organization that’s decentralized and is on a blockchain, where people may never meet each other, where they try and govern it using votes based on tokens.” ........ A Decentralized Autonomous Organization is basically a company, a firm or an organization that operates on a blockchain. Instead of using traditional legal contracts and relationships in a traditional firm, it uses the code of what are called “smart contracts,” or code that executes on the blockchain to handle the various different relationships about governance and decision-making, payments, employment and so forth. All of that happens digitally on a decentralized network. ......... You can design governance structures however you want. These are global phenomena. .......... people who don’t necessarily know each other have to figure out how to work together in this decentralized way. You have to figure out how to make decisions and vote and how to effectuate the decisions, and decide where you want hierarchy and someone in charge of particular functions versus everyone having the opportunity [to make decisions]. ........ We have centuries of work in corporate law in different countries about what the different corporate forms are. Which of them, if any, apply to DAOs? These are new kinds of corporate forms, essentially catalyzing a lot of the discussion about the nature of firms and the nature of corporate governance......... In a traditional corporation, you have a lot of structure that is imposed and is hard to change. Here, organizations can figure out potentially what the right way is to design something for their particular situation. ........ There’s [also] the positive potential that this is a new form of decision- making. ....... Many of the biggest DAOs are decentralized finance platforms ...... There’s no one who has the power behind the scenes to take the money and run. It’s a collectively governed entity. We’re seeing a lot of interest in that in the crypto space, in the digital asset trading space, in using these governance mechanisms. That’s just a starting point. The potential is incredibly broad. .......... a new and powerful kind of trust, because they are open and transparent, and you’re not required to trust one central administrator who has all the control. Potentially, they can be much more trustworthy than traditional systems. .
ChatGPT Passed an MBA Exam. What’s Next? Wharton professors Christian Terwiesch and Ethan Mollick weigh in on ChatGPT and why the controversial software has limitless potential to improve education, business, and a range of industries...... When prompted to explain the bottleneck process at a hypothetical iron ore factory in Latin America, ChatGPT aced it. ........ “Wow! Not only is the answer correct, but it is also superbly explained” ....... can produce high-quality written responses to complex questions in a matter of seconds. .......... With its incredible speed and accuracy, ChatGPT can be a powerful tool to improve the teaching process, customize learning, make business more efficient, and save precious time that could be used more productively by humans. ........
“This is going to be big, and there is reason to believe we have only seen the beginning.”
.......... ChatGPT is a “tipping point” in artificial intelligence. The technology is far better than previous iterations, making it more than just a clever toy. A wide range of people and industries can use it to conquer the mundane and free themselves to focus on more important work and innovation........ one student used it to create code for a startup protype using code libraries they hadn’t seen before. ......... “They completed a four-hour project in less than an hour” ........ “Would Chat GPT Get a Wharton MBA?” The answer is a solid “yes,” with the professor giving the chatbot a final grade of B to B-minus for its performance on a five-question experiment he designed. While the bot earned top marks on the first question about bottlenecks, it did not do as well on every question. Surprisingly, it performed the worst when prompted with a question that required simple math calculations. ......... “If you think about your computer, it might be stupid and dumb at many things, but at least it will get the math right. This was the opposite.” ....... ChatGPT does an amazing job at basic operations management and process analysis questions, including those based on case studies. The answers are correct, and the explanations are excellent. .......... ChatGPT at times makes mistakes in relatively simple calculations at sixth-grade level math. ......... ChatGPT is remarkably good at modifying its answers in response to human hints. ....... Even more remarkable, it seems to be able to learn over time so that in the future the hint is no longer needed. ........ it has the opportunity of boosting my productivity as well as the productivity of our students ........ businesses could save time and resources using the technology to generate written communication for clients and stakeholders or build customized data sets, and educators could use it to generate a syllabus or lecture notes. ......... “Bullshit is convincing-sounding nonsense, devoid of truth, and AI is very good at creating it.
You can ask it to describe how we know dinosaurs had a civilization, and it will happily make up a whole set of facts explaining, quite convincingly, exactly that.
It is no replacement for Google. It literally does not know what it doesn’t know, because it is, in fact, not an entity at all, but rather a complex algorithm generating meaningful sentences.” .
I Watched Elon Musk Kill Twitter’s Culture From the Inside This bizarre episode in social-media history proves that it’s well past time for meaningful tech oversight........ Everyone has an opinion about Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter. I lived it. I saw firsthand the harms that can flow from unchecked power in tech. ........ I joined Twitter in 2021 from Parity AI, a company I founded to identify and fix biases in algorithms used in a range of industries, including banking, education, and pharmaceuticals. It was hard to leave my company behind, but I believed in the mission: Twitter offered an opportunity to improve how millions of people around the world are seen and heard. I would lead the company’s efforts to develop more ethical and transparent approaches to artificial intelligence as the engineering director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability (META) team. ......... Unsurprisingly, we were wiped out when Musk arrived. ........ Dr. Rumman Chowdhury was the engineering director of the Machine Learning Ethics, Transparency, and Accountability Team at Twitter. She is currently a Responsible AI Fellow at Harvard’s Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, and the CEO of Parity Consulting. .
Autonomous cargo drone airline Dronamics reveals it’s raised $40M, pre-Series A Large, long-range drones built specifically for cargo have the potential to be faster, cheaper and produce fewer CO2 emissions than conventional aircraft, enabling same-day shipping over very long distances. In fact, the “flying delivering van” is considered the holy grail by many cargo operators. ........ a “cargo drone airline” using drones built specifically for the purpose. ........ flagship “Black Swan” model will be able to carry 350 kg (770 lb) at a distance of up to 2,500 km (1,550 miles) faster, cheaper and with less emissions than currently available options. ......... Dronamics has so far raised from Founders Factory, Speedinvest, Eleven Capital and the Strategic Development Fund (SDF), the investment arm of the Tawazun Council, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. .........
“We’re the size of a delivery van (Renault Kangoo / VW Caddy) and we can cross all of Europe in 12 hours or less at a fraction of the cost of airfreight."
............... “Right now the same-day radius of a fulfillment center is 2hrs drive… The only way to expand same-day coverage is to use a longer-distance low-cost middle-mile drone (a flying delivering van). With our range we can cover all of Europe same-day from a single warehouse — ............ creating a Dronamics operations in the UAE as a hub for the Middle East and North Africa region. .
Microsoft Considers More Limits for Its New A.I. Chatbot The company knew the new technology had issues like occasional accuracy problems. But users have prodded surprising and unnerving interactions. ......... engage the chatbot in open-ended and probing personal conversations ........ the chatbot, and that it picked up on its users’ tone, sometimes turning testy. ........ make search far more relevant and conversational. ........ “I feel especially in the West, there is a lot more of like, ‘Oh, my God, what will happen because of this A.I.?’” Mr. Nadella said. “And it’s better to sort of really say, ‘Hey, look, is this actually helping you or not?’” ........... “It can be very surprising how crafty people are at eliciting inappropriate responses from chatbots” ......... The chatbot could not actually do something like engineer a virus — it merely generates what it is programmed to believe is a desired response. ........ in “long, extended chat sessions of 15 or more questions, Bing can become repetitive or be prompted/provoked to give responses that are not necessarily helpful or in line with our designed tone.” ............. In November, Meta, the owner of Facebook, unveiled its own chatbot, Galactica. Designed for scientific research, it could instantly write its own articles, solve math problems and generate computer code. .
Instagram launches a new broadcast chat feature called ‘Channels’ The feature lets creators share public, one-to-many messages to directly engage with their followers. Channels support text, images, polls, reactions and more. Zuckerberg announced the feature by starting his own broadcast channel, where he plans to share Meta updates going forward. ....... only creators can post in broadcast channels, and that followers only have the ability to react to content and participate in polls. ........ the company plans to bring the feature to Messenger and Facebook in the coming months ............ .
How should AI systems behave, and who should decide?We’re clarifying how ChatGPT’s behavior is shaped and our plans for improving that behavior, allowing more user customization, and getting more public input into our decision-making in these areas. ....... OpenAI’s mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence benefits all of humanity. ......... Unlike ordinary software, our models are massive neural networks. Their behaviors are learned from a broad range of data, not programmed explicitly. .........
the process is more similar to training a dog than to ordinary programming.
....... the model learns to predict the next word in a sentence, informed by its exposure to lots of Internet text ....... By learning from billions of sentences, our models learn grammar, many facts about the world, and some reasoning abilities. They also learn some of the biases present in those billions of sentences. ........ we’re committed to ensuring that access to, benefits from, and influence over AI and AGI are widespread. ......... taking customization to the extreme would risk enabling malicious uses of our technology and sycophantic AIs that mindlessly amplify people’s existing beliefs. .
TikTok is launching a $500,000 live trivia contest To Patients, Herpes Can Be Devastating. To Many Doctors, It’s Not a Priority. Billions of people live with the infection, but there has been scant progress for treatments and tests. .......... When Lauren went to her doctors with stinging clusters of sores on her genitals, she assumed the pain was from a urinary tract infection. But at the OB-GYN, her doctor swabbed the bumps and told her that the rash was herpes. “No,” she remembered responding. “It’s not.” .......... She was in a two-year monogamous relationship with her second-ever sexual partner — a guy who occasionally dealt with an errant blister on his lip. ........ They hadn’t known that oral herpes could induce cold sores, and that HSV-1, the virus that causes oral herpes, could be transferred to the genitals. Lauren’s boyfriend was convinced that she had cheated on him, and he broke up with her ......... “I’m never going to date. I’m never going to have a boyfriend.” ......... The mental strain — the depression she fell into after the diagnosis, the fear that future partners wouldn’t accept her — has been, by far, the hardest part of managing the disease. “It attacks your self-worth,” she said. ........... Herpes is extremely common ........ and how hard it is to develop a vaccine for herpes. ........ the herpes virus can hide inside neurons that are shielded from the immune system, making the body’s immune response insufficient at eradicating the virus ...... that’s why herpes remains in a person’s body for life ........... If a patient does not have symptoms, doctors typically diagnose herpes with an antibody test that is frequently inaccurate. Up to half of positive commercial test results could be false ........ esting is typically reliable when a patient has symptoms; doctors can swab a lesion and run a highly sensitive molecular test. ......... “psychosocial harms” associated with false positives on herpes tests. ......... And so the virus continues to spread essentially unchecked — exacerbated by just how ineffective the most widely available tests for herpes are ....... As cases circulate, patients are left grappling with a diagnosis that can be psychologically devastating ........ lots of people feel stigmatized, dirty.” ......... Herpes can be severe in certain cases: Babies can contract neonatal herpes from their mothers, putting them at risk for severe complications and even death. For people who are immunocompromised, outbreaks can be more prolonged and painful. In the vast majority of cases, though, people will have very mild symptoms, and many will have none. That’s part of the reason the infection is so pervasive: People pass it onto partners without knowing they have herpes. ............. In the United States, around one in six people between the ages of 14 and 49 has genital herpes, and over half of adults have oral herpes. ......... The disease lingers in the body ......... When Lauren started dating after her diagnosis, she found herself staying in relationships for longer than she might otherwise, scared nobody else would want to be with her. “I thought I was going to die alone,” she said. ........ when she looks at each profile, she wonders how the man would respond to learning about her diagnosis. “I just worry so much that people are going to judge me,” she said. “That no matter how I present it to them, I’ll still face rejection. That weighs heavily on me.” ........... Some men have told her, flat-out, that they would never date someone with herpes ......... He’s seen how the disease “completely shatters a person’s identity,” he said .......... “They don’t feel like they have anything to contribute to a relationship now, just because they have herpes,” he said. “It’s like, ‘Who’s going to want me now that I have this?’” ........... more often than facing rejection, when he shares his diagnosis, he said, he gets a different response: Women share that they, too, have herpes. ......... Herpes stigma stems in part from the idea that people with the infection have done something “wrong” .......... condoms do not entirely prevent transmission, and you don’t even need to have penetrative sex to contract the virus. .......... “Clinicians don’t want to deal with this,” Ms. Warren said. “It involves people talking about sex. They’re crying, they’re going to have to talk about various specifics like is oral sex OK, is anal sex OK — I don’t think they want to go there,” she said. .......... Without support from doctors, or medical innovations to cure the infection, people with herpes are left “dealing with two viruses at the same time,” as Ms. Dawson put it. “You’re dealing with the physical symptoms of the virus,” she said, “and you’re dealing with the mental strain.” .
