This Week's 3 Bells
Young Africans | Bot Valentine | Bank pain
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Are you ready for the young of Africa?
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The very first issue of the 3 Bells rang this bell: "By 2050, nearly a fourth of the people on earth will have passed their 60th birthday; the average African, however, will be just 28 years old. In other words, if it's young graduates, young workers or young consumers your organization needs - you'd better be talking to Africans. Paying attention?"
IBM is paying deep attention. It announced it will initially spend US$70m to roll out an initiative that aims to give as many as 25 million Africans (in South Africa, Nigeria, Kenya, Morocco and Egypt) digital skills training over the next 5 years. Why? Because "Africa will have the largest workforce by 2040 and IBM wants to lay the foundation blocks to build a digital workforce", said the head of IBM Skills Academy. Yep, IBM gets it. It has reinvented itself many times in its 100+ year history; now, it is making a big play on the young of Africa.
Photo credit: Ciku Nyawira (adjusted)
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Are you preparing for the young of Africa? If not, I have no idea why not.
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Did a bot write your Valentine message?
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So you got a personal, handwritten note on Valentine's day. But wait, who really wrote it? It might have come from Bond, a startup that lets people send letters handwritten with a fountain pen from your smartphone. Ahem. It sends millions of such notes every year. You type your note out on your phone, and a robot takes over and writes it out with a pen on nice stationery and posts it. It will even copy your handwriting if you send samples.
So if you received a handwritten love note, go and take another look at it...
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Bots and AI are going to throw up many issues in our lives. Is it still love if a robot took the pain out of writing it out? You tell me...
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This time it's Credit Suisse. A loss of US$2.4 billion (following a loss of US$2.9 billion the year before); and 6,500 employees to be sent home (7,250 the year before).
The bank's continuing pain stems from the many mistakes it made before 2007, most notably selling toxic mortgages, for which it is paying US$5.3 billion to settle claims. Its new CEO is overseeing a major overhaul that requires drastic cost-cutting and strategic refocus. This is necessary medicine for the ills of the past.
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Bank CEOs and directors who read this newsletter: do you really read it? Mis-governance has consequences, even a decade or more later.
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