The Sentient Enterprise

Oliver Ratzesberger gave a good lecture, entitled The Sentient Enterprise, published by Teradata in its YouTube channel. It's worth watching!

Ratzesberger presents the evolutionary journey of analytics capabilities that begins with today’s Agile Data Warehouse and culminates in the Sentient Enterprise. The Sentient Enterprise is an enterprise that can listen to data, conduct analysis and make autonomous decisions at massive scale in real-time. The Sentient Enterprise can listen to data to sense micro-trends. It can act as one organism without being impeded by information silos. It can make autonomous decisions with little or no human intervention. It is always evolving, with emergent intelligence that becomes progressively more sophisticated. Ratzesberger also presents a framework to assess your organization’s progress along this journey and “next practices” that business leaders can harness to unlock the full potential of Big Data and analytics.

Kenneth Cukier: Big Data is better data

Kenneth Cukier, the Data Editor of The Economist, recently gave a good lecture at TED Berlin, intitled Big Data is better data. I agree with him when he said that there is a lot of hype around the term, and that is very unfortunate, because big data is an extremely important tool by which society is going to advance.



"Big Data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think", he said. "It is going to help us manage our careers and lead lives of satisfaction and hope and happiness and health, but in the past, we've often looked at information technology and our eyes have only seen the T, the technology, the hardware, because that's what was physical. We now need to recast our gaze at the I, the information, which is less apparent, but in some ways a lot more important. Humanity can finally learn from the information that it can collect, as part of our timeless quest to understand the world and our place in it, and that's why big data is a big deal."

Can Robots Inspire Us To Be Better Humans?

Ken Goldberg presented at TEDxBerkeley, an independently organized TED event, an interesting lecture called 4 lessons from robots about being human, where he shared four very human lessons that he's learned from working with robots. Ken Goldberg is a Professor of Industrial Engineering and Operations Research in Robotics, Automation, and New Media at UC Berkeley and his work reflects the intersection of robotics, social media, and art. Watch and enjoy.

Leading by Omission

Ricardo Semler is a Brazilian businessman, CEO of Semco, well known for his innovative business management policies. He implemented at Semco a radical form of industrial democracy and corporate re-engineering. I am fan of Ricardo Semler's work since 1988, in the beginning of my career, when I read his first book Virando a Própria Mesa (Turning Your Own Table, published in Portuguese), one of the first business book I read, and after attended his lecture on business management using innovative approaches. In 1995, he published an English version of his book, entitled Maverick: The Success Story Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace, and in 2003 published The Seven-Day Weekend: Changing the Way Work Works.


In 2005, Ricardo Semler gave a good lecture at MIT Sloan School of Management, where he told about the Semco's history.

Watch and Enjoy!



MIT World is a free and open site that provides on demand video of significant public events at MIT. MIT World's video index contains more than 700 videos.

Bill Gates on energy: Innovating to zero!

Bill Gates presented this month an interesting lecture on energy and environment at TED2010. About the lecture, from TED: "At TED2010, Bill Gates unveils his vision for the world's energy future, describing the need for "miracles" to avoid planetary catastrophe and explaining why he's backing a dramatically different type of nuclear reactor. The necessary goal? Zero carbon emissions globally by 2050."

After Gates left his day-to-day role with Microsoft, he focused on philanthropy through his foundation. He has a website entitled The Gates Notes, where he publishes his thoughts, ideas and notes. Recently, he started to use Twitter to share his ideas.

Bill Gates published a post with some comments on his lecture: "It’s the first time I’ve spoken in public on the topic, but I’ve been studying energy and climate change over the last couple of years, and have been lucky to meet fairly regularly with some of the leading scientists in the field."

"In the presentation, I talked about the massive innovation effort needed to deliver “energy miracles,” breakthroughs that will make zero-carbon energy generation possible. There are many promising approaches which we need to continue pursuing aggressively: CCS, Nuclear, Wind, Solar PV and Solar Thermal – but they all have challenges that must be addressed. And the only way to get there is through innovation."

The surprising science of motivation

A tweet¹ by Ron Dimon caught my attention about an excellent video published in the Tony Mayo's blog. It is a Dan Pink's lecture on motivation and rewards, recorded in July at TED Global 2009. About this lecture, from TED: "Career analyst Dan Pink examines the puzzle of motivation, starting with a fact that social scientists know but most managers don't: Traditional rewards aren't always as effective as we think. Listen for illuminating stories -- and maybe, a way forward."

Watch and enjoy.



Thanks Ron Dimon and Tony Mayo for share the link.

1 - Tweet is a message in Twitter.

Lecture at UNA

Before yesterday, I had the pleasure of delivering a guest lecture on Business Intelligence for Business Administration class at UNA Centro Universitário (UNA University Center in english), invited by professor Maria da Graça Bertucci.

UNA is a large and one of the most important university located in my hometown, Belo Horizonte - Brazil.

Maria da Graça, thank you for the opportunity.