Skip to main content

Featured Post

CALIFORNIA FIRE: 62,000 People Have Fled Blaze

#Skills That Will Be In High Demand In The Future - By Richard Bradson

I’ve always relied on instinct when it comes to calculating risks, putting trust in people and making important business decisions. There are some things that can’t be summed up in a statistic, and this is when you need to use a bit of intuition.
Richard Branson - chess - Strive Challenge 2019
On the Strive Challenge this year, I had an interesting conversation on the topic with the team, who have all followed incredible careers across many different sectors – from business and science to aerospace engineering and medicine. We were discussing how decisions are becoming more and more data-driven, as technology and artificial intelligence advances. However, as we rely more and more on analytics to make our decisions, we’re losing touch of our human instinct and we’re taking human reasoning out of the equation. We all agreed on the danger this presents and the importance of looking at every decision with a human lens. Creativity, problem solving, reasoning and imagination will be the soft skills in high demand in the future.
Richard Branson - business is an adventure 2019
When we lose touch of our intuition, we naturally become more risk-adverse and conservative. At Virgin, we like to work fast, to try ideas, see if they stick, and if they don’t, quickly move on to the next. If we got too bogged down in the statistics all of the time, we wouldn’t be able to stay agile. As Tony from our Strive team put it during our discussions: “Don’t be too loyal to an idea. Use humility to keep an open mind and embrace new perspectives.” Maybe the finances all add up, and the graphs are in the green, but if it’s doesn’t feel right – it’s worth exploring those feelings and remaining willing to take risks.
When we launched Virgin Atlantic, we had to take a number of risks – from selling Virgin Records to challenging the firm monopoly held by British Airways. If we had only focused on the financial risk, it may never have launched. But I knew the market was ripe for disruption and people deserved an airline that served them better. 35 years later and the rest is history!
As we sat around the campfire at Strive, we also agreed that some things that can’t be measured in an infographic – and this is particularly true for education. For example, how do you measure potential? How can numbers measure levels of confidence, resilience and emotional intelligence? Kurt Long, a Strive Challenge veteran, summed it up perfectly when he paraphrased Maya Angelou’s words and said: “You may not remember what your teachers taught you, but you’ll always remember how they made you feel.” We need to always consider people’s feelings when we make decisions, and data alone doesn’t do this justice.
Virgin Strive Challenge 2019
While data and analytics present us with many opportunities to take more calculated risks, increase efficiency and guide decisions - don’t forget about human instinct. Trust your intuition, stay curious and always put your people first if you want to thrive in the long-term.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Every Delayed 2020 Movie Without A New Release Date

Several 2020 movies have seen their release dates delayed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic; here's every film that still needs a new one. With theaters closed down and film and TV production shut-down until further notice, Hollywood's 2020 release calendar has been all but  wiped clean on through to the middle of July  (with a few exceptions which will eventually have to move, as we'll discuss later). There's no guarantee theaters will be reopen for business by that point either, in spite of chains like Cinemark saying  they hope to resume showing new movies  that month. The New Mutants ANTLERS RUN THE WOMAN IN THE WINDOW LAST NIGHT IN SOHO SPIRAL: FROM THE BOOK OF SAW GREYHOUND ANTEBELLUM Other Movies On top of all the bigger 2020 movies in need of a new release date after being delayed, there are also smaller indie titles like  Promising Young Woman  and  Saint Maud  (both of which premiered to strong reviews on the film festival cir...

CALIFORNIA FIRE: 62,000 People Have Fled Blaze

  The evacuations have come amid a grueling heat wave, the coronavirus pandemic and air thick with smoke. The wildfires have burned through more than 350,000 acres. The wildfires that continued to rip across Northern California on Thursday have forced 62,000 people from their homes and threaten evacuations for 100,000 more. Firefighters have struggled to contain the blazes, and massive smoke clouds have harmed the air quality. A large group of fires burning in wine country west of Sacramento had grown to cover 131,000 acres, according to Cal Fire, the state’s fire authority. The agency said that, in all, nearly 350,000 acres have burned in Northern and Central California, with many fires sparked by lightning strikes in the high heat and then fanned by winds. Those conditions helped new fires sprout across the state on Wednesday and Thursday, and caused other fires to merge, complicating efforts to contain the combined blazes. Almost two dozen major fires were reported on Wednesday,...

#Yara Virus : The New Mysterious Virus Found In Brazil.

Scientists have discovered a new virus in an artificial lake in Brazil. This mysterious virus found in amoebae has been named “Yaravirus.” This latest discovery comes as the coronavirus from China continues to ravage the world. While the world scrabbles around looking for a cure for the deadly coronavirus, scientists have found another virus. Unlike the former which started in  China,  this new one comes from an artificial lake in  Brazil. Independent  reports that this virus named "Yaravirus" was found in an amoebae. It was named after "Yara" or “Iara,” which means 'mother of waters' - a mythical siren/mermaid figure from Brazilian mythology who would lure sailors underwater. Scientists are saying that this virus is mysterious because it has genes that no one has seen before. Reporting the new discovery in  bioRxiv, a  biological sciences website, the researchers wrote:  “We report the discovery of Yaravirus, a new lineage of amoe...