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8. What is the main subject of this lecture?
a) The failures of the United Nations
b) The historical role of the League of Nations
c) The origins of World War II
d) The forgotten successes of the League of Nations

9. What is the main idea of this lecture?

a) Despite certain advantages, there are any problems involved in the use of hot dry rock technology.
b) Hot dry rock technology is too expensive to ever be used as a practical energy source.
c) The main purpose of hot dry rock technology is to provide pure, clean water.
d) hot dry rock is a potentially important alternative source of energy.

Toefl Listening Practice - Main Idea Part 2

6. What is the class mainly discussing?
a) Government regulation and self-regulation in the advertising industry
b) A court decision that affected advertising for children in Sweden
c) The problems that a ban on advertising caused the tobacco industry
d) A negative advertising campaign designed to prevent people from smoking

7. What is the main point of this lecture?
a) To compare the characters of Greek epic poetry and those of modern novels
b) To discuss why the professor enjoys the Iliad more than the Odyssey
c) To contrast the main characters of the Iliad and the main character of the Odyssey
d) To explain why the professor is going to have to change the syllabus

Toefl Listening Practice - Main Idea Part 1

Questions:

3. What does this TOEFL lecture mainly concern?

a) The archaeological record found in New England shipwrecks
b) The rules for a game that the students are going to play
c) The leading causes of shipwrecks off the coast of New England
d) The role of the State Archaeological Society

4. What is the main purpose of this discussion?
a) To compare regressive and progressive taxes
b) To explain the need fo a new sales tax
c) To discuss the concept of income tax
d) To contrast direct and indirect taxation

5. What is the main topic of this discussion?
a) Edward Hopper’s early career as a commercial artist
b) A style of movie making called film noir
c) Edward Hopper’s realistic, bleak style of painting
d) Edward Hopper’s influence on other painters

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Steve Jobs on Joseph Juran and Quality

Full Transcript

Interviewer: [0:01] Steven or Steve?

Steve Jobs: [0:03] Doesn't matter. Steven P. Jobs is fine. Steve Jobs is fine.

Interviewer: [0:07] And your [inaudible 00:10] ?

Steve: [0:14] President of NeXT Computer, Incorporated.

Interviewer: [0:16] What has your life come into contact with that of Dr. Joseph Juran's?

Steve: [0:23] At NeXT, we decided to try to figure out what all this ballyhoo about quality was about, so we started looking into a lot of things — came in contact with a lot of people. Dr. Juran was one of the few people that I met that had a real down-to-earth approach to it, that didn't think that quality was the second coming, but he approached it much more scientifically, and that resonated with the engineers and other technical people here at NeXT, as well as the executives.

[1:09] Dr. Juran's visited us several times always wearing his characteristic bow tie. We've learned a lot from him.

Interviewer: [1:18] What are some of the things that you've found most valuable?

Steve: [1:25] The things that we've learned most from Dr. Juran are to look at everything as a repetitive process, and to instrument that process, and find out how it's running. Then start to take it apart and re-put it back together in ways that dramatically improve its effectiveness in a very straight-forward way, no magic, no pep rallies.

[1:49] Just looking things directly in the eye, seeing them as repetitive processes, and re-engineering them. Most of the quality stuff, as I've understood it, is really a lot about re-engineering your repetitive processes to make them much, much more effective — combining them, eliminating some, strengthening others.

Interviewer: [2:09] It's easy to see why broadcasters would want to do a program on Madonna or Arnold Schwarzenegger. Why should the American people be interested in seeing a documentary on this old guy with a bow tie in Dr. Juran?

Steve: [2:38] America's in a tough spot right now. We've forgotten the basics. We're so prosperous for so long that we took too many things for granted and we forgot how much work it took to actually build and sustain those basic things that were supporting our prosperity. Things like a great education system, things like great industry.

[2:58] We are now faced with relearning those things, going back to the basics and relearning them. That's why Dr. Juran is so valuable, because he is standing right on the basic heart of the matter of why we are being out-manufactured, why we are being out-planned by Japan.

[3:24] It is not because the Japanese are tricking us, it's not because the Japanese are better intellectually. It's because we are being out-planned, we are being out-strategized, we are being out-manufactured. There is nothing that can't be fixed. But we're not going to fix it up here. We're going to fix it by getting back to the basics of what we need to do.

Interviewer: [3:50] There aren't an awful lot of living legends around these days. When Joseph Juran walked in through these front doors, what struck you about Dr. Juran, the person?

Steve: [4:09] I had an opportunity to meet a few great people in my life and they all have had one characteristic in common, which is that they treat everyone the same, whether it's the janitor or the president of the company, whether it's the president of the United States or someone in a rural slum.

[4:30] They treat them exactly the same. If a question is asked, they will directly answer that question to the best of their ability. The look in their eyes is exactly the same and that was certainly true of Dr. Juran.

[4:42] Any question asked was the most important question that could have been asked at that moment as far as Dr. Juran was concerned. The caring and straightforwardness that he expressed toward every individual made a big impression on us.

[4:59] Of course, his awesome knowledge of the subject. But beyond his awesome knowledge of the subject, the way that he viewed people so optimistically that even the most foolish question was addressed with the greatest desire to transmit what he had learned in his life.

Interviewer: [5:19] Everybody now certainly uses quality, whether it's in the advertising or in internal literature, American flag, Apple Pie, Motherhood [inaudible 05:32] . It's almost the price of admission in lots of industries.

[5:32] And yet so many corporations, large businesses in particular, have such a hard time getting things moving, seeing results, getting people somehow facing the right direction. What holds them back, do you think?

Steve: [5:47] It's funny. The group of people that do not use quality in their marketing are the Japanese. You never see them using quality in their marketing. It's only the American companies that do. And yet if you ask people on the street, which products have the best reputation for quality, they will tell you the Japanese products.

[6:05] Now, why is that? How could that be? The answer is because customers don't form their opinions on quality from marketing. They don't form their opinions on quality from who won the Deming Award, or who won the Baldrige Award. They form their opinions on quality from their own experience with the products or the services.

[6:25] One can spend enormous amounts of money on quality. One can win every quality award there is. And yet if your products don't live up to it, customers will not keep that opinion for long in their minds. So, where we have to start is with our products and our services, not with our marketing department. We need to get back to the basics and go improve our products and services.

[6:50] Now, again, quality isn't just the product or the service. It's having the right product. Knowing where the market's going and having the most innovative products is just as much a part of quality as the quality of the construction of the product when you have it.

[7:08] What we're seeing is the quality leaders of today have integrated that quality technology well beyond their manufacturing, now going well into their sales and marketing and out as far as they can to touch the customer, and trying to create super-efficient processes back from the customer all the way through to the delivery of the end product so that they can have the most innovative products, understand the customer needs fastest, et cetera, et cetera.

Interviewer: [7:31] You've had a remarkable opportunity to do an Act One, an Act Two, maybe there'll be an Act Three, an Act Four. I'm not sure whether you came into contact with Dr. Juran back in the days of Apple…

Steve: [7:45] No, just at NeXT.

Interviewer: [7:49] What did you do differently at NeXT as a result of having been in contact with Dr. Juran that you didn't do back in the days of Apple?

Steve: [7:55] In most companies, if you're new and you ask, “Why is it done this way”? The answer is, “Because that's the way we do it here,” or “Because that's the way it's always been done.” And in my opinion the largest contribution of much of this quality thinking is to approach these ways of doing things, these processes, scientifically, where there is a theory behind why we do them, there is a description of what we do, and most importantly, there is an opportunity to always question what we do.

[8:28] And this is a radically different approach to business processes than the traditional one, “because it's always done this way.” And that single shift is everything, in my opinion. Because in that shift is a tremendous, optimistic point of view about the people that work in a company. It says, “These people are very smart. They're not pawns. They're very smart. And if given the opportunity to change and improve, they will. They will improve the processes if there's a mechanism for it.”

[9:03] That optimistic humanism I find very appealing. I think we have countless examples that it works.

Interviewer: [9:16] Part of this way that this optimistic humanism is expressed in companies are the things to which the people who control corporations say yes, to requests and recommendations that are made to them. What kind of things are you saying yes to, here at NeXT, as a result of Dr. Juran's teachings or exposure that you might never have said yes to before?

Steve: [9:40] Your question actually capsulizes what's wrong. The whole philosophy behind these newer quality approaches is that people shouldn't have to ask management permission to do something that needs to be approved. Authority should be vested in the people doing the work to improve their own processes, to teach them how to measure them, to understand them, and to improve them.

[10:08] And they should not have to ask for permission to improve their processes. A lot of the philosophy behind this quality stuff carries with it a flattening of the traditional hierarchical organization and a distribution of authority, to the people who are best in a position to decide what should happen to improve these processes, the people doing the work themselves. The permission that's given because of this quality philosophy is the permission to not have to ask permission.

Interviewer: [10:49] The two quality gurus in America today, who seem to be getting the most press and the most notoriety, are Joe Juran and Dr. Deming. Obviously, you're familiar with Dr. Deming and the Deming Prize. What do you see as the significant contributions of those men?

Steve: [11:11] I've never met Dr. Deming and I've never read his books. So, I'm ignorant, I can't tell you.

Interviewer: [11:15] When you think back, 5 or 10 years, Dr. Juran is going to be gone at some point. All that's going to be left are his tapes and his books. What are going to be your fondest memories of Dr. Juran?

Steve: [11:37] The thing that strikes me most deeply about Joe Juran is the fact that at his senior age his mind is as alive as anyone I know. He has an energy about him that propels him around the globe on planes, to come visit companies like NeXT, to spend draining days trying to transmit what he's learned his whole life to people.

[12:08] You ask, why does he do this and where does he get the energy for it? There is clearly something in his heart that's propelling him. His pocket book's not what's propelling him. His heart is propelling him. I have a very deep respect for that thing in his heart that he's trying to take everything he's learned in his whole life and teach the next generation, before he can no longer do that.

[12:42] He's flown out here several times, cross-country, to try to make NeXT the kind of company that he would like to see more of. He will gain nothing from it himself, except to know that his ideas will live on beyond him. I really respect that. I've found him to be an incredibly warm individual with something big in his heart.

Interviewer: [13:11] You raise an interesting point, that he treats everyone the same. I don't know how much private time you spent with him in a lunch or dinner apart from the ceremonial stuff…

Steve: [13:20] A fair bit.

Interviewer: [13:22] You could tell us. What's Dr. Juran really like?

Steve: [13:26] He has much more of a sense of humor than he lets show when he's talking to groups, a pretty wicked sense of humor, actually. [laughs] I just imagine, when he was young, he was a pretty wild character.

Interviewer: [13:49] Everyone we've spoken to has always alluded to Dr. Juran's humor. We always say, “Give us an example.” Can you give me an example of the “Juran” humor?

Steve: [13:58] My memory's not that good. I don't remember anecdotes and things like that. I remember laughing a lot with him.

Interviewer: [14:04] Last question. Not smart enough to ask you, what, you think, ought to be on a video tape with the life of Joe Juran. Maybe if you don't say this, nobody else will.

Steve: [14:31] I don't know. I never visited him at his home. You learn a lot by doing that. I never met his wife, and you learn a lot by meeting someone's family. Joe Juran is clearly a person that spent his life on one thing. He found his great subject early in life and he pursued it over decades. He's made a deep contribution that will last well beyond his physical years. Like most people that do that, there is, below the surface, great sacrifices they've made to do that.

[15:33] In some cases with their family, in some cases with a lot of other things they might have wanted to do with their lives. I don't think Joe Juran would be an exception, as a matter of fact I think he would follow that. I imagine that if one scratches the surface a little bit, one will find some sacrifices in his life that he's made. Follow the pure path that he has that most people don't see. Then, maybe, you have a chance to explore. I don't know them myself. You can sense that they're there.

Interviewer: [16:15] Actually, that one was not the last question. You suggested something. Clearly like Joe Juran, your life has been focused with a like passion. You have seen that passion fulfilled and you've seen promise realized, quite early.

[16:32] When you think back, Joe Juran's early success was certainly in Japan, well in the late '50s, I think 50-54, and yet it has taken literally 30 to 40 years before America has come around to giving Joe Juran the recognition that he really does deserve, in his teachings and his philosophies. What do you think it is in Joe Juran that has sustained him for 30 to 40 years, where those audiences were not so willing to listen?

Steve: [17:00] That's a very good question. Most people that are able to make a sustained contribution over time, rather than just a peak, are very internally driven. You have to be. Because, in the ebb and tide of people's opinions and of fads, there are going to be times when you are criticized, and criticism is very difficult. When you're criticized, you learn to pull back a little and listen to your own drummer.

[17:32] To some extent, that isolates you from the praise if you eventually get it, too. The praise becomes a little less important to you and the criticism becomes a little less important to you, in the same measure. You become more internally driven. Joe Juran has, clearly, had those experiences and become very internally driven. I think he felt the bedrock of the truth of his pursuits. That's what kept him going. I think that the great satisfaction that he got from Japan did not end in the '50s.

[18:15] He probably looks at Japan as something that he helped nurture along, and as every decade has passed, he sees his ideas blossoming even more. I'm sure he gets tremendous satisfaction from having injected a very important ingredient into the early, post-war culture of Japan, and he probably sees that in every branch and leaf of a fairly large tree.

[18:39] What he's trying to do now is to make sure that he gets that into the future culture of American industry as it rebuilds itself. If he is successful, which I think he is on the verge of being, that in his last breath he will feel comfortable knowing in the decades to come that his work will get recognition.

Interviewer: [19:06] As we say, thank you, Mr. President.

Steve: [19:09] OK.

Joseph Juran talks Process Improvement and importance of Quality

Full Transcript

Welcome to this program on improving quality and reducing quality related costs. This is our opening session and our subject is proof of the need. Let's begin by stating our objective. Our objective is to develop the habit of annual improvements in quality and annual reductions in quality related costs. Why do we need annual improvements? 
We need them to keep our products saleable and our costs competitive, our why's we lose ground to every competitor who does make annual improvement. For a classic example look at the Japanese revolution in quality, following world war two, the Japanese tried to convert their industries to civilian products but they were unable to export due to poor quality so they launched a revolution in quality, let's diagram that out with a need of our mysterious Mystica. 
In this model the horizontal axis is time in decades, the vertical axis is quality, saleability of the product. In 1950 western quality was high, it has kept improving but at an evolutionary pace, in 1950 Japanese quality was poor, the Japanese then invested in a massive training program, they learned how to improve quality then they made quality improvements at a revolutionary pace year after year my estimate is that by the mid-1970s they had equaled Western quality. That revolution has progressively made Japanese products saleable then competitive and now in some product lines superior in quality. These quality improvements were nearly always accompanied by cost reductions. 
A classic example is that of a color television set until 1974 Quasar was an American old color television factory it was competitive in quality in the US market. Quasar was then sold to a Japanese company who introduced changes in product designs, vendor relations, manufacturing processes and so on. Look at the effect of those changes on the costs of poor quality incidentally during these sessions I will be showing many visual aids on the screen on Mystica on the TV monitor. Most of these aids are reproduced in your workbook under the tab corresponding to the same session number, the page number will be flashed on the screen your workbook will usually include sacramental explanation beyond that contained in my own presentation. 
The cost of service calls during warranty declined from 22 million per year now the formative the number of factory personnel needed to find and repair in-house defects declined from 120 to 15 so the new owners attained the best of both worlds better quality for the users due to lower field failure rates and lower costs for the manufacturer. Not only do we need improvement we need the habit of improvement. To develop that habit our management teams should accept the responsibility for improvement understand the universal sequence of events to which managers make improvements, learn the key concepts techniques and tools and finally apply the universal sequence to actual company problems. Ours is an action program not merely an educational program. Talking about quality improvement but what do we mean by that word improvement? First let us define what we mean by control. Control is the process of detecting and correcting adverse change. Let's explain this by a graph the horizontal scale is time, the vertical scale is performance. Anything that goes up is bad. Now suppose that our past performance has been 10% defective, suppose also that we've been unable to get rid of that 10%. Typically we conclude at least let's make sure that things don't get worse so we set up to measure our actual performance. Similar is our actual performance stays close to that 10% all remains quiet we have learned that we were that 10%, subconsciously we've accepted 10% as a sort of a standard. Now suppose there's a sporadic rise to 20%. That rise triggers many alarm signals, the supervision of converges on the scene and takes corrective actions. We call that firefighting troubleshooting and so on now going from 20% to 10% is a sort of improvement but it is not the kind of improvement we are talking about as we are talking about is this big bionic area under the 10% line. If we could reduce that 10% say to 3% that would be a big gain and it would go on and on. 
Reduction in that chronic level is the kind of improvement we are talking about and is very different from fighting sporadic fires. Now if you wish to explain the distinction between sporadic and chronic to your colleagues you can use the dialogue between the drunk and the half-wit. The drunk says you're stupid and the half-wit says you are drunk and the response is, correct I am drunk but tomorrow I'll be sober and tomorrow you'll still be stupid. Now is that chronic loss a fate or problem? 
Look at smallpox, once it was called the scourge of God, a fate beyond the ability of humans to do anything about it. Then some determined humans waited in and looked at the history of smallpox in the United States. We see a chronic condition with occasional sporadic peaks, now smallpox is extinct, it was a problem after all. Any improvement to unprecedented levels we will call breakthrough. We’ll use those two words improvement and breakthrough interchangeably. We define breakthrough as the organized creation of beneficial change. We will review many cases of breakthrough, we’ll find that there is a universal sequence of events through which all managers made their improvements. 
Let's look at that universal sequence, first there's proof of the need, why change what we're doing? Then there's project identification, specifically what are we going to tackle, then comes organization, organization to guide each project and organization to diagnose or analyze each project. Then follows diagnosis, a breakthrough in knowledge, next comes remedial action under new knowledge including overcoming resistance to change and finally there is control at the new level. This sequence is universal, all breakthroughs follow that sequence, we will use this sequence at our road map, the first step is proof of the need.

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How Artificial Intelligence Will Redefine Management

NOVEMBER 02, 2016

Vegard Kolbjørnsrud, Richard Amico, Robert J. Thomas

From hbr.org/

Many alarms have sounded on the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to upend the workforce, especially for easy-to-automate jobs. But managers at all levels will have to adapt to the world of smart machines. The fact is, artificial intelligence will soon be able to do the administrative tasks that consume much of managers’ time faster, better, and at a lower cost.

How can managers — from the front lines to the C-suite — thrive in the age of AI? To find out, we surveyed 1,770 managers from 14 countries and interviewed 37 executives in charge of digital transformation at their organizations. Using this data, we identified five practices that successful managers will need to master.

Practice 1: Leave Administration to AI

According to the survey, managers across all levels spend more than half of their time on administrative coordination and control tasks. (For instance, a typical store manager or a lead nurse at a nursing home must constantly juggle shift schedules because of staff members’ illnesses, vacations, or sudden departures.) These are the very responsibilities that the same managers expect to see AI affecting the most. And they are correct: AI will automate many of these tasks.

Many alarms have sounded on the potential for artificial intelligence (AI) technologies to upend the workforce, especially for easy-to-automate jobs. But managers at all levels will have to adapt to the world of smart machines. The fact is, artificial intelligence will soon be able to do the administrative tasks that consume much of managers’ time faster, better, and at a lower cost.

How can managers — from the front lines to the C-suite — thrive in the age of AI? To find out, we surveyed 1,770 managers from 14 countries and interviewed 37 executives in charge of digital transformation at their organizations. Using this data, we identified five practices that successful managers will need to master.

Practice 1: Leave Administration to AI

According to the survey, managers across all levels spend more than half of their time on administrative coordination and control tasks. (For instance, a typical store manager or a lead nurse at a nursing home must constantly juggle shift schedules because of staff members’ illnesses, vacations, or sudden departures.) These are the very responsibilities that the same managers expect to see AI affecting the most. And they are correct: AI will automate many of these tasks.

Report writing is another relevant example. The Associated Press expanded its quarterly earnings reporting from approximately 300 stories to 4,400 with the help of AI-powered software robots. In doing so, technology freed up journalists to conduct more investigative and interpretive reporting. Imagine technology like this drafting your next management report; in fact, this is already possible for some analytical management reports. Recently, the data analytics company Tableau announced a partnership with Narrative Science, a Chicago-based provider of natural language generation tools. The result of the collaboration is Narratives for Tableau, a free Chrome extension that automatically creates written explanations for Tableau graphics.

The managers we surveyed see such change in a positive light: Eighty-six percent said they would like AI support with monitoring and reporting.

Practice 2: Focus on Judgment Work

Many decisions require insight beyond what artificial intelligence can squeeze from data alone. Managers use their knowledge of organizational history and culture, as well as empathy and ethical reflection. This is the essence of human judgment — the application of experience and expertise to critical business decisions and practices. Managers we surveyed have a sense of a shift in this direction and identify the judgment-oriented skills of creative thinking and experimentation, data analysis and interpretation, and strategy development as three of the four top new skills that will be required to succeed in the future.

As Layne Thompson, director of ERP Services for a U.S. Navy IT organization, told us: “More often than not, managers think of what they’re doing as requiring judgment, discretion, experience, and the capacity to improvise, as opposed to simply applying rules. And if one of the potential promises of machine learning is the ability to help make decisions, then we should think of technology as being intended to support rather than replace [managers].”

Practice 3: Treat Intelligent Machines as “Colleagues”

Managers who view AI as a kind of colleague will recognize that there’s no need to “race against a machine.” While human judgment is unlikely to be automated, intelligent machines can add enormously to this type of work, assisting in decision support and data-driven simulations as well as search and discovery activities. In fact, 78% of the surveyed managers believe that they will trust the advice of intelligent systems in making business decisions in the future.

One company that is trying to address these opportunities is Kensho Technologies, a provider of next-generation investment analytics. Its system allows investment managers to ask investment-related questions in plain English, such as, “What sectors and industries perform best three months before and after a rate hike?” and get answers within minutes. Picture how such technologies could support individuals and teams of managers in assessing decision consequences and exploring scenarios.

Not only will AI augment managers’ work, but it will also enable managers to interact with intelligent machines in collegial ways, through conversation or other intuitive interfaces. AI will be their always-available assistant and adviser.

Practice 4: Work Like a Designer

While managers’ own creative abilities are vital, perhaps even more important is their ability to harness others’ creativity. Manager-designers bring together diverse ideas into integrated, workable, and appealing solutions. They embed design thinking into the practices of their teams and organizations. A third of the managers in our survey identified creative thinking and experimentation as a key skill area they need to learn to stay successful as AI increasingly takes over administrative work.

In an interview, Peter Harmer, CEO of Insurance Australia Group, emphasized the need for managers who foster collaborative creativity in the digital enterprise: “We need people who can actually layer ideas on ideas. Not somebody who has to win in a competition around ideas, but somebody who can say, ‘Crikey! If we bring these two or three or four things together, we’ve got something very, very different.’ That’s the creativity, the curiosity [we need in managers].”

Practice 5: Develop Social Skills and Networks

The managers we surveyed recognized the value of judgment work. But they undervalued the deep social skills critical to networking, coaching, and collaborating that will help them stand out in a world where AI carries out many of the administrative and analytical tasks they perform today.

While they will use digital technologies to tap into the knowledge and judgment of partners, customers, and communities, they must be able to tease out and bring together diverse perspectives, insights, and experiences.

Steps to Success

AI will ultimately prove to be cheaper, more efficient, and potentially more impartial in its actions than human beings. But such a scenario should not be cause for concern for managers. It just means that their jobs will change to focus on things only humans can do.

Writing earnings reports is one thing, but developing messages that can engage a workforce and provide a sense of purpose is human through and through. Tracking schedules and resources may soon fall within the jurisdiction of machines, but drafting strategy remains unmistakably human. Simply put, our recommendation is to adopt AI in order to automate administration and to augment but not replace human judgment.

If the current shortage of analytical talent is any indication, organizations can ill afford to wait and see whether their managers are equipped to work alongside AI. To prepare themselves and their organizations for the kinds of human-led work that will gain prominence as technology takes on more routine tasks, leaders must take the following steps:

Explore early. To navigate in an uncertain future, managers must experiment with AI and apply their insights to the next cycle of experiments.

Adopt new key performance indicators to drive adoption. AI will bring new criteria for success: collaboration capabilities, information sharing, experimentation, learning and decision-making effectiveness, and the ability to reach beyond the organization for insights.

Develop training and recruitment strategies for creativity, collaboration, empathy, and judgment skills. Leaders should develop a diverse workforce and team of managers that balance experience with creative and social intelligence — each side complementing the other to support sound collective judgment.

While oncoming disruptions won’t arrive all at once, the pace of development is faster and the implications more far-reaching than most executives and managers realize. Those managers capable of assessing what the workforce of the future will look like can prepare themselves for the arrival of AI. They should view it as an opportunity to flourish.

Vegard Kolbjørnsrud is a senior research fellow at Accenture and an assistant professor at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway.

Richard Amico is a senior analyst at the Accenture Institute for High Performance in Boston.

Robert J. Thomas is a managing director of Accenture Strategy. He is the author of eight books on leadership and organizational change, including Crucibles of Leadership, Geeks and Geezers (with Warren Bennis), and Driving Results through Social Networks (with Robert L. Cross).

Artificial Intelligence could give managers half of their time back

Watch: Dutch PM Rutte applauded after clearing up own coffee spill

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte was on his way to a cabinet meeting when he dropped his coffee going through security gates.

Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte took a hands-on approach after spilling his coffee en route to a cabinet meeting.

After bemoaning the waste, the politician got a mop from the cleaning team, and proceeded to clean up after himself.

However, he had a little trouble with the mop, and the cleaners had to show him how to adapt it to suit his height.

Artificial Intelligence, Real Food

• by HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW STAFF

JUL 26 2017

Chef Watson can’t chop, dice, or julienne. “He” has no taste buds or appetite. But ask the chef for a recommendation on cooking with green olives, and his knowledge is vast, incorporating data points from a library of recipes and an encyclopedia of flavor profiles.

One of the early applications of IBM’s Watson technology, Chef Watson’s intelligence is in food. Specifically, how ingredients can come together to form new, never-before-tried recipes. The goal for Chef Watson, IBM says, is to “surprise and delight human chefs.”

HBR enlisted two cooks to partner with Watson in the kitchen: Ming Tsai, a renowned professional chef, and Gretchen Gavett, an HBR editor and kitchen novice. We asked each of them to cook with Watson as an experiment in how humans and machines work together. Was it surprising and delightful? Or a recipe for disaster? Watch and find out.

5 Skills You Need To Master To Get 26+ On TOEFL Speaking - Podcast & Transcript

In a new episode of The TOEFL Podcast, Paul Austin, head instructor at TOEFL Speaking Teacher speaks about the five skills you need to master to get 26+ on the TOEFL Speaking section.

First, Paul tells us about his work and how he created his website TOEFL Speaking Teacher. He noticed that many students struggled with the TOEFL Speaking section, and there were very few good resources.

Also as he started to work with the students on the Speaking section, he noticed that a lot of students needed to get 26+ on the TOEFL Speaking section and tried to figure out what is required to get 26 on TOEFL Speaking.

As a result of his experience, he found the five skills you need to master to get 26+ on the TOEFL Speaking section.

The first skill is Fluency. Fluency is your ability to deliver a response smoothly, with minimum interruptions.

Skill number two is TOEFL Speaking Tactics: Timing, Content, Organization, and Note-taking.

The third thing Words and Phrases. You want to show the evaluator that you can speak English well, you are not using templates, you are using natural sounding English.

Skill number four is your Accent and Intonation. It´s the most challenging one to improve because it takes more time.

Skill number five is your Pace of Speech. You need to speak fast enough, 100-105 words on Question types 1 and 2 and about 125 in Question types 3 to 6.

A bonus skill that affects everything is Confidence. You really need to work on improving your Confidence to get 26+.

The advice that Paul gives is not to focus on the score you need to get but focus on improving those five skills. Then you’ll be good enough to get 26+

Also, Paul emphasizes, that the part of getting 26 is accepting that you haven’t been perfect in the past, but now it’s time to change, now it’s time to get a professional help.

5 Skills You Need To Master To Get 26+ On TOEFL Speaking - Transcript

Welcome to the TOEFL podcast where we give you all of the hints, tips and secrets you need to know to score one hundred plus on the TOEFL exam. I'm your host Paul Austin, head tutor at TOEF Speaking Teacher and I'm here to help you succeed in your next TOEFL test.

Welcome back to the toefl podcast listeners, we are so excited to have you here today and to learn about the 5 skills that you need to master to get 26+ plus on the TOEFL speaking section now some of you may be familiar with the work that I've done in terms of the toefl test. If you haven't just a brief introduction about what my work has been like for the past couple of years, you know when I first started the toefl speaking teacher website a couple years ago I only had one or two years of experience with toefl and I specifically created this site because I noticed that there were many students who struggled with the toefl speaking section. As you probably know the productive skills Speaking and Writing are the most challenging skills for a total student to master and so I thought you know I'll just focus on the speaking section, I’ll provide private lessons, I’ll provide extra help for people so that they can do well on the speaking section and as I started to work with students on the speaking section I noticed that a lot of students needed to get 26+ on the toefl speaking section and this 26+ was for pharmacists, physical therapists,  nurses, teachers, doctors, dentists then of course you know people who needed to get their MBA or go to graduate school look at their PhD or their LLM and there were a lot of students who needed to get 26­+ on toefl speaking and there weren't a lot of resources, in fact they were basically zero resources that were widely read and well known amongst the online community. You know you have note full as I've spoken about with other students and as I spoke about on this toefl podcast, their advice for the reading, listening sometimes the writing section is pretty good but their advice for the speaking section is bad, it’s the best way to put it, it's incorrect and since they have the most popular YouTube channel, they get the most traffic people say I'll look it's work for other people it will work for me too I'm unfortunately if you were to ask them the percentages of the students that they would help for the speaking section specifically to get 26 it would be probably somewhere between 20 and 30 % and maybe even lower so you always wanna look at percentage.

Anyway that's getting a bit off track because there weren't any good resources I started to work with since I started to try to figure out what is required to get 26 on toefl speaking because this is a challenging thing to do, it is not easy and after about two years of private lessons, now specific to 26 on toefl speaking I've come up with a program more or less, and  this program is you know I do have a self-study course curriculum called get twenty six placental for speaking that's available for purchase it is a premium product but it basically has then all of the skills that I'm gonna tell you about today it has all the details on them audio files, video files, fleshed out exercises that you can use at home all of those things are in the cream of course but in today's podcast I just wanted to give you a taste for what those five skills are that you need to master to get 26+ on toefl speaking so let's get started without kind of waiting any longer and at the end of the 5 skills I'm going to tell you one bonus skill that you definitely need to master or understand well if you want to get 26+ speaking and this bonus skill I see 90% of students struggle with probably 90 to 95% of struggle with this bonus schools would definitely stay on in time to hear the bonus skill so the first skill right let's get into it guys the first skill is Fluency you need to have excellent fluency if you want to get 26­+ on toefl speaking.  What does that mean? you know so we say the word fluency what does that mean when you're actually giving a response on the TOEFL speaking section well fluency is your ability to deliver a response smoothly with minimal interruptions from point A to point B so for example the question one you have forty five seconds to get that response should start with confidence in the first five to ten seconds start smoothly you should go the full time forty four forty five seconds with minimal interruptions of hesitation I say no more than two or three hesitations or interruptions in your response if you want to get 26 on toefl speaking so what do we count as a hesitation or an interruption? Well the most common one is going to be the word mmm or ahhh so if you record your responses and you listen to those responses and you notice a lot I have eight mmms and ahhhs  in this response, well you need to minimize those, you need to get those down so that's the first one mmms and ahhhs.

The second type of interruption is often when we repeat ourselves so this happens with people who maybe have some issues with stuttering which are brought on by a lack of confidence and being nervous and stressed out so if you find yourself repeating words stuttering over words you would also count that as an interruption and you want to minimize those and sometimes those can be very challenging because sometimes the student also stutters in their native tongue and that's something that's difficult just to eliminate right away so if that's a problem for you I highly recommend hiring a professional, it could be one of our teachers, it could be someone else who will help you to minimize the stuttering in your response so we have mmms and ahhhs, we have stuttering, we also have general pauses and breaks and kind of drawing words out so I worked with one student who, she's from Dallas Texas and she really struggle because to give her brain more time to think she would often drag words out very long so she's say you know personally I think that the doctor should blablabla instead of just saying like that person I think the doctor should go to Chicago she was a personallyyyy, I think the doctorrrrrr should go to Chicagooooo and she would draw out those kind of the ends of the words to give herself more time to be able to think about what she wanted to say next. We fixed that, we improved it and she went from 23 to 26 on toefl speaking and we also worked on some other things but that was one of the main things that we worked on so to minimize also than drawing any words out you want to speak clearly you want to speak quickly and you want to get from one point to the next. So that’s skill number one, skill number one is fluency let's go on to skill number two guys skill number two is going to be the toefl speaking tactics so the toefl speaking tactics, there are four of them there's your timing, there's your content, there is your organization and there's finally your note taking and these I call these the total speaking tactics because these are just the things that you need to do specific to taking the toefl speaking section you know if you were doing any other thing if you're going to have coffee with a friend or you were going to give a presentation about a certain topic to a group of people or if you were going to speak to a client or a person is coming into your work you don't need to worry about these things you don't need to worry about taking notes beforehand or how you're organizing your response or that you know how much time you're talking but because we're in the toefl speaking section you know you need to you need to be able to do those things so toefl speaking tactics: timing, content, organization and your note taking.

I'll say a couple of things about these. Timing: for question type one and two you want it to be forty four, forty five seconds, for question types three to six you want it to be fifty eight, fifty nine or sixty seconds, easy enough and you just want to work until you can hit that timing consistently, now content and organization 90 to 95 % of students who work with me we don't ever focus specifically on content and organization, that's something that with enough practice and with enough exposure to example responses, you won't have any problem with the content and organization thought if you're struggling with content and organization, if a teacher tells you that you are or if you kind of self-evaluate and determine that you're struggling with it look at your notes, usually notes are the first problem. If you want more advice on the notes then you can take a look at our YouTube videos, ok master guide to question type one, master guide to question type two, question type three I tell you how to take notes in those videos I tell you how to take very good notes so improve that note taking process and that is going to help you with your content and organization. The other thing that will help you with content and organization is by listening to example responses from students who have gotten 26­+ for toefl speaking, this is one of the best things that I include in our premium course to get 26­+ for toefl speaking, before I have students take the TOEFL, I have them record responses and send them to me and then I save those responses and if they end up getting 26+ on toefl speaking which most of them do, I put those responses in my premium course so that the students were coming through can actually hear what a 26 response sounds like from a nonnative speaker and when you listen to those again and again and again and again and again you have a very good understanding for what you need to do to get 26 on the toefl speaking task in terms of content and organization. One last note, a lot of students that come to me they worry that their content and organization is not good enough, they worry that it's preventing them from getting 26 on toefl speaking, typically they're worrying about the wrong thing so if you're worried that your content and organization is preventing you from getting 26, you are probably wrong. I will repeat that if you're worried but the content and organization of your responses is preventing you from getting 26 on toefl speaking you are probably wrong it is probably something else that is probably your accent and intonation it's probably the words and phrases you use and it might be your pace of speech it could be your fluency but usually when students come to me their content and organization is fine so if that's the case if you think that's preventing you from getting 26, meet with me. Ok schedule TOEFL speaking response analysis which will provide a link to below, we evaluate your responses and will actually tell you what is the real thing that's preventing you from getting 26 on toefl speaking for some students it is content organization but that's very rare typically students want to believe that its content and organization because that you know that's the easy one to fix that's the one they know how to fix but it's usually not usually not the tactics it's usually not the content and organization let's move on now okay so total speaking tactics timing content organization and note taking.

The third thing I get is going to be the words and phrases that you use, yes words and phrases what are the actual words that are coming out of your mouth. First of all if you're using templates and you expect to get 26 on toefl speaking you are shooting yourself in the foot that's a really good idiom to look up, shooting yourself in the foot. Don't use templates in the toefl speaking section when humans communicate when native speakers talking English we do not speak like robots me go to the store or talking with friends were ordering food at a restaurant we don't have pre memorize phrases that we use. Why would you do that and the toefl speaking section? You are trying to show the evaluator that you can speak English well that is the entire point of taking the toefl speaking test. Yes you want to get your MBA yes you want to go to graduate school yes you want to get your PhD you want to you know work as a pharmacist doctor, dentist, physical therapist, teacher but ultimately you need to prove that you can speak English well in order to do those things and the toefl is the medium for you to prove that so why would you speak like a robot on the total speaking section? It doesn't make sense you want to show the evaluators that you can speak English well so don't use templates don't try to memorize formulas, spoken language is not A plus B equals C.  It's not that simple you have to be able to use conversational English at the able to speak English naturally okay so that's the third thing our words and phrases so for not using templates what you need to use is informal colloquial English, natural sounding English and the best way to learn that, the best way to understand what that is by just immersing yourself in as many natural kind of authentic listening resources as possible: podcast, movies, TV shows, the radio, listen to those again and again just notice and pay attention to how native speakers actually talk what it what's the conversational English they don't use the word moreover for I still chuckle have a good chuckle when I have a student come in who uses the word moreover I've never use that word in my entire life. Ever. When I'm speaking English I've written a couple times but I would never use that word to don't use it if there's a word that a native speaker wouldn't use in conversation with other people and you're trying to use it and that'll for speaking response, the professor states that, get it out, eliminate it, it's not helping you. Ok, the words and phrases, eliminate templates, use colloquial informal English. Skill number four is your accent and intonation so your accent and this is probably the biggest thing preventing students from getting 26, this is the real one so where a lot of students think oh it's my content and my organization they come to me and I say no it's your accent the reason they don't want to admit that it's their accent the reason they don't want to have to accept the fact that it is their accent is because that is the most challenging one to improve. That is by far the most challenging thing to improve because it takes time because it takes patience because it's typically not an overnight fix and in our day and age in our society in the way that we live we have been trained to want to find the shortest way possible, we have been trained to want to find a shortcut. Sometimes it's just not possible sometimes you have to take the long way, the challenging way and I see this most often with students who struggle with accent and intonation so as part of accent, there are you know there are multiple areas of accent there's your intonation which is the rhythm of the language, going high, going low, taking pauses, speaking really fast and going from one word to the another it's that type of rhythm that we look at for intonation but then there's also pronunciation, how might actually saying phonetic sounds in the English language and pronunciation takes, it can take anywhere from one to three months to improve to get to a point where you can get 26 which is why students don't want to accept that intonation, sorry they don't want to accept that pronunciation, that accent is the reason they can't get 26 because they don't want to study one to three months they want to say I want to be done with this in two weeks I want to be done with this in three weeks. Now paradoxically, that's a good word paradoxically because they try to shortcut their way to 26 because they try to take the short way, it ends up taking them much longer to actually get the score I've heard I've worked with so many students who have come to me and then like yeah I've already taken the toefl 20 times they started out with the same mindset as you well you know just take the short way I'll take the shortcut in eventually I'll get lucky and I'll get this, it only be a couple months, two months turns into three months three months turns into six months, six months turns into one year, one year turns into three years and then all of a sudden they've spent three to four thousand dollars on taking the test they still haven't passed the gotten 26 on toefl speaking and they've lost all that time and opportunity in terms of making extra money at their job so by trying to take the short cut they've completely failed and actually extended how long it's taking them, and if that's you that's no problem right, it’s part of getting 26 is accepting that that's you accepting that you've made a mistake accepting that you haven't been perfect in the past but that now it's time to change now it's time to get professional help. If you need 26 on toefl speaking and you've taken the test more than three times you need to hire someone who can actually get you twenty six on toefl speaking who has a track record of helping students get 26 on toefl speaking and not 20%, I'm talking 60 to 70 to 80 % like we have at Toefl Speaking Teacher so accent and intonation is skill number four.

Skill number five is your pace of speech and that one's pretty simple I tell students okay fluency is great beautiful speaking tactics are great you using informal words and phrases your accent and intonation is closer and closer to a native speaker well then you just need to speak quick enough need to speak fast enough and I tell them aim for 105 words in question type one and two, aim for about 135 words in question types three six so imagine these five skills like a pyramid okay then I'm gonna provide a graphics you guys can see what I mean but skills one and two fluency and toefl speaking tactics, those form the foundation of the pyramid and first you need to make sure that those are well established then once you've mastered those go to the next step of the pyramid which the words and phrases you're using, once you eliminate the templates, once you use in informal words and phrases then go ahead and go to the next step of the pyramid which is your accent and intonation, work on your accent, work on your intonation, then finally top of the pyramid is your pace of speech but if you try to jump right if you try to say ah my fluency is fine and it's not fine and you try to go work on words and phrases that's a recipe for disaster, you want to first make sure that the foundation is very strong very strong because of the foundation crumbles, if it doesn't go well everything else falls about it so imagine that period will include a graphic below, one other thing the bonus of course that I mentioned what is the one bonus for the skill that everyone needs to master his confidence.

I have too many students who come to me and say you know I can speak fine I can speak English fine when I'm talking with a friend or when I'm having coffee with a friend or when I'm at work like it's no problem but then I get into the toefl speaking section then all of a sudden I can't function I can't give a response I'm too nervous I'm too distracted the environment is challenging all these things are difficult and I ask questions and I try to get into why that's the case and I will record a full podcast episode about this but usually the reason that's the case is because they lack confidence so the one bonus skill that affects everything is confidence, you need to work on improving your confidence, there are a number of ways to do that just system quick advice: focus not on the outcomes, too many students focus and saying I need to get 26 I need to get 26 I need to get 26 and because their focus is so outcome driven that causes a lot of stress and anxiety when they go actually to take the test so kind of reverse that mindset and instead of focusing on the outcome 26 on toefl speaking, I want you to focus on the process I want you to focus on improving those five skills, focus on what you can control to improve your fluency and improve your TOEFL speaking tactics, improve your words and phrases, improve your accent, improve your pace of speech and then do that and after time eventually, eventually you'll be good enough to get 26 and then the outcome it's just a result of having focused on the process. Ok the last thing, guys I'll make this very simple I make this very clear if you have taken toefl for more than three times and you have not gotten 26 on toefl speaking yet you are throwing away money, you’re throwing away money on the actual total test fees, 190 dollars each time you take the test you're throwing away money because for every month or two months or three months that you're not getting 26 on toefl speaking you're literally losing thousands of dollars in extra salary that's not an exaggeration. Pharmacists, full pharmacists make about 90,000 more dollars per year, on a per month basis that means they make somewhere between 6,000 or 7,000 more dollars per month, for every month you don't get 26 in TOEFL speaking if you're a pharmacist we were losing seven thousand dollars which is why I don't understand why students aren´t investing in professional help for this if you take control for more than three times you have not gotten twenty six until full speaking at you need to sign up or register for a response analysis so we can see what's going on with you and then based on that we’ll give you a recommendation about whether private lessons or group lessons or does the self-study course is the best option for you but stop wasting time stop wasting money, invest in your education, invest in getting help and you can get those details on our web pages here on the blog posts if you just listen to this from itunes and you can access at toeflspeakingteacher.com ok toeflspeakingteacher.com thank you so much for listening today guys love string this information with you if you have questions about this please go to our website leave comments on the blog post page I'm happy to answer any questions and like I said I will probably record podcasts about each one of these skills as well, definitely about the confidence aspect of taking the toefl speaking section so thanks again have a great rest of your day.