Hasta La Gadget!

Apple has brought on the former head of BlackBerry’s automotive software division to lead its own self-driving car tech projects.

The physical home button has always been a point of contention amongst iPhone users as it does have the potential to wear out, which can be rather annoying and inconvenient. However if the rumors are true, 2017’s iPhone is said to be ditching the home button, so the question is where does this leave Touch ID?

It has been suggested that Touch ID will embedded underneath a piece of glass on the front of the iPhone, and it looks like the speculation has proven to be true. In a recently discovered patent from Apple, it hints at the company’s plans to create devices in which Touch ID could be used without the need for a button.

As you can see in the diagram above, it suggests that while the phone could retain the home button, Touch ID could be used anywhere on the phone, even on the screen itself. What makes this patent more compelling is its inventor, Dale R. Setlak, the co-founder of AuthenTec whom Apple acquired back in 2012.

It should be pointed out that a button-less fingerprint recognition system isn’t exactly new. Qualcomm unveiled their own solution back in 2015 called Sense ID in which it relies on ultra-sonic technology to detect and read the user’s fingerprint. That being said, as much as we’d like this to be true, it is only a patent which means there’s no guarantee that it will be applied to an actual product, but if anything it does seem to be in line with what we’ve heard so far.

Apple Patent Hints At A Button-less Touch ID For The Future , original content from Ubergizmo. Read our Copyrights and terms of use.

NBA legend Kareem Abdul-Jabbar delivered one of the Democratic National Convention’s best jabs at Donald Trump, succinctly skewering the GOP nominee’s bigotry with a joke invoking another famous basketball player. 

Abdul-Jabbar made a brief appearance at the convention Thursday evening to introduce the father of U.S. Army Capt. Humayun Khan, one of 14 American Muslims who has died serving in the military since 9/11. 

“I’m Michael Jordan, and I’m here with Hillary,” said Abdul-Jabbar. “I said that because I know that Donald Trump couldn’t tell the difference.” 

Abdul-Jabbar, who was named U.S. cultural ambassador by then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton in 2012, detailed how Khan’s story stands in direct contrast to Trump’s xenophobic rhetoric. 

“At its core, discrimination is a result of fear,” he said. “Those who think Americans scare easily enough to abandon the country’s ideals in exchange for a false sense of security underestimate our resolve. To them, we say only this: Not here, not ever.”

Watch the clip above.

Editor’s note: Donald Trump regularly incites political violence and is a serial liar, rampant xenophobe, racist, misogynist and birther who has repeatedly pledged to ban all Muslims ― 1.6 billion members of an entire religion ― from entering the U.S.

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Mark D’Arcy thinks we are living through the most fertile era for creativity in eight decades. But that doesn’t necessarily mean he thinks we should simply get more creative.

The chief creative officer of Facebook’s Creative Shop sees an “extraordinary opportunity” to “transform entire industries”.

His group is a team of brand marketers, creative directors and strategists who build ideas to help clients grow their business, building tools, processes and creatives to make ad experiences sing.

“A lot of people always pursue these things by saying,” D’Arcy tells Beet.TV in this video interview. ‘We need to be more creative’.

“Creativity, when I got into the business, was a very focused group of people who lived within a certain single set of businesses called creative agencies. What we have seen … is the fragmentation of creative sources, of clients aggregating creativity from a multitude of different sources.

“Lots of different people have ideas. We don’t need to be ‘more creative’, we need to be more connected. Because there’s a lot of very bright people in a lot of different areas around a brand or a brand idea that need to come together to bring that idea not just to life, but to scale it.”

In May, Facebook’s Creative Shop announced it would team with Digitas Studios to make “built-for-feed’ content, including Rise & Shine, a morning talk show with local weather, workouts, recipes and more.

This video is part of a Beet.TV series titled “Unlocking the Creative and Connect Potential of Video” which is sponsored by Facebook.  For more videos from the series, visit this page.   You can also find the series on Facebook’s media page.  

You can find this post on Beet.TV.

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by Dawna Jones, Connecting Decisions to Creating Prosperity

Are company decision makers setting executives up to fail?
Or is something else going on?

Fifty to seventy-five percent of newly hired executives fail in the first eighteen months. Apart from predicable reasons such as inadequate formal development, absence of coaching during the adjustment combined with insufficient understanding of the role, executives, experienced or not, are no longer standing on anything resembling familiar territory. The entire context is changing fast. So fast that you cannot assume anything from the past, apart from your ingenuity, applies. Increasing complexity makes mockery of past practices or best practices particularly when dealing with surprises such as tech innovations obliterating business models over night. It’s the fork in the road separating old paradigm leadership consciousness with the choice to dive deeper into expanding consciousness and leadership built for complexity.

An Overview of the Consciousness Levels – Leadership Mindset

Richard Barrett defines consciousness as ‘awareness with a purpose’. From my personal experience awareness is the driver of decisions and all actions, whether you are aware of it or not. When you are not aware, it is hard to achieve personal and professional fulfillment. Instead, you wind up doing the same things over and over again until a new and scary experience interrupts all assumptions about how the world works. Marital meltdowns or loss of financial security are two of the many ways offering an chance to rethink and refresh perception of your world.

Bill Torbert’s model, ably described by MetaIntegral Associates, complements earlier work done by Richard Barrett mapping consciousness developmentally (and fairly predictable organizationally). Vlatka Hlupic’s recent research on leaders mindset builds on a similar foundation, not surprisingly since being human is the common thread. The conclusions in Torbert’s work point to U.S. adults and refer to what people actually to when confronted with issues of power and timing, which are equally relevant in personal and professional working relationships.

Roughly speaking the levels break down into what decisions are focused on. (See HBR for the full article or MetaIntegral.)

• Levels 1-3: Focuses on meeting immediate needs, protection, conflict, anxiety, not coachable. Seeking socially accepted approval, black and white (we-they) thinking, status conscious, feedback is perceived viewed as lack of approval. Focused on procedure and efficiency. Relies on rules, reason and logic preferring a technical expert view for feedback. Wants to choose the ‘right’ approach. 55% of U.S. adults fall into Levels 1-3.
• Level 4: Focuses on successful delivery of expectations within the context of the existing system. Causal thinker, looking for relationships. Willingness to learn. 30% of U.S. adults fit Level 4.
• Level 5-7: Focuses on contextual connections, seeing more deeply into the inter-relationships and personal role. Naturally collaborative, comfortable with diversity and open to learning. Generating organizational and personal transformation. Works with conflict as a constructive force. Growth oriented. Focuses on the interaction of awareness, thought, impacts, attuned to meaning, understands the interaction between the formal and informal system. 15% of U.S. adults fit into Levels 5-7.
• Level 8: Focuses on vision, going with the flow of experience, unifying perspective, can shift and hold multiple perspectives fluently. Respects each person’s unique essence. .05% of U.S. adults fit into Level 8

[Summarized from The Future of Leadership for Conscious Capitalism by Barrett C. Brown]

The dissonance is clear.

Increasing complexity, innovation and exponential growth demands Levels 5-8 leadership consciousness, which, in turn, powers decision-making, creativity and innovation. Leadership consciousness hasn’t yet made the leap. Workplaces still reflect traditional levels of leadership consciousness resting in levels 1-4. Stress and failure is a logical consequence.

Moving Up Levels

Moving from one level to the next is neither logical nor sequential and a much longer process than can be practically addressed here but the catalyst is the same. Start with a yearning for growth, personal fulfillment, guided by a massive purpose that benefits the world, serves, and makes a difference will ultimately lead you to contributing to peaceful coexistence with the living world and humanity as a whole. It is a personal and a collective collaboration that permeates workplaces, working relationships and seeps into personal relationships bringing a person into a state of unified ‘wholeness’ at peak moments. You feel invincible and intrinsically powerful no matter what you face.

The journey, based on my experience, incorporates somatic awareness, emotional self-regulation, clarity of focus and a passion for learning using the worst situations to become a better human. Confronting your own illusions is as critical a part of the process as trusting in compassion for your self and others. More than a two-three day workshop, expanding consciousness uses unfamiliar situations, such as being propelled into an executive position drenched with uncertainty to leverage learning and expansion to reawaken deeper wisdom and innate intelligence described in books but found in you.

Tips for Using Unfamiliar Territory for Expansion and Growth

Bring Your Ingenuity-Let Go of Habits: Executives, or anyone else for that matter, entering new territory are easily tempted to reach into their trusted toolbox and use what worked before. For instance, when moving from operational to executive positions, the context for decisions changes radically from fairly predictable to completely volatile. The move demands awareness that your context has changed and so must you. From relying on the concrete to accessing your intuitive intelligence allows for working more effectively with data and the unknown.

• Develop contextual awareness to adapt your decision making to the context.

Become Aware of Focus-Use Vulnerability: Selectively focused on keeping the company afloat exposes a blind side to quietly simmering, or rapid-fire disruption, leaving the company and executives vulnerable to epic failure. Oddly it is vulnerability that serves as the greatest ally. In the state of vulnerability you are receptive to creative ideas, different approaches that beg standing back, and reexamining the situation before taking action. However, under the ninety-day pressure to produce results, most are too absorbed in keeping the company above water to notice. The pressure alone, and failure to recognize it and address it directly, further increases risk of failure.

• Decisions and attention follow focus. Observe moment-to-moment what pressures push you to respond, then reclaim control over what is steering your attention. Step back, take a walk until you can see more clearly what is going on.

Learn how to pattern-spot – Watch for abnormalities: Conventional expectations, tangled up with entrenched systemic habits, trigger default responses. Reacting usurps collective intelligence, which is far more accurate. Without engaging all in the company in creative solutions, you create disengagement and lose or repress talent.

The patterns you witness are systemic holding patterns that will sabotage your efforts to do things differently. Spotting patterns and recognizing them as a reflection of the deeply held belief system, puts control back in your hands for making the cultural systemic adjustments needed to ensure your company has a hope of becoming agile enough to meet today’s challenges.

With fluency in pattern spotting, the abnormalities are in plain view. Those abnormalities are the window for innovation, for releasing stuck patterns in thinking or decision making, for mitigating or (better still) using risk to your advantage.

Trust in Yourself

Your mission of leadership consciousness expansion, should you choose to accept it, will take you into all domains of your humanity. Trust that when you are faced with a mountain bigger than you’ve ever climbed before some part of you will step forward to guide or give you strength.
You’ll encounter and dismantle your identity so that humility can replace the ego’s role in protecting your personality. And you’ll release suppressed parts of yourself that are begging to see the light of day and to be released into the world that needs all of you to show up, be present and speak your truth without blame or judgment. As you can tell, I speak from experience.

Will you join me on the path to expanded consciousness where struggle gives way to co-creating tomorrow at a scale humanity has not yet achieved?

Dawna Jones collaborates with decision makers and leaders at all levels to advance self and contextual awareness needed in rapid and radical change. Contact her through www.FromInsightToAction.com or LinkedIn.

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