Experience TABL

Congrats to Croixstone consultant Tony Armeni on facilitating his very first TABL event for 15 senior-level executives from NewDominion Bank and Park National Bank.  TABL is Croixstone’s new culinary team-building experience that couples world-class cooking instruction with a customized application of DiSC, the training and development tool designed to improve work productivity, teamwork and communication.


What You Need to Know About Social Enterprises

On April 16th, Social Venture Partners Charlotte (SVP) will host the annual SEED20 program which identifies, highlights, and connects the community to twenty of the region’s most innovative ideas for tackling pressing social challenges. In today’s business world, nonprofits are not the only ones concerned with being integrated into the social fabric of society. Earlier this week, Forbes ran an article titled the “The Rise of the Social Enterprise: A New Paradigm for Business” which illustrates that businesses today need to make a shift in management in order to be more integrated into the social fabric of society.

Social enterprises are revenue-generating businesses with a twist. A social enterprise has two goals that are equally important:
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  1. Achieve social, cultural, community economic and/or environmental outcomes
  2. Earn revenue
In the Forbes’ article, a yearlong research and survey of business and HR leaders by Deloitte revealed that “citizenship and social impact” were rated critical or important by 77% of respondents.
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One of the trends identified is that companies today must be “social” in a truly external sense, and one of the biggest challenges is that C-suite executives are not operating or organized effectively to deal with the new world of economic growth and technology revolution while effectively addressing diversity, inclusion, fairness, equity at work and more.
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There are two dimensions to the evolution of social enterprise.
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  • Moving from an organization which operates as a functional hierarchy to one that operates as a “network of teams.”
  • Each part of the company looks at the impact of external factors and the company’s footprint in the external world.
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Click here to read more about the new paradigm shift for businesses addressed in the article and click here to learn why social enterprise can be a win-win for companies.

Biotechnology And Its Applications

Another core technology altering nearly every dimension of our lives as outlined in a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article is biotechnology. Biotechnology is really the combination of technology, chemistry, and life sciences.  At first glance, many business leaders may believe that biotechnology only impacts the health care field. The rapid advances in biotechnology, however, show enormous promise and have the potential to “both expand existing industry boundaries and create entirely new industries,” according to Dr. Albert H. Segars, author of the article and PNC Distinguished Professor of Strategy and Entrepreneurship and Faculty Director of the Center for Sustainable Enterprise at the University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School.

Biotechnology Applications

  • Industrial Processing – applications in product development, pollution control, bio-recycling, and hazardous waste.
  • Biometrics/Bio-identification – expanding the use of biomarkers as a gateway to information access and commerce.
  • Bioinformatics – analysis of large sets of data used in the Human Genome Project, Disney’s theme park design, and more.
  • Medical – advancements in the field of genomics, production of vaccines, antibiotics, gene therapy, and personalization of implantable devices.
  • Food & Agriculture – significant gains in the production of plants, improved quality of livestock, pest-resistance crops, nutrient supplementation, and manufactured power fibers.
  • Energy – alternative energy sources, production of biofuels from algae and other plant and waste sources.

Click here to read the entire MIT Sloan Management Review article.


Pervasive Computing 101

In a recent MIT Sloan Management Review article, Dr. Albert H. Segars from University of North Carolina Kenan-Flagler Business School outlined seven core technologies that are altering nearly every dimension of our lives and their implications for commerce, health care, learning, the environment and more.  According to Dr. Segars, pervasive computing is one of the core technologies that every business leader should become familiar with as the digital revolution rages on.

Pervasive computing, also called ubiquitous computing, is a concept where information, media, context, and processing power are delivered conveniently to us in all kinds of things. The Apple Watch’s ability to alert users of incoming phone calls and to allow users to complete calls through the watch, is an example of pervasive computing. The large network of connected microprocessors embedded in everyday objects allows access to information from virtually anywhere and at any time.

First pioneered in the late 1980s at the Olivetti Research Laboratory in Cambridge England, the development of the “Active Badge“, a small clip-on microcomputer employee ID card, enabled the company to track employee movement. This spurred articles by the The New York Times, ComputerWorld and other publications about George Orwell’s Big Brother prediction coming true.

Mark Weiser, considered to be the father of ubiquitous computing, soon began building early ubiquitous computing devices with his colleagues at Xerox PARC and popularized the term “pervasive computing” with the creation of IBM’s Pervasive Computing division.
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Today, pervasive computing generally involves wireless communications and networking technologies, mobile devices, embedded systems, wearables, wireless sensors, voice recognition, AI and more. According to a recent study report published by Market Research Future, the global market of pervasive computing technology is booming and expected to gain prominence. Technology advancements and the increased demand for Internet of Things (IoT) continue to drive the growth.
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Application of Pervasive Computing Technology:
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  • Communications
  • Logistics
  • Transportation (by air, land and sea)
  • Energy
  • Learning
  • Military
  • Banking/Finance
  • Production
  • Smart Homes
  • E-commerce
  • Security & Safety
  • Healthcare/Medical Technology
  • Media
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To learn more, read:
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Happy Pi Day!

For those of us who love numbers, we know the significance of today…it’s Pi Day! What makes pi (π) so special? You may recall from your days in school that pi is the ratio of a circle’s circumference (the distance around the circle) to its diameter (the distance across the circle at its widest point), and the digits of pi never end and never show a pattern. Some of us even memorized the starting digits of pi, 3.14159265359…

Due to its connection to cycles and its involvement in equations relevant to circular or harmonic motion, pi is used every day in billions of computations, from large-scale supercomputers simulating the earth’s climate to the mechanics behind your ability to talk on your cell phone. Here are just a few of the areas where pi is used:
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  • Normal Probability Distribution – Sometimes referred to as the bell curve, normal distributions show up in nearly every specialized field of study — finance, medicine, physics, engineering, etc. — and is applicable to a wide range of natural phenomena such as standardized test scores, lifespan of a product, rolling of dice, and tracking of population dynamics.
  • Signal Processing & Spectrum Analysis – Pi is found in sine waves, used for signal processing in sound and light waves. Watching tv or listening to the radio, taking an ultrasound of a baby in the womb, and studying the behavior of ocean waves all involve the use of pi. Your cell phone technology uses pi when communicating with a local cell tower.
  • Other Applications – The design of clocks, the skin of an airplane, GPS navigation, the make-up of your DNA, the construction of arches, bridges and buildings, and the rhythms of sleep and wakefulness that govern our bodies can also all be determined or described using pi.
There is an endless number of applications of pi. Even though we can’t see pi, it is at work in the world around us each day.
Happy Pi Day from Croixstone Consulting!