Weekend Reading, Listening and Watching Recommendations (January 24, 2025)
The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond; 9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2025 and Beyond; The science of better workplace conversations; The Rise Of AI Agents And Agentic Reasoning
Read: The How We Need Now: A Capacity Agenda for 2025 and Beyond (by Jennifer Pahlka, ex-deputy CTO, US and founder Code for America): This compelling preview of a Niskanen Center report offers a non-partisan roadmap for transforming America's struggling administrative state, focusing on four key priorities: modernizing civil service, reducing bureaucratic bloat, upgrading digital infrastructure, and bridging the policy-implementation gap. Whether you lean left or right, the report argues that fixing the government's ability to execute effectively isn't just about cutting programs – it's about ensuring that vital institutions can actually deliver on their missions, making this essential reading for anyone concerned about the future of American governance. She discusses the report in this podcast.
Read: 9 Trends That Will Shape Work in 2025 and Beyond (via Harvard Business Review): Leaders face a perfect storm in 2025: They need to build a workforce ready for an AI-transformed future, reinvent what it means to be a manager in this new landscape, and navigate mounting talent risks that could make or break their organizations. Gartner's latest research cuts through the noise to show executives exactly what's at stake and how to tackle these intertwined challenges.
Listen: The science of better workplace conversations (via FT Working It podcast): What can we learn about the way we speak by analysing thousands of everyday conversations? Alison Wood Brooks, an associate professor at Harvard Business School, and author of the forthcoming book, Talk: The Science of Conversation and the Art of Being Ourselves, explains how to plan a conversation even when you don’t know who you’ll be speaking to, how we misunderstand apologies, and why there’s no such thing as too many questions.
Watch: Andrew Ng Explores The Rise Of AI Agents And Agentic Reasoning: This video explores how AI is rapidly evolving, highlighting the potential of agentic AI workflows to revolutionize applications and problem-solving in areas like text, images, and video. The discussion reveals how these advancements enable faster experimentation and development, meaning that new capabilities previously requiring months to build can now be prototyped in days and that the ability to leverage the power of AI to unlock value from visual data can be transformative for small teams and large businesses.