A bit of a grab bag this week for you; this article goes pretty deep into why Gravity Payments decided to give all of its employees a minimum salary of $70,000, how that has changed the culture of that company, and the positive and negative effects of that decision (note that revenue and profits have increased at pace with the additional costs).

Next is a collection of TED Talks that really is one of the better sets I’ve come across in a long time.   Right off the bat, the way the statistical data is graphically represented in the first talk just really floored me … and I was a bit shocked by how the data was so clearer to see due to how it was presented, much less what the content was.  I’ve seen many of these before and have to say that it truly is a great collection.  Many of these are in the twenty minute range and I found the easiest way to approach them was to just pick one to watch each morning as I got started with my day.

What about the arrogance of tech? In this opinion article, Bob O’Donnell scratches the surface of the “we’re a tech company, we know better and can do it better than anyone else” attitude that we often run into.  While there is a competitive, first mover advantage mindset that dominates the tech industry, the question to be asked is how can the new players venturing into things like auto manufacturing (Apple, Google) learn from or partner with the stalwarts f that industry.  Yes, usually you don’t chart a course to blue ocean doing the same thing you’ve always done, but there’s a lot of ingenuity coming out of traditional industry giants as well – just look at this Day Made of Glass video from Corning as an example of what the future may bring.

Last is an article from Bloomberg Business Week about the trend among companies to hire women to fill top Cybersecurity posts.  It touches briefly on how in the 80s women were filling coding and pre-cursor big data roles and how that has evolved to position some of them into a role as cyber security experts and leaders in their companies.  It’ll be interesting to see how this continues to evolve as we see some course correction from the trend in the 90s and 00s to drive women (and girls) away from programming how these high profile women may bring even more women into technology careers.