(Courtesy of TED
here are three mind-expanding illustrated talks.)
CAN WOMEN CHANGE THE WORLD ECONOMY BY THINKING BIGGER? You
bet they can!
Women aren't micro -- so why do they only get micro-loans? Gayle Tzemach Lemmon argues that women running all types of firms -- from home businesses to major factories -- are the overlooked key to economic development. Lemmon never set out to write about women entrepreneurs. She was simply looking for a great—and underreported—economics story after leaving ABC News for MBA study at Harvard to pursue her interest in economic development. What she found was women entrepreneurs in some of the toughest business environments creating jobs against daunting obstacles. Since then her writing on entrepreneurship has appeared in publications including the International Herald Tribune and Financial Times along with the World Bank and the International Finance Corporation. While working in finance at the global investment firm PIMCO, Lemmon went on to write a book about a young Afghan teacher-turned-entrepreneur whose dressmaking business supported women around her neighborhood under the Taliban. "The Dressmaker of Khair Khana" became a New York Times bestseller and the subject of a Harvard Business School case study. Now a fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and a contributing editor-at-large for Newsweek Daily Beast, Lemmon continues to travel the world reporting on economic and development issues with a focus on women. She is author of the Newsweek March 2011 cover story "The Hillary Doctrine" and the September 2011 profile on U.N. Women's Michelle Bachelet.
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CAN WE SAVE THE WORLD WITH ALGAE AND SEAWATER? You bet we can!
Bilal Bomani runs NASA’s Greenlab research facility, where he is developing the next generation of biofuels. As a senior NASA scientist, Bomani focuses on developing new and truly sustainable biofuels. After receiving two masters degrees from Cleveland State University, he earned his PhD in computer engineering from Case Western University. He currently runs the Greenlab Research Facility in Cleveland, Ohio, where he works on creating biofuels that don’t use freshwater, and meet his definition of green: sustainable, renewable and alternative.
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CAN TOO MUCH CHOICE RESULT IN NO CHOICE?
You bet it can!
Sheena Iyengar studies how people choose (and what makes us think we're good at it). We all think we're good at making choices; many of us even enjoy making them. Iyengar looks deeply at choosing and has discovered many surprising things about it. For instance, her famous "jam study," done while she was a grad student, quantified a counter-intuitive truth about decisionmaking -- that when we're presented with too many choices, like 24 varieties of jam, we tend not to choose anything at all. (This and subsequent, equally ingenious experiments have provided rich material for Malcolm Gladwell and other pop chroniclers of business and the human psyche.) Iyengar's research has been informing business and consumer-goods marketing since the 1990s. But she and her team at the Columbia Business School throw a much broader net. Her analysis touches, for example, on the medical decisionmaking that might lead up to choosing physician-assisted suicide, on the drawbacks of providing too many choices and options in social-welfare programs, and on the cultural and geographical underpinning of choice. Her book The Art of Choosing shares her research in an accessible and charming story that draws examples from her own life. She has also posted a short video called "Ballet Slippers" on Facebook.
