Normally I’d be flying around the world to attend a handful of conferences between the end of summer and end of the year. Here in 2020, we instead get the global, online, virtual conferences. Earlier this week I attended The Future Summit, hosted annually by the Segal Family Foundation. Lovely event. Only trouble was that it was scheduled for East Africa Time, GMT+3, and I live in Pacific...
Spending too many hours per day on Zoom? Finding Zoom calls far more draining than phone-based conference calls and face-to-face meetings? Yes and yes for me, and I’ve been experimenting to try and figure out how to overcome Zoom Fatigue. Over the summer (and before the unbreathable smokey air showed up), I took pleasure in any meeting that was by phone rather than Zoom, as that let me get...
The New York Times shared an enlightening graph last Sunday. A graph of deaths per year per 1,000 people living in New York City. Here we are in the midst of a horrific global pandemic. Over 13 million known infections and more than half a million known deaths, and counting. This disease is far from the worst of history. As of today, the death rate in New York City is 19 per 10,000 or 1.9 per...
COVID-19 is the ninth pandemic since 1900, the thirteenth since 1800, and the seventeenth since the Black Death decimated Europe. Pandemics happen! A visualization of past and present pandemics, from VisualCapitalist.com
“How in the world [is Africa] going to deal with this? We didn’t plan for disease. They are putting dead bodies in the streets” – Melinda Gates When Melinda Gates, co-creator of the world’s largest foundation, largest non-government philanthropist for healthcare and hunger doesn’t know of a solution, there is no solution coming. I’ve been writing about...
Two months after predicting a hunger crisis in Africa, and there is a hunger crisis in Africa. The news on this has been sparse, but its starting to trickle out. Today the story was posted on Foreign Affairs. The novel coronavirus has overwhelmed public health systems and jolted economies around the world. Now it is poised to spark a global hunger crisis as well. After decades of progress in the...
Both McKinsey and the International Monetary Fund published papers in the last week talking about the current and coming food security issues in Africa. McKinsey McKinsey’s paper is Safeguarding Africa’s food systems through and beyond the crisis. TL;DR: Africa is a net importer of food and requires $6 billion worth of imported inputs to grow the food it grows. So far, the breakdowns in the...
Three months ago I started posting about the coronavirus pandemic. If this hadn’t turned into such a huge national and global tragedy, it would be quaint to look back at the very first graph and try and remember just how naive everyone was when a bad day was not even 70 new cases. A day under three months later and 21,000 new cases in the U.S. would be a good day. Here we are in June...
The 2nd of June, 2020. The United States of America. More divided than united at the moment, still fighting the worst pandemic in the last 100 years, and for the past week nightly aflame with civil unrest. How does this story end? How do protests end? How do pandemics end? How does life ever go back to a pattern that feels normal? I’m an entrepreneur. I have been for almost 30 years. Part...
When the world gives you a pandemic, make lemonade??? Maybe, if what your city needs most of all is lemonade. Most likely it is something else. But what? Well… unless you live in China, the good news is that some country is ahead of yours in terms of dealing with the pandemic, and thus you can look to see how they dealt with their epidemic to better guess how your customers will deal with...
