| Our best ideas, quick and curated | July 8, 2022
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| This week, how to make fun a priority, not an afterthought. Plus, personalized vitamins and the future of wellness, and Tech for Execs explains the crucial role of data products. |
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| Are you having enough fun? It’s a darn good question, especially during this mellower summer season for many of us. McKinsey recently interviewed Catherine Price about her new book, The Power of Fun: How to Feel Alive Again. She offered tips on how to incorporate more playfulness—both at work and at home—and why having fun boosts happiness and resilience. Here’s an edited version of her Author Talks conversation. |
| Fun as a tool. We typically think of fun as something that we can only have or experience when things are already going well, but what I’ve come to realize is that the opposite is true. Actually, fun can boost our resilience and our spirits in a way that makes it easier for us to cope with whatever life may throw our way, whether it’s a global pandemic or anything else. We really need to rethink how we think about fun—less as a treat that we have only if everything’s already going great and more as a tool that we can tap into to help ourselves weather the challenges that life may present. |
| Go with the flow. Flow is the psychological state in which you get so absorbed in your present experience that you lose track of time, like an athlete in the midst of a game or a musician playing a piece of music or even when you’re in the middle of a really engaging conversation. The important point here is that flow is very different from what’s known as “junk flow,” which is the passive state we get into when we’re just consuming content. I’ve come to conclude that when we are having what people describe as fun—true fun—three elements are present: playfulness, connection, and flow. |
| It takes effort to prioritize fun. Think back on your own life to reflect on what activities, people, and settings typically generate fun for you, and then actually make space for those things in your calendar. You will be happier, you’ll be healthier, you’ll be more productive and creative. I signed up for guitar class, and I started feeling this buoyancy and energy that really kept my spirits raised for the rest of the week. I thought, “This is really interesting. What is this feeling that I’m experiencing?” And I realized that the best word to describe it was fun. |
| Start a ‘delight’ practice. This is a way to introduce a fun mindset, which means becoming more appreciative of opportunities for fun that already exist. Simply resolve to notice things in your environment that bring you any delight. They don’t need to be profound or awe inspiring. A friend texted me a picture of ice crystals on his windshield, along with the word “delight.” He lives in Boston where it’s cold, and he could have said, “I hate scraping ice off my windshield all winter.” Try spending time at work sharing delights. You can do it on Slack or wherever you use workplace communication. It brings people closer, gives them something positive to notice in their lives, and is self-reinforcing. And guess what? It’s fun. |
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| OFF THE CHARTS |
| Europe converges on digital adoption |
| McKinsey’s third annual Digital Sentiment Survey in Europe found that digital adoption remains strong and that there has been a convergence in capabilities among countries in the European Union. Austria and Germany, which have traditionally been slower to adopt digital behaviors, saw the greatest surge in adoption, catching up in industries such as banking, healthcare, and grocery. The United Kingdom had the highest adoption overall, while the Czech Republic, France, Greece, and Portugal saw the greatest decreases in adoption.
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| INTERVIEW |
| ‘Find the smartest technologist in the company and make them CEO’ |
| Marc Andreessen, a Silicon Valley stalwart who has launched the likes of NCSA Mosaic, Netscape, and Opsware, has a unique perspective on how new technologies develop, disrupt, and create opportunities for business. In an interview for the McKinsey Quarterly, he tackles tech trends such as artificial intelligence, crypto, and Web3—and digs into why incumbents still have a tough time competing with digital start-ups. “No matter what big Fortune 500 companies say, they still don’t consider themselves technology companies first and foremost,” he says. |
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| TECH FOR EXECS |
| Getting out of the data doldrums with data products |
| McKinsey experts serve up a periodic look at the technology concepts that leaders need to understand to help their organizations grow and thrive in the digital age. |
| What they are. Data products are high-quality, ready-to-use, and reusable sets of data that people across an organization can easily access and apply to different business challenges. For example, a data product could provide a 360-degree view of an important entity, such as customers, employees, product lines, or branches. Or it could deliver a given data capability, such as a digital twin that replicates the operation of real-world assets. |
| Data products sit on top of existing data lakes and storage, and they incorporate the wiring and technologies necessary for different business systems to consume the data within them. Think of them like Lego bricks that are readily available in a published catalog and can, for example, snap into an AI application, like a product recommendation engine, quickly.
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| Why you need them. While nearly every company recognizes the power of data, most still struggle to harness it. Typically, data teams end up piecing together the data sets and technologies anew for every application they build. This approach results in significant duplication; a tangle of bespoke technology architectures that are costly to build, manage, and maintain; and neither the near-term nor long-term ROI that companies seek. |
| For teams building data-driven applications, data products eliminate the long cycles spent searching for data, processing them into the needed formats, and building bespoke data sets and data pipelines. We’ve seen businesses use this approach and deliver new business applications as much as 90 percent faster. Data products can also reduce total cost of ownership—including technology, development, and maintenance costs—by 30 percent and significantly lessen the risk and data-governance burden. |
| A large national bank, for example, developed a customer data product that has powered nearly 60 use cases, ranging from real-time scoring of credit risk to chatbots that answer customers’ questions, across multiple channels. These use cases already provide $60 million in annual incremental revenue and eliminate $40 million in losses annually (for example, those related to fraud). The impact will continue to grow as new use cases are supported. |
| How to make data products work for you. A data product is quite similar to a consumer product and should be managed like one. Each data product should have dedicated management and funding, a set of standards that governs its development, quality assurance, and a way to track both the product’s performance and user input so it can be improved over time. Want more on the “how” of data products? We recently shared our thoughts in this Harvard Business Review article. |
| What technology concepts would you like us to help explain next? Let us know. |
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| — Edited by Barbara Tierney |
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| BACKTALK |
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