Why You Need to Read ‘Invisible Women’ Now
If you’re involved with setting policy, allocating funding, designing products or services and delivering on them, then one book you simply must have read is the absolutely astounding ‘Invisible Women’ by Caroline Criado Perez.
What Perez has done with this book is ALL OF THE RESEARCH you need to have available to you when you make decisions about your business. It is a jaw dropping piece of work for it lays bare just how badly things can go wrong, when you’re missing crucial data in your workplace, in your design team, in your strategy department.
Women reading the book will probably get angry. Sure you’ll have lived it, but just the extent of the battle in ALL domains of society is covered.
If you’re male, you might find this book confronting for it shows just how much your organisation is probably missing when it comes to making effective and profitable decisions. Trust me, you won’t like what it exposes, the short sightedness of the people you work with (maybe even your own thinking) and how that short sightedness is costing you hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars every year. Of course you’ll be concerned about the (now?) obvious social implications, and given the decision bias we all tend to cling to, this book is the starting point for change – just why do ‘we’ ignore this opportunity?
It’s worth the discussion. It’s an eye opener. And like a good family barbecue where the salads have been made, guests invited, house cleaned, meat bought, drinks organised, tables set, kids tendered for, all YOU have to do men, is read it. Like cooking the meat, knowing what’s in the book and acting on it will bring you high praise and huge benefits. Trust me though, the prep work has already been done.
Have just spent a few hours discussing the Future of Money, hosted by James Bibby at Microsoft in Sydney and facilitated by Peter Vander Auwera from SWIFT/Innotribe. I’d like to flag that everyone understood that the session was way too short for such a big topic and everyone would agree that we just scratched the…
Read More >Ernst & Young and GreenBiz have completed a survey of business executives looking at the development of Corporate Sustainability around the world. The report shows that there has been a clear rise in awareness; that employees are a core source driving sustainability actions; that reduction of costs is a core appeal and that return on…
Read More >On the eve of ANZAC day here in Australia ABC Radio Darwin’s Vicki Kerrigan chats with futurist Marcus Barber on the future of war – what the future triggers of war might be and how war will be fought Increasing technology or less technology? Haves versus the have nots? On a pretty serious topic…
Read More >In this chat with Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Radio Darwin, we chat about workplace design and the need to create functional workplaces – something the ‘open-plan’ model fails utterly at delivering. Click on the link below Futurist Marcus Barber on ABC Radio Darwin discussing the future of workplace design and the challenges of dysfunctional workplaces…
Read More >Columbia University’s Earth Institute have just made publicly available their World Happiness Report, joining the expanding list of happiness reports emerging ultimately from Bhutan’s Happiness Index. There’s some interesting results in this one and some that you might expect were more obvious, like the idea that at a certain point, more money won’t make you…
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Read More >Strategic Futurist Marcus Barber chats with Vicki Kerrigan on ABC Radio Darwin about the challenges facing the Northern Territory, the farming and mining sectors. In summing up the emerging signs of a clash between agricultural uses of land and land use for resource and mining needs, Marcus uses the phrase ‘Eat or Extract’ as the…
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Read More >A new city is due to emerge in Darwin over the coming couple of years and the key question is – what sort of attention is being paid to weather related disasters in the design phase? Paul Dale on ABC Radio Darwin chats with futurist Marcus Barber about planning and weather. You can download the…
Read More >Dorothea Mackellar’s poem ‘My Country’ is best known for its second verse – “I love a sunburnt country, A land of sweeping plains, Of ragged mountain ranges, Of droughts and flooding rains”. As vast tracts of Australia again face the prospect of massive floods I wonder if our Urban Planners ever consider the significance of…
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