Episode 74: Jer Thorp on Living in Data and Creating Better Futures
Release Date: 07/22/2021
OODAcast
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In this OODACast, Matt talks with Chris Butler about how concepts like adversarial thinking can be applied to product design and management. Chris is an exemplar of someone who has excelled in his field but also looks to study and bring disruptive ideas like randomness and future framing from other disciplines to determine their value and applicability in product management. As it turns out, he's a big fan of John Boyd's OODA Loop and even made a trip to the Boyd archives where he discovered that Boyd was a fan of a certain science fiction book. Chris Butler is a...
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John Chambers is the legendary former CEO of Cisco, a company he helped grow from $70 million in revenue per year when he joined in 1991 to $1.2 billion a year the year he became CEO to over $48 billion a year by the time he retired in 2015. As a leader John was always known for far more than just revenue growth, he was skilled at building an organization that treated people well, including employees, customers and the community. In this OODAcast we discuss John's book, , which shares his insights into leadership including leadership of organizations that need to disrupt themselves. The...
info_outlineEach year, there are one or two books that deeply resonate with me and become sticky in that I'm thinking about the book often, bringing it up in conversations, and sending out unsolicited recommendations for executives and researchers in my network to check it out. Jer Thorp's "Living in Data: A Citizen's Guide to a Better Information Future" was that book for me in 2021 so I was delighted to host Jer for a conversation on the OODAcast.
Jer Thorp is an artist, writer and teacher living in New York City. He is best known for designing the algorithm to place the nearly 3,000 names on the 9/11 Memorial in Manhattan. Jer was the New York Times' first Data Artist in Residence, is a National Geographic Explorer, and in 2017 and 2018 served as the Innovator in Residence at the Library of Congress. Jer is one of the world's foremost data artists, and is a leading voice for the ethical use of big data.
Jer is like the Indiana Jones of data, thriving not only in the realm of data analysis, but traveling the world to explore new ways to bring data into our local and global decision-making process. In this OODAcast, we go deep on a variety of issues to include:
- Jer's origin story and career experience
- The risks of data bias, adjacencies, and exclusion
- The role of data in understanding our relationship with nature
- How we envision and build better futures
- Working as citizens to derive benefit from our own data to improve our lives
- Lots of great stories about his data adventures and lessons learned along the way including how he was almost killed by a hippo
Additional Bio Details:
Jer’s data-inspired artwork has been shown around the world, including most recently in New York’s Times Square, at the Museum of Modern Art in Manhattan, at the Ars Electronica Center in Austria, and at the National Seoul Museum in Korea. His work has also appeared in a wide variety of publications, including Scientific American, The New Yorker, Popular Science, Fast Company, Business Week, Popular Science, Discover, WIRED and The Harvard Business Review.
Jer’s talks on TED.com have been watched by more than a half-million people. He is a frequent speaker at high profile events such as PopTech, and The Aspen Ideas Festival. Recently, he has spoken about his work at MIT’s Media Lab, The American Museum of Natural History, MoMA, and NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) in Pasadena.
Jer is a Rockefeller Foundation Fellow, and an alumnus of the World Economic Foundation’s Global Agenda Council on Design and Innovation. He is an adjunct Professor in New York University’s renowned Interactive Telecommunications Program (ITP), and is the Co-Founder of The Office for Creative Research. In 2015, Canadian Geographic named Jer one of Canada’s Greatest Explorers.
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