Room for Improvement
Looking to be a leader in your workplace or in your profession? Here are some resources that can help you in that quest.
December 2015/January 2016Exponential Organizations
By Salim Ismail
In this book, Salim Ismail, keynote speaker for the opening general session at the 2015 SOA Annual Meeting & Exhibit, looks at how companies can leverage assets like community, big data, algorithms and new technology to achieve performance benchmarks up to 10 times faster than the competition.
Ismail also shares the 10 characteristics that exponential organizations have in common and walks readers through how any company—from a startup to a multinational organization—can streamline its performance and grow to the next level.
Ismail is a technology strategist, best-selling author and executive director of Singularity University, and former vice president of Yahoo!
SOA CPD Tracker
Keeping track of your Continuing Professional Development (CPD) credits has never been so easy with this new tool. Designed by actuaries for actuaries, the SOA CPD Tracker is a free tool that will help actuaries track their CPD credits on mobile devices or other online connections.
TED Talk with Shawn Achor—The Happiness Advantage: Linking Positive Brains to Performance
Positive psychology expert Shawn Achor is one of the world’s leading authorities on the connection between happiness and success. His internationally best-selling book, The Happiness Advantage, gives us five actionable, proven ways to see the world through a more positive lens to increase motivation, engagement and creativity, and help us reach our personal and professional goals. His TED Talk is one of the most popular of all time, with over 11 million views.
Achor was the keynote speaker at the presidential luncheon during the 2015 SOA Annual Meeting & Exhibit. The positive psychology expert graduated magna cum laude from Harvard, where he taught for over a decade and earned a master’s degree in Christian and Buddhist ethics. In 2006 he was named Head Teaching Fellow for “Positive Psychology,” which eclipsed “Intro to Economics” as the most popular course at Harvard. He founded Good Think Inc. in 2007 to share his research with the world. He has lectured or researched in 49 countries, speaking to CEOs in China, school children in South Africa, doctors in Dubai and farmers in Zimbabwe.
Interview with Judith Glaser, Keynote Speaker at 2015 Life and Annuity Symposium
Judith Glaser, organizational anthropologist and author of Conversational Intelligence: How Great Leaders Build Trust & Get Extraordinary Results, discusses conversational intelligence, self-awareness and how to listen to connect with Kelly Hennigan, vice chair of the SOA’s Leadership & Development Section Council, during the 2015 Life and Annuity Symposium.
Actuarial Glossary—From A to Z
The Actuarial Glossary contains several hundred actuarial terms and their definitions to assist actuaries in their everyday work. Terms from the Actuarial Glossary can be shared via email and marked as favorites for easy retrieval. Actuarial Glossary users may also request new terms be added to the Glossary to further enhance and enrich this robust reference tool for actuaries.
If you know of a tool that might be beneficial to other actuaries, please let us know by sending and email theactuary@soa.org.