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<ul><li><keyword id="6355629" type="General" weightage="100" keywordseo="google" source="Orion">Google</keyword> is inviting applications from women in Asia-Pacific countries to apply for its scholarship worth $1000 for 2022-2023.</li><li>The scholarship will be awarded based on the strength of each candidate's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, innovation and academic performance.</li><li> The last date to apply for the scholarship programme is December 10, 2021.</li></ul>Google is welcoming women living in Asia-Pacific countries to apply for scholarships worth $1000 for 2022-2023 school year to help students pursuing computer science degrees excel in technology. The scholarship will be awarded based on the strength of each candidate's commitment to diversity, equity and inclusion, innovation and academic performance. The programme is open to students who meet all the minimum qualifications and it strongly encourages women interested in computer science to apply. The applications for 2022 are already open and the last date to apply for the scholarship programme is December 10, 2021, 11:59 p.m. (India time). Eligibility criteria for the Generation Google scholarship programme — <ol><li>Candidates must be currently enrolled in a full-time bachelor’s degree for the 2021-2022 academic year.</li><li>Applicants must be a second year student at an accredited university in an Asia-Pacific country when completing the scholarship programme.</li><li>Must be enrolled in computer science/computer engineering, or a closely related technical field.</li><li>Should have a strong academic record with leadership qualities.</li></ol>Other terms and conditions — <ol><li>The scholarship amount must be spent on tuition, fees, books, supplies and equipment required for the classes at their primary university.</li><li>Enrollment will be verified after the winners are selected, and all scholarship payments will be made directly to the student which has to be used for tuition and education-related expenses.</li><li>The award will be withdrawn of any scholar who no longer meets the eligibility requirements or who does not maintain the eligibility requirements.</li><li>Selected recipients will receive instructions from Google on how to receive the award and in case of failure to complete these steps by the specified deadline will disqualify recipients from receiving the award.</li><li>Google employees are not eligible to apply for Google scholarships.</li></ol>What are the requirements to apply for this scholarship? <ol><li>Resume/CV highlighting technical projects and participation in community engagement</li><li>Academic transcripts from your current or prior institutions.</li><li>Responses to two short answer essay questions (check details down).</li></ol>Candidates are required to submit two 400-word essays, which have to be written in English. These essays will assess your commitment to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and financial need. These are the two topics on which essays have to be submitted — <ol><li>What is a significant challenge that you believe women in the tech industry face and how do you see yourself being part of the solutions to this challenge? Keep in mind that impact can happen in many ways and at different scales.</li><li>What impact would receiving this scholarship have on your education? Describe any circumstances affecting your need for a scholarship and what educational goals this scholarship will enable you to accomplish.</li></ol> SEE ALSO: <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/careers/news/hcl-announces-first-career-programme-for-engineering-freshers-to-bag-their-first-jobs/articleshow/87500602.cms">HCL announces ‘First Career Programme’ for engineering freshers to bag their first jobs</a> <a target="_blank" class="c-link c-message_attachment__title_link" href="https://www.businessinsider.in/sports/news/india-vs-afghanistan-at-t20-world-cup-it-may-not-be-an-easy-win-for-virat-kohli-and-boys/slidelist/87498627.cms">India vs Afghanistan at T20 World Cup — It may not be an easy win for Virat Kohli and boys</a>

Google announces scholarship for female computer science students residing in Asia-Pacific countries

<ul><li><keyword id="6355629" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="google" source="Orion">Google</keyword> hosted its seventh Google for India event.</li><li>Google shared its plan to help India fast track its digital transformation and the role it wants to play.</li><li>Here are the key highlights from the event.</li></ul>Google hosted its seventh Google for India event and this time the emphasis was on making the internet safer for a billion Indians and empowering the country to become a leading digital economy. The search giant says it wants to play the role of a catalyst as the country is looking to grow in the digital space. During the event, it laid the roadmap of its plans in India and made some major announcements. Here are the key highlights from the event- <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Climate concerns" comment="subhead" text="Climate concerns">Climate concerns</cmsannotation> With climate change being real, Google is working on a range of climate-related efforts in India to fulfil its commitment to being carbon-free by 2030. Google is working on a <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/google-announces-new-climate-related-efforts-for-india/articleshow/87775123.cms">range of climate-related efforts </a>in India. Google has partnered with India Meteorological Department to launch weather alerts for any extreme climatic conditions as India gets affected by events such as heavy rainfall, heatwaves, cold waves or thunderstorms. These alerts will be available on Android phones and Google Search. Users can also use voice commands such as “Weather near me” to get spoken weather alerts. As many parts of India suffer from natural disasters such as floods, Google has sent about 110 million notifications to 20 million affected people. As pollution affects some parts of the country, Google has partnered with the Central Pollution Control Board to provide the latest Air Quality Index information from their nearest station. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Education, learning and skill development" comment="subhead" text="Education, learning and skill development">Education, learning and skill development</cmsannotation> Google is also working to develop the digital education and learning space in India. It has partnered with <keyword id="1017386" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="coursera" source="Orion">Coursera</keyword> to deliver new courses for students to upskill their digital careers such as IT management, data analytics, UX design and others. The Google Coursera prices will range between ₹6,000 to ₹8,000 and it will also award 1,00,000 scholarships for Google Career Certificates Graduation cap in partnership with NASSCOM Foundation, Wipro, Times Internet and Tech Mahindra. Google will connect students to job opportunities through a consortium of companies. Through its Google Classroom program, it allows users to download class work whenever they have internet access and work on it later. Google Search is bringing free learning content such as the practice problem feature and the company is working to make this feature accessible with poor internet connectivity. Google Read Aloud feature on Search-Google will also read aloud search results in the user's language. The feature will work with Hindi for now it seems and work with any mobile browser, says the company. The read aloud feature will expand to more languages soon. Google is also bringing the read aloud feature in native languages for Indian users. It will first be available in Hindi and will then expand in other languages. Google showcased its Look to Speak app that was launched last year. It will now support five more Indian languages. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Making digital payments more accessible and intuitive" comment="subhead" text="Making digital payments more accessible and intuitive">Making digital payments more accessible and intuitive</cmsannotation> Talking about <keyword id="2750705" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="google-pay" source="Orion">Google Pay</keyword>, Ambarish Kenghe, VP for Google Pay, said that it had over 15 billion transactions annually. The company is bringing <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/google-pay-users-in-india-will-soon-be-able-to-interact-in-hinglish-split-bills-and-sell-their-products-online/articleshow/87774356.cms">new features</a> for payments such as Groups and Bill Split. The payment app will also be available in the Hinglish language to its users. Google Pay will also let users speak out the bank account number, instead of typing it when transferring money to one. Users can say it in Hindi or English and Google will figure out what the number is. Google Pay is getting a My Shop feature where a small store merchant can showcase the entire inventory from the app itself. <cmsannotation type="cmsannotation" annotationid="Making healthcare affordable and accessible to all" comment="subhead" text="Making healthcare affordable and accessible to all">Making <keyword id="6354525" type="General" weightage="20" keywordseo="healthcare" source="Orion">healthcare</keyword> affordable and accessible to all</cmsannotation> Google's also looking to improve the healthcare facilities digitally. Google Assistant will now support end-to-end vaccination appointments. It will guide users to register a person for COVID-19 vaccination via Google Assistant in their native language. Google brings the Mitra program in partnership with Armaan. It is aimed at benefiting women who are pregnant and very often lack access to basic healthcare. With Google’s AI, the program can pinpoint who is more at risk, and make sure they access the service better. The non-profit organisation, Armaan, will help get women back into the program and save their lives, especially during pregnancy. In India, one woman dies every twenty minutes during childbirth. SEE ALSO: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/google-pay-users-in-india-will-soon-be-able-to-interact-in-hinglish-split-bills-and-sell-their-products-online/articleshow/87774356.cms">Google Pay users in India will soon be able to interact in Hinglish, split bills and sell their products online</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/apps/news/instagram-video-selfie-verification-feature-tricked-by-a-barbie-doll/articleshow/87773617.cms">Instagram’s video selfie verification feature can be easily tricked with a Barbie doll</a> <a href="https://www.businessinsider.in/tech/news/qualcomm-developing-windows-11-processors-to-take-on-apples-m-series-chips-performance/articleshow/87772497.cms">Qualcomm developing Windows 11 processors to take on Apple's M-series chips’ performance</a>

Google for India 2021 highlights: All the major announcements from the event

<ul class="summary-list"><li>Elaine Lou Cartas is a career and business coach focused on women of color, but before that, she was a political organizer for Democratic campaigns and a fundraiser for keeping low-income students enrolled in community college.</li><li>She credits those efforts for helping her launch her coaching program, which garnered more than 200 clients and $100,000 within two years, without paid advertising.</li><li>Important lessons she learned were keeping a close list of contacts, reminding clients of the cause, and working with people in person.</li><li>She also said expressing gratitude to all involved keeps clients invested.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/prime">Click here for more BI Prime stories.</a></li></ul>Turns out motivating political volunteers has a lot in common with motivating customers. Listen to the Bernie Sanders of the world and it can seem like business people and grassroots organizers exist on the opposite ends of the spectrum of motivation and approach. Organizers are all about mission and community. Business leaders are all about money and the bottom line. But if you ask business coach <a href="https://elainelou.com/">Elaine Lou Cartas</a>, that's bunk. Before starting her work as a career and business coach focused on women of color, Cartas spent a decade making calls and knocking on doors, first as a political organizer for a variety of Democratic campaigns and then as a fundraiser searching out money to keep low-income kids enrolled in community college. Speaking to Business Insider, Cartas insisted that her work as an organizer was actually pivotal in teaching her the skills she needed to win more than 200 clients and make just over $100,000 with the launch of a single product, a bundle of coaching services she dubbed her "mastermind program," all within two years of setting up shop. And all of this was with no paid advertising. <h1>Low glamour work with a high pay-off </h1>Cartas is the first to admit her backstory is not glamorous. The child of first-generation immigrants from the Philippines, Cartas graduated in 2010 into the teeth of the Great Recession. With very few job options, she took a gig on the very lowest rungs of the political hierarchy, rustling up volunteers for a state-wide race in Iowa. She made 300 calls a day and knocked on 15 doors an hour while living on the couches of campaign supporters. "I'll be transparent. I hated it. I cried," she said of her first days in the field. She stuck it out, growing better and happier in her job, but after five years she was burnt out. She returned home to California and took a job as a fundraiser at Pasadena Community College. It was a meaningful move for Cartas, and she thrived in the role. "My mom went to that community college when she had three kids under the age of five, which included me," she explained. "She couldn't finish. But when I got the job I told her, 'I know you couldn't finish college but I want to let you know that I'm helping other people like you.'" Cartas raised over $1 million in six months for scholarships, but eventually realized she missed the hands-on, personal nature of organizing (if not some of the personalities in politics). She decided to make a change that at first seems out of the left field: She decided to start her own business coaching company. What qualified her to do this? As Cartas set about figuring out how to woo clients and help them succeed, she quickly understood that her background in organizing actually had huge overlap with her new venture. The skills she mastered trying to get Iowans to make calls on behalf of her candidate actually served her incredibly well in her new career. <h1>Rolodexes don't exist anymore, but 'Rolodexing' is still powerful </h1>When a campaign would call up Cartas and ask her to round up 100 people for a town hall meeting in less than a week, she would freak out. Then she would start 'Rolodexing,' or working her way through her contacts to start to make it happen. When she started her coaching business a decade later, paper Rolodexes were only to be found in design museums and landfills, but she still started just where she would have in her organizing days - with Rolodexing. "Let's say your niche is woman of color millennials, which it is for me. What I did was I looked through my phone, my Gmail, my LinkedIn, my Facebook and Instagram for anyone who I thought met that criteria. Then I put a list together and just started messaging like, 'Hey, I want to get your feedback.' I started mobilizing people," she said. Is that sexy? New fangled? Fun? No, but it works. "I did unsexy things like phone calls and door knocking and I continue to do unsexy things. Something that I've learned and also teach my clients is I might not be able to control how much money I make, but I can control how many conversations I have," Cartas said. <h1>You can get people to do nearly anything for the right cause </h1>Once you've worked that (virtual) Rolodex and connected with real, live humans, how do you motivate them either to help your candidate or sign up as your customer? According to Cartas, both often come down to the deeper meaning behind the everyday ask. "Who wants to do phone calls for an hour or two? That's not glamorous," Cartas said of her days trying to convince ordinary people to volunteer for campaigns. The key to overcoming resistance, she added, is "reminding them, 'Hey, this person represents pro-choice. This person represents equality for all.' Really understanding what their issues are.""If I translate that into the business world, as a coach, when I would talk to, for example, moms, I know that you want to get out of your corporate job because your goal is to walk your child to school every day," she said. Keeping an eye on the 'why' behind a decision - be it to join a movement or buy a product - works both in organizing and selling. It also gives you resilience. "My parents and the generations before them didn't have that life of choice, but I do. And for me, I feel like just living my dream, which is having my own business, is honoring their legacy," Cartas said. That sense of purpose keeps her going when things get hard. Cartas teaches her clients to focus on the deeper reasons for their struggles. "Psychologically, when we remind ourselves that it is something bigger than ourselves, it helps us push forward when you get rejected. Like for a mom, your three kids are more important than getting rejected from two phone calls," she said. "It's getting to the root. Why are you doing this in the first place? Something deeper than, 'I want money.'" <h1>In-person community is incredibly powerful </h1>Much of business happens online these days. Thanks to her time in politics, Cartas has seen the limits of the all-virtual approach. That's why, when she was gearing up for the launch of her mastermind program last year, she organized free monthly get-togethers for women in the demographic she serves, calling the gatherings the '<a href="https://www.instagram.com/p/B7LzT4npYBy/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link">Color Your Dreams Movement</a>.' More than 1,200 people registered for these events over the course of the year based off only organic social media advertising and outreach to her mailing list. To Cartas, that speaks to an untapped thirst for offline contact, which business people can use to their advantage. "I sound like a politician, but at the end of the day, it is about building community," she said. "Community is so important because you don't feel so lonely. You know that you have issues and problems and fears and doubts just like other people. You know that you're not alone and that anything is possible when you have the right support. You don't have to just Google all your answers" she explained. <h1>Gratitude is everything </h1>Volunteers are, by definition, not paid, so campaigns know they need to appreciate the heck out of them or they're not going to stick around. "What I learned from grassroots organizing is the first time they come is for the candidate. The second time is for you," Cartas said. "And what I've learned in my own business is that if you focus on making sure your current clients are happy, they'll continue working with you." "Whenever I have clients, I'm expressing gratitude. That's a huge thing. So I send thank you cards to people. I ask for feedback. How else can I best serve you? And making sure I take action right away," she continued. That's why 51% of her business comes from repeat customers. We all recognize mission, community, communication, and the simple numbers game of connecting with as many of the right kind of people as possible as the backbone of politics. Cartas's impressive success in her first few years as a coach reminds us that they're also the backbone of effective selling and brand building. Building a movement works for politicians, but it might just work for your business, too.

How a decade spent as a political organizer, including knocking on doors and making hundreds of calls, helped this business coach grow her own company to 6 figures in just 2 years

I attended Instagram influencer Caroline Calloway's 5-hour, $165 creativity workshop that people have called a 'scam.' Here's what it was like inside

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Susan FowlerSusan Fowler</div></div></div><ul><li> Susan Fowler has already found a buyer to make a movie about her time at Uber, reports Deadline. </li><li>And Fowler's book on her life is being shopped to publishers now and has multiple bidders.</li><li>Her life story is extraordinary, too: She's gone from home schooled and largely self-taught to a famous software engineer who has filed a petition with the Supreme Court.</li></ul>If Susan Fowler's <a href="https://www.susanjfowler.com/blog/2017/2/19/reflecting-on-one-very-strange-year-at-uber">infamous "very, very strange year at Uber"</a> was the stuff of lemons, then Fowler is making lemonade.It seems she has already sold a movie about her life, just a few weeks after word leaked that she was shopping the script around.The film production company Good Universe beat out three other bidders to land the rights to the film, <a href="http://deadline.com/2017/10/uber-movie-susan-fowler-sexual-harassment-whistleblower-allison-schroeder-screenplay-1202192899/">Deadline reports. </a>The film is named "Disrupters," says Deadline, and it's supposed to be an "Erin Brockovich" meets "The Social Network." Oscar-nominated screenwriter of "Hidden Figures" Allison Schroeder has also reportedly been tapped to write it.Good Universe is an interesting fit for the story. It's best known for its silly comedies like 2014's Neighbors (Seth Rogen, Zac Efron) or 2017's The House (Will Ferrell, Amy Poehler). But it does dabble in other genres like the forthcoming horror thriller "Extinction" and the 2016 crime thriller "Don't Breathe."And this is on top of two well received technical books that Fowler had previously published, based on the lessons she learned working at Uber building an app that rarely goes down. <h2>From home-schooled to harassed </h2>The 26-year-old Fowler has already given the world a taste of her life story in an interview she gave to <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2017/10/21/style/susan-fowler-uber.html?_r=0">New York Times Maureen Dowd</a>. She was raised one of seven kids, daughter of an Evangelical preacher, in a small Arizona town where she was home schooled, Dowd reported. Instead of attending high school, she mostly studied on her own, reading the classics.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table float_right"><div><div class="image on-image">Evan Agostini/Invision/AP, FileFeb. 26, 2017: then-Uber CEO Travis Kalanick arrives at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in Beverly Hills, Calif.</div></div></div>She figured out how to get into college on her own and landed a full-ride scholarship to ASU. When the school wouldn't put her on a track to study astronomy, given her lack of formal math training, she transferred to the University of Pennsylvania and did some brutal catching up in math to study physics there.She came crashing into the public eye when, back in February, she wrote about the sexism and sexual harassment she said she faced at Uber. Her post told of HR looking the other way as managers allegedly hit on employees and bought just the male members of her team leather jackets. The blog post went viral and shook the company to its core, eventually leading to the firing of over 20 people and an investor uprising that forced CEO Travis Kalanick out.But Fowler didn't stop there. She has filed a petition <a href="https://techcrunch.com/2017/08/23/susan-fowlers-lawyers-just-told-the-supreme-court-why-tech-cos-should-eliminate-arbitration-agreements/">with the Supreme Court </a>challenging the forced arbitration clauses that tech companies routinely make employees sign as a condition of their employment. This not only keeps employees from suing, but it often means that disputes happen in private, hidden from view.Fowler told the Times that, like most women, she feared the repercussions of her blog post before she published it. She also didn't want her name to be forever associated with sexual harassment drama at Uber.But then she decided, "If what people know you for is bringing light to an issue about bad behavior, about bad stuff going on and laws not being followed and people being treated inappropriately, why wouldn't I want that? That's a badge of honor," she told the Times.<h2>Voices of discontent</h2>Fowler is certainly not the first woman to come forward. Women have been<a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/sexual-harassment-scandals-tech-industry-2017-7"> speaking out more and more frequently</a> in the tech industry for years. Still, Fowler's voice had power and influence in the wake of President Trump's election. Her blog post was a spark that lit an enormous fire. In 2017, more women came forward. They revealed stories of harassment by VCs that led to investigations, resignations and dismissals.The women of Hollywood are now speaking out. And <a href="http://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/Women-in-California-Capitol-describe-sexual-12296564.php">women lawmakers have begun</a> to speak out, too.Meanwhile, Fowler has a movie deal, is expected to have a book deal soon. She's written a couple of technical books, filed a Supreme Court petition and, with her first child on the way (a daughter, she told the Times), she can proudly say that change is in the air.Fowler could not be immediately reached for comment. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="http://www.businessinsider.com/google-pixel-buds-wireless-headphones-translate-live-2017-10">Google built wireless headphones that can also translate languages</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

Uber whistleblower Susan Fowler already sold her movie ... and she's working on a book

<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Getty Images / Ksenia Ogneva / EyeEm"Kamchatka is very, very beautiful. Volcanoes and geysers. I wanted to go there because I loved what it looked like," Phillips said.</div></div></div><ul class="summary-list"><li>Julia Phillips' debut novel "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Earth-novel-Julia-Phillips-ebook/dp/B07H72JM68/ref=sr_1_1?crid=J7913PXP6FGT&amp;keywords=disappearing+earth+julia+phillips&amp;qid=1573515518&amp;sprefix=disappearing+earth%2Caps%2C141&amp;sr=8-1">Disappearing Earth</a>" is one of five titles on the shortlist for the 2019 National Book Award in fiction.</li><li>Phillips spent a college semester studying abroad in Moscow before receiving a Fulbright scholarship to spend a year in Kamchatka, the remote peninsula in far-eastern Russia.</li><li>The novel is set in the Kamchatka capital, Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, where two young girls go missing on a summer afternoon. It is told, over the course of one year, through 12 female characters' points of view.</li><li>In a recent sit-down conversation, Phillips discussed the art of writing about shock, what drew her to Russia, and how her time abroad shaped her novel.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories.</a></li></ul>When she was a year and a half old, Julia Phillips drowned in the pond in her backyard.At the time, the Phillips family lived in Montclair, New Jersey. Her dad pulled her out of the pond and yelled to his wife, Julia's mom, to call 911.Her mom made her way up the hill to their house, stared at her phone, and then, swimming through her shock, realized she couldn't process how to call 911. She called her neighbor, a nurse, instead. The nurse gathered what Julia's mom was saying and screamed at her to call an ambulance.The scream got through. She called 911. The ambulance arrived. Julia survived.Tonight, some 30 years later, she is sitting next to me at a bar in Brooklyn. The story is hers, and the wording of it likely rings recognizable to anyone who has read her debut novel, "<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Disappearing-Earth-novel-Julia-Phillips/dp/0525520414/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?keywords=disappearing+earth+juil&amp;qid=1573850405&amp;sr=8-1-fkmr0">Disappearing Earth</a>." The novel, which came out this year, is one of the five finalists for the <a href="https://www.nationalbook.org/the-2019-national-book-awards-finalists-announced/">2019 National Book Award</a> in fiction.<h2>A novel told through intertwining, female-driven narratives</h2>"Disappearing Earth" takes place over the course of one year. It is told through 12 female characters' perspectives, all of whom are connected by a similar thread.<div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image">Julia Phillips</div></div>"All of these women," Phillips explained, "lose something or are grappling with some loss in some way."The biggest loss in this story is the one that opens the novel. In the first chapter, we see two young sisters meet an injured man on the beach, and we fear that they're going to get into his car and disappear. They do.What unfolds from there feels, at first, like a collection of isolated storylines about unrelated strangers. However, the narrative soon spirals inwards until readers find themselves rethinking the characters they thought they knew.It is the wording of these women's stories that struck me as so similar to the anecdote from Phillips' childhood. As the characters work their way through longing and grief, there's the recurring sense that what they're really doing is wading through the recognition that their worlds do not look the way they wanted them to. Information comes through in spurts; time feels disconnected."To me, shock or rampant anxiety is one of the most interesting things to write about," she explained when I asked about writing in the language of shock. When one of the characters has a panic attack, it manifests as internal and external senses of time moving at different paces: "She's moving slowly and the world is moving fast, and things are happening, and she's in profound shock."<h2>A thriller that drives itself forward through equal parts narrative and character development</h2>Phillips' novel has the plot of a thriller, but it's driven forward by lyrical language that readers may well miss if they rush through it to discover the age-old question of what happens at the end.Consider Ksyusha, a college student torn between worlds, as she reminisces on her childhood:"... The horses they rode. The trails followed. The nights Ksyusha spent in the tundra, when she was younger and braver and slept alone, when her world was clear, smelling of smoke and grasses, and thousands of reindeer passed her by."And later, Oksana, a young woman in the city, who grapples with a recent loss of her own in an entirely different way:"It hurts too much to break your own heart out of stupidity, to leave a door unlocked or a child untended and return to discover that whatever you value most has disappeared. No. You want to be intentional about the destruction. Be a witness. You want to watch how your life will shatter."Peppered in between plot twists and turns, though, these musings do not slow the book down."The thing I want to write and the thing I always want to read is something that pulls me forward and has momentum," Phillips said of the pacing of her novel. "I think that can be created lots of different ways, sometimes through rapid-fire plot developments, sometimes through rich characterizations."Several of her characters spring to life with particular clarity. In addition to Ksyusha, there's Revmira, who works at a hospital's triage desk even as she attempts to navigate a series of shattering losses of her own. And, of course, there's Marina, the journalist whose daughters were kidnapped in the first chapter and whose attempts to find answers come together in a swirling sense of anxiety.But there's also another type of character in this book: Kamchatka itself.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Julia PhillipsKamchatka has more active volcanoes than any other region on Earth.</div></div></div><h2>How a semester abroad in Moscow turned into a year in Kamchatka</h2>The peninsula where Phillips set her book has a population of roughly <a href="https://www.citypopulation.de/en/russia/kamcatka/">314,000</a>, making it one of the most sparsely populated regions in Russia. It's a <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/travel/2010/sep/25/russia-fishing-kamchatka-bears">10-hour flight</a> from Moscow, and there are no roads connecting it to the mainland. In Phillips' words, it's a land of "volcanoes, mountains, taiga, tundra, geysers, hot springs, some permafrost, lots of wildlife." <div class="KonaFilter image-container float_right"><div class="image on-image">Google MapsKamchatka is a 10-hour flight from Moscow.</div></div>The first time Phillips stepped foot in Russia was when she studied abroad in Moscow, in college, at age 20. The prospect of returning to Russia after that semester, she explained, provided the perfect opportunity to combine two of her ambitions."After four months in Moscow, I knew I wanted to come back. I always knew I wanted to be a novelist. And I thought, 'Okay, if I can write about Russia in English, then I can research by living there and do everything that I want all at once,'" Phillips recalled.She started looking for a place with "a distinctive regional identity and rich history; some place beautiful; and maybe some place that was not a city, or not in western Russia." "And when I learned about Kamchatka, I thought: This is it," she said. "This is the place I want to go."She was awarded a Fulbright student research grant for creative writing to Russia; when she arrived in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky - roughly 4,600 miles from her hometown - in 2011, it was the first time she had set foot in the region. It was, she said, "a dream come true" - but it was also an experience flush with challenges."There's a good pair of Russian words, svoi and chuzhoi, meaning 'one's own' and 'other,'" Phillips said. "Svoi covers your family, your home, your country, the things you know, the people you trust. Chuzhoi is everything else. These two words mark the separation of existence into familiar and foreign. On the peninsula, I was so chuzhaya it hurt."This sense of isolation and of being an outsider plays so strongly into the novel that it feels like not only a setting for it, but also a driving force within it. The battle of insider versus outsider is vividly depicted as women struggle to adapt to new environments, carry on living lives that have lost logic, and sometimes, even, look in on themselves as outsiders in their own bodies.<div class="KonaFilter image-container display-table"><div><div class="image on-image">Julia PhillipsReindeer herders camped outside the village of Anavgai.</div></div></div>The book is not without its bursts of joy, though, and Phillips stressed that the time she spent in Kamchatka was a "quiet, productive, very happy period of my life," marked by interactions with people who were patient with her American accent-laced Russian.These emotions join forces in the novel, where moments of beauty and acceptance come together with pangs of sorrow and loneliness. Fittingly, that theme echoes her own memory of her time there: "I felt overwhelming love and nostalgia for Kamchatka when I wasn't there," she said.Ultimately, when I asked her whether she could have written this book without her year abroad, Phillips' reply, citing the region's history, isolation, and demographic, was definitive: "It's impossible for me to imagine this particular book taking place anywhere but Kamchatka."The winners of the National Book Award will be <a href="https://www.nationalbook.org/the-2019-national-book-awards-finalists-announced/">announced</a> on Wednesday, November 20. <div class="margin-top"> <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/why-palm-oil-is-so-cheap-2019-11">Why palm oil is so cheap</a></h3> <div> </div> </div>

How spending a year 4,600 miles from home on an isolated Russian peninsula brought an American writer's debut novel to the final round of the National Book Awards

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Sjoerd van der Wal/Getty Images; Samantha Lee/Business Insider<ul class="summary-list"><li>"Disruption" has become the buzzword of buzzwords in the transportation industry.</li><li>But the supposed disruption isn't true disruption at all - it doesn't fit into Clayton Christensen's theory of disruptive innovation, as explored in his book "The Innovator's Dilemma."</li><li>Nonetheless, automakers are actually disrupting themselves from within.</li><li>The "disruption within" isn't about cheap, small, fast. It's not about catching the industry off-balance and ill-prepared to respond.</li><li>It is about big companies that have a lot of money recognizing that they can spend literally billions to attack a new business opportunity.</li><li><a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/?hprecirc-bullet">Visit Business Insider's homepage for more stories</a>.</li></ul>This story is part of Business Insider's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/on-the-radar-transportation">"On the Radar" series</a>, a collection of stories, analysis, and interviews revealing how the transportation industry will evolve over the next decade.Disruption.I've heard it. You've heard it. We've all heard it. In the global auto industry, a multitrillion-dollar business that employs millions directly and indirectly, there is no more potent a concept these days. Disrupt now! Disrupt or be disrupted! Prepare for disruption! In almost two decades of covering the car business, I've never seen such a frantic effort to pile into a once relatively obscure idea, one that's both useful and widely misunderstood when not outright misinterpreted or misapplied - which is often.It's time to correct that and make an effort to describe what's really going on in the transportation industry. I'm calling it the "disruption within," and it's going to shape the future of this global industry.The first thing you should know is that I'm a disruption purist. Let me use a story to explain. In 2015, I went up to General Motors and interviewed CEO Mary Barra. Barra had been in the chief-executive role about a year at that point, and she had landed right in the middle of trench warfare, on the heels of the ignition-switch recall, and five years removed from GM's bankruptcy. It was hardly an ideal beginning for GM's first female CEO and the first woman to run a major automaker. It would have been a rough start for anyone, regardless of gender. But Barra was clearly under extra pressure.I'm on record for thinking that Barra is the finest CEO in GM's history and one of the best business leaders America has ever produced. She has also put together the best management team in the industry - a critical achievement because GM is always a management challenge, first and foremost.However, when Barra and I sat down in her office to talk, she said exactly what I didn't want to hear.<h2>Do that disruption thing</h2>Bill Pugliano/Getty ImagesGM CEO Mary Barra."We're going to disrupt ourselves, and we are disrupting ourselves, so we're not trying to preserve a model of yesterday," she said."Oh no," I thought. Another CEO from an old-line company who thinks it can beat the disruptors at their own game. You know, somehow do that disruption thing itself, getting ahead of all those nimble merciless companies with a dozen employees, venture capital, a WeWork space, some laptops, and cold brew on tap.I was immediately reminded of a TV commercial for some tech service from years back in which some young guys in casual dress are pitching their talents to a stuffy old firm run by aging people in suits. "We have a website," the dudes say nonchalantly because everybody has a website. "You have a WEBSITE?!" the oldsters respond, incredulous. "On the WORLD WIDE WEB?!"So yes, when Barra said that word - "disruption" - I cringed.I wasn't convinced GM was going to be able to figure out Cadillac, much less fight off the Ubers and Lyfts and Teslas and Google Cars and everybody else who was preparing to storm the Detroit battlements and knock people like Barra out of their lovely high-rise offices.I had another reason for not believing her: I had read Clayton Christensen's seminal book "The Innovator's Dilemma." (Christensen, a Harvard Business School professor who was widely admired for his character and scholarship, died in January.) For what it's worth, I was also familiar with Joseph Schumpeter's "Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy." Christensen's book contains the theory of disruptive innovation, and Schumpeter's lays out the idea of "creative destruction" in modern capitalism. Disruptive innovation isn't supposed to happen in large incumbent firms. The whole point is that with their established expensive systems, they're vulnerable to new players who, in a nutshell, start out with a cheaper, crappier product that's still good enough to get the job done. Gradually, the disruptor acquires customers, grows its business, and consolidates its innovation. By the time the big slow incumbent figures out that it's in trouble, it's too late. The disruptors have already changed the game, and the incumbent is doomed. That's the shorthand version, but you get the idea.<h2>Tesla isn't disrupting anything</h2>Ringo H.W. Chiu/Associated PressNo disruption here.By this analysis, Tesla isn't disrupting anything. Christensen told me that Tesla is essentially improving on prior innovations. In other words, it is improving the automobile - an invention that has been with us, more or less, since the late 1800s.I would build on that insight to argue Tesla has absorbed the risk of creating a new car company - and basing it on electric propulsion - and that that is Elon Musk's true innovation. He has developed a growth market for risk in an industry that has always been averse to it.More power to him. But again, the notion that Tesla and its rather expensive cars are disrupting anything, at least as far as the actual theory goes, is ridiculous.In fact, pretty much all the touted "disruptors" are bogus. Waymo is hoping to replace human drivers with robots, but the businesses that they're attacking - ride-hailing and freight - are what economists call nontransferable and not susceptible to being undermined by anything except price slashing in mature markets. There's no cheap way to replace the hardware or software, so labor is the only thing that can be taken out of the equation. The technology is staggeringly expensive, but the bet is that removing people could change the cost structures of taxis and semitrucks, and boom, all those billions spent were worth it.(They might also be worth it if we could drastically reduce auto-related fatalities and provide easier transportation for the elderly and people with disabilities.)Mind you, I'm not disagreeing with this strategy. I've talked to numerous folks at Waymo, including CEO John Krafcik, and their ambitions are noble, their talent is considerable, their dedication is impressive, and their intelligence is indisputable.Thinking all this through has led me to the conclusion - debatable, of course - that there's disruption in the sense that Christensen defined it and a new sort of disruption, of the type that I think most of the established well-capitalized players in the traditional industry are talking about.I call this the disruption within. <h2>What the 'disruption within' is all about</h2>Joshua Lott/GettyClayton Christensen.The disruption within isn't about cheap, small, fast. It's not about catching the industry off-balance and ill-prepared to respond. It is about big companies that have a lot of money recognizing that they can spend literally billions to attack a new business opportunity.That business opportunity is appealing because, as we all know, the economics of the car business are difficult. My go-to quote in this matter comes from Bill Ford. A few years ago, I was sitting between Ford and Jim Hackett at a dinner in Detroit. I asked Ford to describe the auto industry and he said, "It's a tough business - you have to fight for every sale."So it is, and if you do that very well, you can achieve a profit margin that might break 10%.That's not bad, but it isn't Apple, either (the tech giant's margin has averaged 21% from 2015 to 2019). It isn't Porsche (the Germany luxury automaker enjoys 15%). And it isn't Ferrari (which pulls down a comfortable 22%). If your life meant managing a 10% margin for the next few decades, you might also want to "disrupt" your business.This is what drove Barra and Dan Ammann to buy an obscure self-driving startup in San Francisco for what wound up being an all-in price of $1 billion. Their plan was relatively clear: acquire an autonomous-mobility firm whose tech could be integrated with GM-made vehicles and commercialized in an urban setting - because that's where the ride-hailing customers are. Integrated is the key word here. Yes, Cruise Automation is now just Cruise and a separate company, with Ammann as CEO and cofounder Kyle Vogt as chief technology officer. But the overall "stack" of the undertaking is highly vertically integrated, with GM and some other investors owning pretty much the entire thing. It's their talent, their management, their capital, their cars, their technology, and ultimately their business. After a lot of follow-on investment, Cruise is now worth almost $20 billion. That valuation has cost GM a few billion at this juncture. There is no better example of disruption within. Does it look like classic disruptive innovation? No. Is it innovation? Yes. Does it fulfill Barra's directive for GM to disrupt itself? I think it does.Sticking with GM, let's talk about electric vehicles, which I considered to be yesterday's mislabeled disruption. After having their dominant narrative of what Michael Lewis once called the "New New Thing" stolen by self-driving schemes, EVs are back. <h2>Electric cars aren't disruptive - in fact, they aren't even all that successful</h2><a href="https://newsroom.porsche.com/en/2019/products/porsche-taycan-world-premiere-live-all-electric-sports-car-18445.html">Porsche</a>The Porsche Taycan EV.But why? Objectively, EVs have been a bust. The most successful EV company in history is Tesla, and it has taken them more than 15 years to sell about 350,000 vehicles annually. That meager output has also been achieved without yearly profits at a cost of billions and billions of dollars. After a wild rally in early 2020, the stock is up over 3,000% since Tesla's 2010 initial public offering, so I don't think investors are unhappy. And even the evil short sellers, in Musk's mind, have been rewarded from time to time.Ten years ago, I stood in the parking lot of Dodger Stadium and listened to Carlos Ghosn predict, while standing next to a Nissan Leaf, that EVs would capture 10% of the global market by 2021.EVs fell about 8% short of that. In fact, the market for EVs would have to double from 2 to 4%, then double again to even get within striking distance of Ghosn's goal. You might ask yourself: "Why is there any excitement around this at all?You might also ask yourself, for example, why Barra recently said the focus of GM's future research-and-development investment would be on electric vehicles - and why she and her extremely capable right-hand man/chief car guy Mark Reuss intend to roll out dozens of EVs in the next few years and have made Cadillac into GM's main electric brand.The reason is China, but I'll get to that in a minute.No rational business person - even with just a passing acquaintance with the theory, much less a Harvard MBA who might have spent time with Christensen in person - would intentionally disrupt their business. To do so would be extraordinarily difficult. Your goal would have to be taking established products and cheapening them, then convincing your customers that these products are suitable replacements for what they're used to.Some customers might go for this, pleased by the much lower price. But most wouldn't, and in the end, even if you pulled off a textbook self-disruption, you might do so much damage to your brand that it wouldn't have been worth it. Forget the degradation in profits and downgrading of your production capabilities.The threat of true disruptive innovation is that its progress is largely out of the control of the enterprise being disrupted, unrecognized until it's too late: a viable alternative before the established player can mount an effective counterargument. When faced with those odds, why wouldn't a company invest some winnings in self-disruption? Instead of a chaotic, unpredictable scramble to catch up - usually hopelessly - you get to update Wall Street every three months on how you're doing (if you're a public company). In this context, disruption isn't agony. It might actually be fun.<h2>Why the auto industry is the perfect framework for disruption from within</h2>REUTERS/Ralph OrlowskiA Porsche 911 Carrera 4S at the Porsche factory in Stuttgart-Zuffenhausen, Germany.The auto industry is the perfect framework for disruption from within because, quite frankly, it's all but impossible to start a new car company, as the notable lack of them over the past seven decades demonstrates - as does the dismal track record of EV startups from that optimistic 2010 period. I would go so far as to insist that the only EV efforts from that time period that have endured are Tesla's and what GM has been doing since it "killed" the EV1 in the 1990s.With this understanding, it should be obvious that disruption within is actually just a savvy form of research and development - a skunkworks mentality that encourages the development of new business ideas.Newsflash: This isn't disruption in the Christensen sense. Rather, it's what mature companies are always trying to - wisely invest their profits in remaining competitive and capitalizing on new opportunitiesSo why is there so much fear and trembling around the whole disruptive framework?It could be because of a more anxious society. Businesses were disrupting from within in the 1950s, but the pace of life, certainly the pace of media, was slower. In the 21st century, whole consultancies have been built around the notion that all success is under constant threat and only a warrior mindset can keep an enterprise from insolvency.But it could be thanks to the Silicon Valley-fication of business thinking. Software allows a small number of people to capture total market control very rapidly at a low cost of entry. So we have Google and Facebook worth many billions of dollars but with modest physical footprints relative to, say, Ford with its numerous factories and army of workers. However, software-driven companies are under relentless threat of being undermined by the very system that allowed them to grow so big so fast. In transportation, this can lead to chaotic efforts of apparent disruption, such as scooter startups invading cities and wrecking quality of life. Disruption from within is more orderly. Take for example Cadillac's Super Cruise hands-free self-driving technology. It was introduced several years ago and does exactly one thing - allow for true hands-free highway driving - quite well. It has been available on just one vehicle since its debut, as GM has sought to refine the technology and ensure that it's safe. There have been no accidents, so the carmaker is adding it to several new models.Legitimate Christensen-style disruptive innovation is coming to the car business. Before his death, Christensen himself offered the case of small cheap electric vehicles in China - simple transport that's ideal for congested cities. Local manufacturers could create fleets of such microcars and threaten larger Chinese and Western automakers hoping to capture millions of new vehicle sales in the region.It might not go that way, and that's why GM is pressing to electrify its range; the company sells more cars in China than in the US.That said, disruption from within and disruptive innovation could happen simultaneously. After all, while Chinese buyers might start out with an inexpensive basic vehicle, Cadillac beckons, as it always has.This story is part of Business Insider's <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/category/on-the-radar-transportation">"On the Radar" series</a>, a collection of stories, analysis, and interviews revealing how the transportation industry will evolve over the next decade. <h3>NOW WATCH: <a href="https://www.businessinsider.com/how-teslas-model-3-compares-to-volkswagens-new-ev-ide-2020-2">How Tesla's Model 3 compares to Volkswagen's new EV</a></h3>

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