As you will see below, my formative years were spent dissipating while reading tomes like The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. Europa Will Be Bulldozed to Make Way for the Next Cosmic Superhighway! We’re just sending the Europa Clipper to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Clipper is an apt name coz there’s apparently a huge underwater ocean on t...
Alzheimer’s is the most terrible, mind-shattering disease of our time. We citizens given the task to the prestigious National Institutes of Health to slay the dragon. Staffed by the crème de la crème, leading scientists from all over the world, there could be no questioning of its scientific expertise and its capacity to take on this role. Agency l...
To my peevish mind, OpenAI looks just too good to be true. What if I am right? Easy Queasy Whenever I see a certain type of headline in a prominent publication I get collywobbles in my stomach. That’s because I have seen so many similar associated with hubris, fraud and wrongdoing. Here’s one headline I saw recently: OpenAI Is Growing Fast and Burn...
There’s a global industry out there devoted to predicting stock prices; the evidence shows that human traders rarely beat index funds or the S&P. Is AI going to finally figure out how to do that? Don’t bet on it, but we have a way. Is AI Expert? Whither AI? The pundits all see it taking over the world. I’m not so sure. The oldies reading this m...
We need to make a clear distinction between the types of immunities. Boring Immunities We’ve heard a lot, actually too much, about immunity lately. Seems like if it were granted to any politician who became a President, that’s the end of the American dream, freedom if you remember. We’ve also heard a lot about another disrupter extraordinaire excep...
The killer app for AI is being able to win wars over unprecedentedly multiple fronts, irrespective of an initiators’ level of resources. Check out the recent Napoleon movie to see how it’s done. AI Spy (With My Little Eye) There’s been much chatter as to why Sam Altman was fired and then, (pro tem?) rehired. The scuttlebutt is that OpenAI had secre...
Post Summary: Men holding the power is the fundamental structural impediment to ending global war and poverty and extending good health to all. The Second(ary) Sex Which astronauts will be the first to go to Mars, men or women? Seems like women win this race.(“Study finds female astronauts more efficient, suggesting future space missions with all-f...
Who Knew? This is the very week that Richard Branson and Jeff Bezos went into space (or near as) and Elon Musk has booked a suborbital flight on Virgin Galactic for a time yet to be announced. Yet the press coverage has been at best muted and occasionally disparaging. As in, they didn’t actually go into real space, just a 3-minute taste of minima...
Can You Trust Shoeless CEOs? So, the truth is out, from no less than the oracle of Omaha. What’s the skinny? The biggest problem we face in investing in companies are the CEOs themselves. You knew that didn’t you? According to the Oracle, “You get a guy or a woman in charge of it—they’re personable, the directors like ’em—they don’t know what the...
Before - Business Acumen for the Birds I don’t have to tell you now the world is a totally different place. Before it was BCV -Before Coronavirus. Now we’re just shifting into the ACV – After Coronavirus world. That world is totally different. My day business is leadership development. We have developed assessments that assess whether people will...
Uh oh, GE just warned of another year of falling profits. It recently sold off its BioPharma unit making investors feel a bit better, until they realized things were still getting worse. GE needed to do something after cutting its dividend and reporting a huge loss. Jack Welch would be turning in his grave except for the fact that he’s alive. Do ...
Perth Leadership Institute and its Founder, Dr. E. Ted Prince do a new take on an old issue. See the article by Katherine Heires in GARP Risk Intelligence, the News service of the Global Association of Risk Professionals.
We’ve just seen China approve a lifting of term limits on their leader, an epochal decision. Clearly there’s a move to authoritarian leadership globally. As well as China there’s the usual suspects like Russia, Belarus and North Korea, but now there’s some new/newish members of the club including Turkey, Hungary, Poland, Venezuela, Malaysia and Mya...
For lovers of democracy, what’s not to dislike? Dystopian news from Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Ukraine, North Korea and so on. Not to mention German, Hungary, Myanmar. Even (especially?) the US! Could things get worse? You remember “The End of History” by Francis Fukuyama? Liberalism and democracy triumph, nothing left to do until mankind reache...
So we didn’t expect Amazon to do the Whole Foods thing right? Bezos is an unpredictable guy. Reminds me of Elon Musk, Richard Branson, even (especially) Donald Trump. Unpredictable to a fault. Never know what they’re gonna do next. The traditional leadership canon teaches that leaders should be predictable; authentic they call it. But what I see is...
So Travis Kalanick of Uber has been given the boot. What’s that all about? He’s promoted a hostile and sexually harassing culture. He needs to be reformed. Is his departure going to kill the company? Probably. I can think of several leaders who totally lacked empathy; more; they were unsympathetic, bullies, sometimes narcissistic and unappealing hu...
You know the old story: when a celebrity gets to be Time Person of the Year, it’s time to short them. Obama received the honor twice, in 2008 and 2012 and look where that got him! Trump was Time Person of the Year 2016 so look out! In the same vein I notice that the Wall Street Journal now has a new and separate section on quants. Does that mean th...
So I know I don’t have to remind you that we have a family running the US of A. Let’s say that it continues, with or without a gap between other family members also getting into the saddle. That’s what a dynasty is, in both cases. And this is hardly new. In modern times we’ve had the Kennedys, the Bushes and the Clintons. The Roosevelts before that...
Did you notice that Tesla is now worth as much as General Motors? Quite a milestone given the fact that Tesla sells 80,000 cars a year versus GM’s 2 million plus. Does that tell us something about leadership? My go-to reference Wikipedia defines a leadership style as a way of “providing direction, implementing plans, and motivating people”. T...
Big data is really big. So is analytics. Our interns all want to get a job in those areas, so they can hit one out of the park. The big idea is that Big Data can help us uncover insights especially into how consumers act, so we can get them to buy more, and, to be fair, to better meet their needs. Big Data is transforming business, companies and ev...
