ZeroHype

Have started re-reading a book I picked up almost 20 years ago. It’s called Leadership Aikido by John O’Neil. Here are some of the keys points. Old-style industrial-era command and control leadership is not sustainable. He describes he Green Glass Age to reflect the coming together of the environmental concerns and biological advances – the green – with communication and computing power – the glass (glass being the colloquial term for silicon wafers and fibre optics). The way to the new style of leadership can be understood and learnt by the lessons of a particular form of defensive martial art known as Aikido (the way (Do) of life forces (Ki) in harmony Ai)). Leadership is about overcoming internal enemies: Failing to grow emotionally Failing to make creative connections Failing to emphatise Failing to manage the ego Failing to overcome alienation and boredom by mastering these practices: Cultivate self-knowledge Get creative – usually through the creative arts Find a passion Learn fr...

Feynman on the light and electromagnetic radiation waves all around us. He describes it as fascinating as it is not as how we have come to think of all the waves simplistically. The perspective he gives illustrates how messy and fascinating it all is. These waves are all around us but we perceive only a fraction of them. We think that the visible light spectrum which we perceive makes up the bulk of sensory reality but it’s only a fraction.

Change is challenging. The world is seemingly more complex and interdependent than it ever was. The pace of change calls into question old models of thinking about the world in general and the way we organize businesses. Smaller is better, agile is more productive and adaptability is non-negotiable. As a result we now focus more on how we design organisations and attract and retain talent rather than developing long term strategic plans. Take customer centricity for instance. Putting customers at the heart of organisational design has become the mantra for companies to remain relevant, survive and continue to thrive. What is often overlooked is how we implement this change. Stating a vision and aligning it to a strategy is necessary but not sufficient to become customer centric. We need to change our mentality, behaviour and habits. Much like achieving a New Year’s resolution we have to fundamentally change how we act. Retaining old organisational design habits is also severely lim...

Harnessing massive volumes of data and developing predictive models is the 21st century’s arms race. Google, Facebook and others are leading the race. Technology innovations are morally neutral. It’s how we choose to use them that determines whether they produce good or bad outcomes. Big data and related Artificial Intelligence algorithms are different because machines can be taught to make decisions on our behalf. Depending on how these algorithms are developed human bias can creep in and distort outcomes. Data can also be analysed to find cures for diseases, alleviate poverty, and combat climate change on the one hand or to get us to click on ads more often and buy more stuff on the other. Today, we voluntarily give up personal data about our physical activities to ‘earn’ Apple watches and cappuccinos or allow Insurance companies to monitor our driving habits in exchange for reduced premiums.  Tomorrow, we might allow our brains to be probed for the lure of big screen TVs and fre...