I once worked with an organization that developed five year strategic plans, while at the same time teaching its employees that we live in volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous (VUCA) world. See the irony? Either planning or reacting - organizations best able to adapt to their environment win.
Optimism often requires believing in unknown, unspecified future breakthroughs — which seems fanciful and naive. The nature of problem-solving is we are aware of problems long before we are aware of their solutions. There will always be a frontier of problems we don’t yet know how to solve. To solve them we must believe we can.
Do you how bees communicate with each other to share information about food sources? The bees communicate this critical information by performing a type of dance called the waggle dance. The other bees then follow the instructions and go harvest the flowers. Yet, some bees ignore the dance. Why?
Charlie Munger has been Warren Buffet’s partner since he joined Berkshire Hathaway as a vice chairman in 1978. In 1995 Charlie gave a speech at Harvard University about human decision-making and factors contributing to misjudgments. He wanted to share what he had observed and learned; models he used that helped him (and Berkshire Hathaway) succeed.
When hiring software engneers I look beyond technical talent. What I really want is someone who understands "the ecosystem" they work in. Recruiting is always challenging. I think this is a good start to help you spot the great ones.
Companies say they want engaged employees. Funny, I’ve never heard an employee say they wanted to be "engaged" (at least not to their company). Personally, I’d much rather be inspired. When you’re high on inspiration, you can get two weeks of work done in a weekend. Inspiration literally brings the future forward like a time machine.
Having worked in financial services for most of my career I want to share some the software engineering challenges that are associated with tracking and moving money digitally. Most of these lessons have been learned the hard way. Hopefully they will be useful to anyone moving into the fintech space.
We think that generative AI creativity is limited by its training data and algorithms, and therefore can produce technically proficient content, but not truly novel and innovative content. We like to believe that our own creativity and innovation, rooted in personal experience, knowledge, and human emotions results in intentionality and emotional depth that cannot be replicated by AI. Current research contradicts that view.
The Biden administration has collected “voluntary commitments” from OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon to pursue shared AI safety and transparency goals ahead of a planned executive order. Will it be enough?