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Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Scaling Up Excellence

Scaling Up Excellence: Getting to More Without Settling for Less by Stanford professors Robert Sutton and Huggy Rao. This book is a wonderful, insightful read for today’s world. Robert Sutton continues to provide deep analysis for successful leaders. Those leaders in turn generate (and sustain) ideal performers. Coronavirus is challenging business to fundamentally re-think their core business model.

scaling up excellence

Scaling Up Excellence will help organizations understand how to embrace change faster and effectively in the short term. And short term as of mid April may be forecasting this into December 2020.

Let me begin with a new twist for business projects. Conduct a pre-mortem. Organizations conduct post mortems to discover where tasks failed. Sutton’s pre-mortem can drive project goals or reveal scope creep.

The key is dividing your team into two. One team will imagine project delivery as a success specifically down to the details. The second team takes the opposite road, also in great detail. Bring your teams back together and place all points on a whiteboard. Find your hits and misses in a new way and determine if your scope is accurate enough to deliver.

Scaling Up Excellence provides great case studies and academic research. From start-ups, pharmaceuticals, airlines, retail, financial services, education, non-profits, and healthcare. All benefit from pre-mortems.

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Design Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Focus

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence by Daniel Goleman is a book for our coronavirus moment. Chapter 12: Patterns, Systems, and Messes addresses the 1918 flu pandemic. Does Focus have your attention now? Goleman provides many insights we need to understand today. He delivers direct lessons for our new coronavirus world.

Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence

Maybe what readers should enjoy is a quick test on your reading memory. What? A memory test in a book? Ah…Yes. This approach brings into sharp ‘focus’ how we read.

Focus addresses how business needs to pay more attention to the market. The refrigerator business does not change. The mobile handset market dramatically changed.

Goleman addresses the sharp rise and sudden fall of Blackberry. A smartphone market lesson would not be complete without a story of Steve Jobs and the iPhone.

And to some extent what Goleman may have missed was the demise of Blackberry was their simple lack of ‘focus’ on 4G networks. Yes, Blackberry actually stayed with 3G, did not embrace 4G just as mobile began BYOD.

Blackberry’s leadership (engineering backgrounds) led them to success very early in the mobile device marketplace. They rested on their laurels. The iPhone killed their company. Smartphones do not equal, as Goleman suggests a refrigerator marketplace. He points to many lessons about corporate shooting stars.

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Latest Read: Scorecasting

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won by Tobias J. Moskowitz and L. Jon Wertheim may be the closest thing to a sports version of Freakonomics.

Moskowitz was a Booth Professor of Finance at time of publication. Today he teaches at the Yale School of Management. Jon Wertheim holds a law degree from the University of Pennsylvania and is Executive Editor at Sports Illustrated

Scorecasting: The Hidden Influences Behind How Sports Are Played and Games Are Won by L. Jon Wertheim and Tobias Moskowitz

As we headed into the Easter weekend, the NFL virtual draft was the only sports headline. Coronavirus shut down all sports recently.

Scorecasting it’s worth noting, reveals the recent NFL draft number one picks, turn out equal to a number ten pick regarding rookie performance.

Yet the money NFL teams waste on top picks should change. Scorecasting reviewed the signing bonuses of Ryan Leaf and Sam Bradford, top busts from the NFL draft. Actually the Leaf vs. Payton Manning draft reversal remains popular with sports fans even today.

For all the cable sports hype regarding player performance leading up to the draft, Moskowitz and Wertheim separate the signal to noise ratio very efficiently.

The hours (upon hours) of endless player and coaching interviews, season hi-lights showcasing how each team should draft the data reveals is only good for … selling commercials. Actually fans should wise up and gain some hours back in their lives.

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Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Network

Zoom out

How quickly the ground shifted on Zoom. Since March 30th the video conferencing app has been exposed by gaping security and privacy vulnerabilities. The impact on higher education is immense and must be addressed swiftly.

Zoom’s security and privacy vulnerabilities are deal breakers for higher education. Why? The online journal Inside Higher Ed shared shocking news: Dissertation Defense on Zoom Interrupted by Racist Attack. Yes, the ’N word’ was zoombombed at Cal State Long Beach during a dissertation defense. Educause links to multiple zoombombing articles.

Stunningly, multiple campus zoombombings quickly followed prompting the FBI to issue this warning: Teleconferencing and Online Classroom Hijacking During COVID-19 Pandemic addressing concerns across higher education. Yet, The Chronicle of Higher Education returns NO articles about Zoombombing.

These two events instantly change any campus conversation that all is well using Zoom. A Zoom cool factor was going viral just as Coronavirus closed down all higher education colleges. Students can sway easily via online trends.

Look at Zoom’s March 18th Collection of your Personal Data privacy statement:

Zoom gathers and sells to data brokers very personal information of your students and colleagues. Add the orange hi-lighted scraping of your campus network data and asset information.

Remember when an app is free many times you become the product. Zoom (NASDAQ) has been operating for nine years.

I know what you are thinking — how did this happened?
Many colleges had no idea Zoom was reckless with the data security and privacy of our students. Prior to coronavirus Zoom had about 12 million users. By late March this jumped to over 100 million. Instant capacity issues.

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Education Innovation Reading Technology

Latest Read: How Not to Be Wrong

How Not to Be Wrong: The Power of Mathematical Thinking by Jordan Ellenberg is a really fun read. Let’s re-think mathematics today.

Bill Gates gave the book quite a boost when he blogged How Math Secretly Affects Your Life. Ellenberg won the 2016 Euler Book Prize, awarded annually for an outstanding book about mathematics. Jordan is a math professor at UWMadison.

how not to be wrong

Look beyond the title. Math holds special psyche on many of us.

Yet it is critical now in the age of covid-19 to consider how math allows us to think profoundly to answer today’s challenges.

Jordan demonstrates how math empowers us. Many readers will ask “When Am I Going To Use This?”

Well how about now as we confront the covid-19 pandemic?

Or consider chapter four: How Much Is That In Dead Americans. Jordan addresses widespread miscalculations assessing war dead. Times may change but standards must remain.

Reading How Not to Be Wrong as covid-19 is devastating major cities across our country seems the exact right time to think mathematically.