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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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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.

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Design Education Globalization Network Technology

Wipro is changing education

I have begun reading a really good book called Bangalore Tiger and have become very impressed with the closing of the fifth chapter and second section called People Principals to Lead By.

This book is about Wipro, one of India’s great IT companies.  This chapter concluded with an overview to their companies’ social responsibility initiatives and volunteer efforts in India called Wipro Cares:

The education program provides training for teachers, administrators, and parents –with the goal of fostering more creative and analytical curricula in pubic schools, rather than rote learning.  In an effort that targets underprivileged children, Wipro volunteers spend two hour every Saturday tutoring and encouraging these kids…..The Azin Premji Foundation is an attempt to help transform Indian society through improving public education.  Premiji established the foundation in 2000 and it became operational in 2001.  To date [Azim Premji] has contributed $125 million in Wipro stock –and has pledged to keep replenishing as money is spent.

The main focus is on convincing education that they need to retool their approach to education and on giving them the tools to do it.  So far, one Indian sate has agreed to switch to analytical learning……”What we’re focused on is quality education,” says Dileep Ranjekar, a former head of HR who is now CEO of the Azim Premji Foundation.  Premji’s charity.  Unless India fundamentally addressed the quality issue and the shifts from rote learning to analytical learning, it can’t realize its dream of becoming one of the world economic superpowers.”

There’s obviously a crucial side benefit for Wipro.  Unless the Indian public education system improves dramatically, Wipro won’t be able to fulfill what it sees as its destiny – becoming one of the world’s great companies by offering up India’s brainpower to the world.

America needs this type of innovative company that can lead change in our education system.  As Intel’s CEO has stated many times America will continue to graduate more masseuses than engineers.  At some point this will catch up with us.  And by the looks of it when that time arrives India will be prepared to step in.

Tags: India, Wipro, Bangalore Tiger, globalization, education, technology, reading, trends