Category: Innovation

Latest Read: Find Your Why

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date June 20, 2021

Find Your Why: A Practical Guide to Discovering Purpose for You and Your Team by Simon Sinek. Simon wrote a bestseller in 2009 called Start with Why.

This book is the workshop companion. It will certainly not stand alone without the original. Find Your Why is above all, lead by Simon, David Mead, and Peter Docker as a corporate workshop now part of Simon’s consulting company Sinek Partners.

In this book the authors walk through specific points to identify “Why”for teams and organizations.

At the same time, Find Your Why is positioned to be an anchor for a workgroup moderator. So again, without reading Start with Why, your organization will struggle with Find Your Why as a stand alone book.

However, I found Start with Why to be compelling so I eagerly absorbed how this companion book can bolster teams and organizations. At various points throughout the book I could forecast how this would be received by my organization and others during a pandemic, when everything was changing rapidly in the opening weeks of remote work.

Tags Find Your Why, Simon Sinek, start with why

Education Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Moonwalking with Einstein

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date June 19, 2021

Moonwalking with Einstein: The Art and Science of Remembering Everything by Joshua Foer. For the most part, Joshua is a recognized freelance writer appearing in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Esquire, Slate, Outside, and the New York Times.

Joshua wrote a story regarding the US Memory Championship. He was so moved by the event, he spent the next year training to compete. Therefore this book reveals Joshua’s year long effort to learn mnemonics and memory palaces.

His book certainly conveys how you can sharpen your memory skills based upon techniques used by participants in the competition. Pretty cool insights.

Joshua’s abilities was certainly enhanced by interviewing contestants who befriended him. Above all, the memory palace chapter was a wonderful introduction into learning how you can create deep lasting memories regarding any topic.

At the same time, techniques to memorize complex mathematics was brilliant, yet a technique that I would struggle with in attempting to master. Yet, if there is a will – there is a way.

Tags Joshua Foer, Memorization, Moonwalking with Einstein, US Memory Championship

Cyberinfrastructure Education Globalization Innovation Network Reading Technology

Latest Read: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date May 27, 2021

This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth. Nicole covers cybersecurity and digital espionage for The New York Times. Certainly this is one of the more anticipated books addressing a new cyber arms race. More than ever before, it is imperative to understand how a global market for Zero Day exploits began and today how it is certainly tipping the scales.

Quite frankly, Nicole’s reporting will stun readers. This book will also surprise long time IT professionals.

As it seems so often in life, by chance, a ‘stumbling’ idea took hold. Initially a company in 2003 began buying exploits from hackers for as little as $75. Fast forward to today, a good iOS zero day commands over $3 million dollars.

Nicole begins her reporting role at the NYTimes by reviewing secret documents leaked by Edward Snowden and Glen Greenwald.

This of course revealing the illegal spying on American citizens by the Bush Administration. At the same time, this project was tapping phone calls of German Chancellor Angela Merkel. The Guardian obtained copies via Greenwald who passed a copy to the NYTimes. This proved to be her introduction to the cyber world.

In addition, Nicole retells the hard lessons from Soviet spying (actually from within the US embassy) in Moscow back in the 1950s. This reveals a good baseline to today’s advanced attacks including the resources and dedication necessary to carry them out.

Cyber weapons for Board rooms

Chapter One’s Closet of Secrets is certainly mandatory reading for organizational leaders. It will become very apparent that organizations must reconsider their outdated understanding of information security. One cannot walk away from this book ignoring an often repeated message: your organization has already been hacked, or your organization does not yet realize it has been hacked. Thus, Nicole makes the case in her interviews with hackers that every computer, phone, network, or storage drive has been compromised.

Tags cyberweapons, Nicole Perlroth, nsa, olympic games, stuxnet, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends, zero day

Education Innovation Reading TED

Latest Read: Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date May 15, 2021

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life by Ozan Varol. I am very impressed with the messages in this book. Majoring in astrophysics at Cornell, Ozan was also serving on the operations team for the 2003 Mars Exploration Rovers project. He really is a rocket scientist.

Ozan went to law school and today teaches at Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Oregon.

So, when did you first learn to correctly breath? Yes, breath. Can you recall learning how to think? Well, Ozan will teach, as the book title implies like a rocket scientist.

Likewise, you will certainly appreciate learning that scientific thinking can position you for success in life.

Ozan delivers the opportunity to improve how your approach, perceive, analyze, and act in our very chaotic, and complex world.

This book’s insights are across three sections: Launch, Accelerate, and Achieve. Each provides rich examples from a scientific mindset. This will provide new thinking for many.

Chapter 1 Flying the Fact of Uncertainty

Chapter 1 provides a great introduction to NASA thinking. Tackling the identification of uncertainties, Ozan introduces benefits of best-case and worst-case scenarios. This is great thinking for rocketry. In addition, this addresses risk mitigation via redundancies (and deploying margins of safety) that can easily be applied to many organizations.

Tags nasa, Ozan Varol, Think Like a Rocket Scientist

Education Globalization Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

Post author By Don Kasprzak
Post date May 8, 2021

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World by Fareed Zakaria. We are certainly living through a transformational period of human history. So, is the pandemic’s aftermath within American control? Regrettably this is unquestionably not a pressing American issue. Yet Fareed offers simple plain advice via a global historical lens.

Firstly, this is not another book about the pandemic. Fareed is focusing on how the global economy is shifting. COVID-19 is unquestionably light years from the 1918 flu pandemic’s impact on our economy.

Indeed America found itself confronting a truly horrific event in an analog world. Today’s impact is certainly global on a digital internet.

Secondly, he is addressing a post-pandemic world. Fareed sees common sense lessons from the 1916 flu pandemic. Can one even imagine responding to COVID during a world war?

America was just entering Europe’s battlefields as the great flu pandemic was also ravaging our country. On the contrary, today’s digital wars with Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are aggressively playing out on internet-based battlefields. Yet, America’s initial response to COVID began presenting new challenges:

Over more than two centuries, the United States has stirred a very wide range of feelings in the rest of the world: love and hatred, fear and hope, envy and contempt, awe and anger,” the Irish commentator Fintan O’Toole wrote in April 2020. “But there is one emotion that has never been directed towards the US until now: pity.
Page 192

COVID-19 is accelerating our responses to contain the spread. Fareed identifies key issues that are changing the fate of humanity as we learn of incredible infection rates across both emerging and third world countries.

Tags COVID, fareed zakaria, Globalization, pandemic, tom friedman