This book is addressing five categories of time: Cold War, Vietnam War, Operations other than war, War on Terror, and Future War. Researching newly de-classified materials make Annie’s book difficult to put down.
Cold war events beginning with Sputnik led to the formation of ARPA. Without over exaggerating, this group would be changing the world. There are so many brilliant physicists, scientists, and mathematicians, this book is literally a Who’s Who of brilliant minds called upon to drive the Pentagon’s mission.
Annie is a master storyteller. She clearly reveals Eisenhower’s administration was ill prepared for post war technology challenges.
Cold war hysteria in the State Department was certainly ripe after China fell to Mao in 1949. France would be defeated by an Asian guerrilla force in 1954. Certainly Sputnik only added to that hysteria in 1957.
The Art of Gathering: How We Meet and Why It Matters by Priya Parker. In the year of COVID why would anyone consider reading a book about gathering? Admittedly it crossed my mind when I received notification from my library. On the contrary this book taught me how to make gatherings a great memorable experience.
Priya is a professional meeting facilitator and certainly has been accumulating a deep understanding how creating meaningful gatherings creates an amazing impact. Yet this is an area we have been overlooking since office meetings began with Powerpoints.
Subsequently I never realized how much we have all lacked advice for making others feel comfortable, engaged, and authentic in social and business gatherings.
As you can see, one may view this book as simply focusing on gatherings. Yet Priya is delivering a solid book on leadership.
Constructing meaningful gatherings is revealed to be a core leadership skill. Priya shares meaningful examples she has facilitated. For all those reasons she breaks down the “how and why” gatherings can work so well.
Decide Why You’re Really Gathering
Her journey to create memorable events begins with a simple challenge. For this purpose many of us are unaware of what is actually required to fully commit to gatherings.
For business meetings this is why defining a clear purpose and an agenda is critical. This includes prepping your guests prior to the event, and establishing meeting rituals from start to finish.
Hence Carol’s popular research regards two mindsets, and the difference they make in outcomes is incredibly powerful. In addition, by learning where an individual’s view on ability are sourced, you can change their reaction to failure.
Accordingly, anyone can appreciate that middle school children can benefit the most and become a sponge for knowledge. Consequently in the age of COVID, resilience is a key lesson for the need for a growth mindset in an almost daily changing environment.
Dweck’s research reveals why one’s raw talent and abilities do not define success, however approaching them with a growth mindset will prove success in the long run. This is also effective for any parent’s goals, personal or professional.
Carol reveals what great parents, teachers, CEOs, and athletes already know: how a simple idea about the brain can create a love of learning and a resilience that is the basis of great accomplishment in every area.
Simons went to MIT in 1958, obtaining a mathematics Bachelors, then a PhD at UC Berkeley also in mathematics PhD at the age of 23. During the cold war Simons began working for the NSA in 1968 breaking Soviet encryption. Simons won the Oswald Weblen Prize in Geometry in 1976. Likewise he later became chair the Math department at SUNY at Stony Brook from 1968 to 1978. He began developing a talent for recruiting high performing, well respected mathematicians away from Ivy League schools.
Simons is widely recognized for establishing pattern recognition, development of string theory, and developed the Chern–Simons form. His efforts combining geometry and topology with quantum field theory has paid off handsomely. At the same time, Gregory serves four keys lessons for anyone striving to achieve success.
Lesson #1: Believe in yourself
Yet to the surprise of many, Jim left academia in 1978 to launch his investment firm. Here is where James shines: establishing a firm by believing in yourself. Chiefly hiring noted mathematicians James Ax, Sandor Strauss, Leonard Baum, Elwyn Berlekamp, Robert Mercer, and noted programmer David Magerman to join him was the bedrock of his firm. Gregory writes about the upbringing of key players in the book to provide just enough insight to what makes mathematicians and scientists tick.
Simons understood that bringing very intelligent people to his company would continue to build a foundation for success. Even Jim’s competition would shortly change markets:
One programmer, Jeffrey Bezos, worked with Shaw a few more years before piling his belongings into a moving van and driving to Seattle, his then-wife MacKenzie behind the wheel.
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The Man Who Solved the Market is an excellent book which reinforces the notion to surround yourself with smart people. Along this path, his company dealt with his own bad behaviors while also managing the motivations and decisions of those he hired. From time to time, these talented teams caused friction. Name an organization that is immune from this.
Lesson #2: True success is not an overnight gimmick
Although society expects little today by the way of grit and success must be immediate. On the contrary, Simons and his team created, tested, and then re-created models over a twenty year span.
Furthermore, Simons understood historical financial big data would better tune their prediction models. The longer tail provided the math quants a tested, fine tuned approach in establishing new success whose by-product was large sums of money.
The book’s pitch is well researched, yet there is a surprising lack of unique cases compared to his three books above. Likewise, the opening chapter “Artificial Intelligence Comes of Age—Slowly” provides a general overview to IBM’s Watson. Small hits, and yet a larger unfocused ability of Watson to move the needle on cancer research.
The promise of AI’s subset, machine learning (ML) is very over-promoted across today’s IT sales marketplace. The opening chapter reveals some deep AI shortcomings that should not be ignored.
Meanwhile, examples throughout the book refer to the Robotic Process Automation (RPA), a somewhat flavor of machine learning. Likewise, this extends into Chapter 2: AI in the Enterprise, the impact of AI for knowledge workers. This type of technology advance is impacting a cognitive advantage in healthcare.
Surprisingly, The AI Advantage released in 2018. But the role of AI driven Deep Fakes is missing. Launched in 2014, Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) technology may indeed be the most contested application of ML.
16 Million views of a Deep Fake application on YouTube
While amusing for movies and celebrities, certainly there are significant impacts upon society regarding government, corporations, and foreign relations. Shockingly the manipulation of voice has already resulted in financial transfers to criminal organizations.
