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Education Innovation Reading TED

Latest Read: Think Like a Rocket Scientist

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.

Think Like a Rocket Scientist: Simple Strategies You Can Use to Make Giant Leaps in Work and Life

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.

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Education Globalization Innovation Reading

Latest Read: Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

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.

Ten Lessons for a Post-Pandemic World

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.

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Education Innovation Reading TED

Latest Read: Quiet

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain. Susan’s efforts in revealing insights addressing introverts are remarkable. In the age of COVID, Quiet offers all readers a refreshing though process to strengthen ourselves and all of our relationships by better understanding introverts. At the same time, it may be indeed revealing that readers are rediscovering their own quiet demeanor while working at home.

Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking by Susan Cain

Susan’s stories of Rosa Parks, Dr. Seuss, Steve Wozniak, and Eleanor Roosevelt are certainly well researched and serve as insightful lessons to their daily behaviors.

As a result, one of the strong and revealing topics across the opening three chapters address how leadership is impacted by extroverts. However, this is sometimes not for the better.

Traditionally extroverts certainly carry a group’s ideas. Susan is proving this to be a wrong approach.

Any unchallenging loud voice in the room seemingly is ‘defining’ a project or sales ‘success’ for the gorup, can certainly be where the train goes off the tracks. When this is a CEO or senior Vice President there can be uphill challenges to organizational success. An introvert attending a Tony Robbins event was interesting to say the least as Susan attests.

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Education Innovation Reading

Noise Preview

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by noted authors Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass Sunstein. This upcoming release certainly reminds me that I first read Daniel’s Thinking, Fast and Slow six years ago. This Noise preview is certainly a book everyone should read. I have found many references to Daniel’s work across a series of books that I have been reading over the last couple of years. I attribute the same embrace of Cass’ deeply insightful book Nudge, which I re-read just last year. Above all, they make a powerful 1-2 punch in Behavioral Science.

Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment by Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, Cass R. Sunstein

Noise looks to be just as compelling as the following premise: Consider two doctors in the same city giving the same patients different diagnoses. Additionally, consider two judges working in the same courthouse giving different sentences to people for the same crime. In addition, consider the impact of different food inspectors providing different ratings to indistinguishable restaurants.
In contrast, consider that the same doctor, the same judge, the same inspector, makes different decisions in the morning versus the late afternoon, or decisions made on Mondays versus Wednesdays. Following these examples of ‘noise’ the authors will reveal, a variability in judgments that should be identical.

I am very much looking forward to learning how noise makes impactful contributions to errors in literally all fields. Obviously ‘noise’ is located wherever people make decisions. Yet it appears most if not all of us are somewhat oblivious to the role of chance in our decisions. I certainly cannot wait to read this book!

2021 DLD Conference | Book Talk: Noise – A Flaw in Human Judgment

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Education Reading

Latest Read: The Last American Hero

The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn by Alice George. What can you say to a boy growing up in Ohio during the 1970s about astronaut John Glenn? Back then the word ‘hero’ was simply enough.

The Last American Hero: The Remarkable Life of John Glenn

I can recall in grade school learning about John Glenn becoming the first American astronaut to circle the globe. The country was locked into a space race with the Soviet Union.

Recalling Neil Armstrong, another Ohio boy growing up just 80 miles south of my hometown would land on the moon. Glenn and Armstrong proved to me growing up in Ohio you could change the world.

The early life of John Glenn is interesting. His roots providing him with support and curiosity that served him well in life.

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