CDOQ

A culture that eats strategy for breakfast, eventually dies of indigestion. 

It is harder to reimagine what exists than to imagine what does not exist. 

At the end of 2019, I wrote down the list of societal trends I had been noticing over the years because I wanted to actively observe these trends in 2020. A pandemic happened in 2020 and we are still living in it. Surprisingly, almost all trends (19 out of 20) are still continuing. Following are my Y ear E nd of 2020 U pdates (YE2020U; all new 2020 text is in blue) to the trends.  ----- 2019 is coming to an end and continuing my quest to better understand human behavior, I wrote down the twenty trends I have been noticing for a few years. It would be interesting to observe these trends in 2020 to see how they evolve and if they achieve wider adoption. There are multiple reasons why these trends have emerged but in this article we will only look at what the trends are. Unless specified, the trends are for the US.  Source: Wikipedia  Here they are:  1. Phone calls on decline:   Millennials  and post-millenials do not talk on the phone much. They prefer text ...

The underlying assumption in data-based decision making is that the future will be the continuation of the past. The big companies have all the data in the world and somehow meaningful innovation comes out of startups which are based on the founders' believes, intuition, or curiosity. All data is about the past including the data about the future, which is more of an opinion than fact. Does that mean we ignore data? No. Understand the data about the data. Where does it come from? When and how it was collected? Is it showing causation? Do we understand the interconnectedness of all variables? etc. And then, use data as one of the inputs in decision making.  Was controlled fire invented based on data? :) 

Ironically, the most objective television news available in America, the most powerful country in the world and  a leading democracy,  is from a TV news channel, Al Jazeera , owned by the Qatar government, which is a monarchy and the country's GDP is almost half of Amazon's annual revenue. 

Growing up in India, I did not hear the term career or career growth or career development. I think it is because everyone I knew worked for the government and the career growth happened with tenure in the job. Nobody talked about career. Since I did an MBA in the US, I have been hearing these terms regularly. Over the years, I am lucky to have worked with a wide variety of people and in management roles, I have been responsible for helping people with their career development. This article is a brief summary of what I have learned about career and career growth.  Career There are a variety of ways the term is defined and broadly speaking it means a sequence of jobs a person takes within an industry or a domain. For example, someone can have a career in teaching and teaches all her life to students in different grades. Someone else can have a career in marketing (domain) and spends her life in marketing jobs in multiple industries. When a teacher takes a job as a marketing manager...

Do you pay corkage fee if you take a screw-top to a restaurant?

No one has become a great artist by following norms. 

It takes a few weeks for a software product to go from a good demo to general availability. For a hardware product, it can take years. 

The supreme court judges are selected based on their biases to make unbiased decisions. 

Do you have an identity that is not in opposition of anything? Smart is opposed to dumb, male is opposed to female, american is opposed to un american, etc. 

Absurd is the new normal. What would Magritte paint today?

Regardless of the facts, people tend to believe things they understand. If an incorrect explanation, A, can be understood with a simple analogy and a correct explanation, B, requires mental energy and effort to be understood then most people will believe A. 

My discussion with Arne Tonning, a venture capitalist based in Oslo, on:  1.   GPT3 (a new generalized Artificial Intelligence model for Natural Language Processing) - what it is and what are its applications.  2. Epic Games fight with Apple and Google on 30% revenue share that App Store and Google Play charge for digital goods sold via in-app purchases on their app platforms.  3. TikTok ban in the US 4. How latest US immigration policy is affecting the tech industry

If a system is highly dependent on you then the system is penalized for your errors and you can gain from the errors of the system. 

If you are highly dependent on a system and the system does not depend on you then you are penalized for the errors the system makes and for the errors you make. 

There are a few things that one can only learn from experience. 

The number of unique situations the world experiences will continue to rise with time.