Buffett offers keys to business success
Speaking to a class of MBAs, Buffett advised the group that high IQs will not differentiate business leaders. Instead, he listed traits required to succeed:
- Fulfill your promises
- Be honest
- Be trustworthy
- Give credit where credit is due
- Be mindful and emotionally intuitive
- Manifest humility
- Be willing to admit you’re wrong
- Offer help when it’s needed
- Treat others with respect
- Be charitable
- Be patient
dis-rup-shun: While high IQs without integrity may lead to problems later in the journey, there is no quantitative score card available to rank workers on Buffett’s list of integrity traits. So for the foreseeable future, organizations will continue to use IQ as a unit of measure for recruiting and hope that their members possess, or will develop, Buffett’s leadership traits.
India going to the moon
India delayed, on Sunday, the launch of its lunar lander and rover project, called Chandrayaan-2 due to technical problems. The mission includes a lunar lander and rover that will explore the Moon’s south pole. Space.com
dis-rup-shun: Lunar landings are so 1960s — why bother? The moon is a convenient platform for a country to showcase its space travel capabilities. To be not only a global, but universal super power, a country now has to have a formidable space program, not so much to colonize the moon, but to operate a fleet of orbiting satellites that will provide future broadband and 5G services, as well as play important military roles including spying, weapons hosting, and communications. India will be the fourth country to land on the Moon (USA, China, Russia have landed, Israel missed).
Employee leaked recordings of Google Voice conversations
Google revealed that employees listen to conversations from Google Assistant that are not related to the watch phrase, “Okay Google,” or “Hey Google.” All of the smart speaker vendors have disclosed that real people listen to samplings of customer recordings to improve quality of speech recognition. ArsTecnica
dis-rup-shun: Listening to conversations for the purposes of development of the technology is not the big deal. The big deal is that 15% of the conversations listened to were not in response to the watch phrase, and therefore should not have been recorded. The fact that the recordings were leaked to a company in Europe, where the European Union is currently enforcing its new data privacy safeguarding law, GDPR, means that Google will certainly face additional investigations from the EU. The article provides instructions for settings that turn off voice recordings and delete conversation history.
Amazon building Sonos-killer
Amazon continues to expand its line of Echo products. Bloomberg reports that the company will introduce a high fidelity version of the player that will seek to deliver a music experience akin to Sonos or Apple’s HomePod. eMarketer reports that the Echo family owns 63% of this year’s smart speaker market. Bloomberg
dis-rup-shun: Amazon will continue to flood the market with many shapes, sizes and variants of Echo devices as it seeks to establish critical mass as the voice control standard for all types of appliances, cars, players and even light switches. The smart speaker makers are buying market share, selling devices below cost, as sales of the devices are, more importantly, sales of a voice control network standard. The Network Effect states that the value of a network standard such as Echo increases with the number of nodes, making competition nearly impossible once one company grabs a high share of market. Building a high fidelity version of Echo puts Amazon in competition with Echo licensing customer Sonos, but alienation of a customer is a small price to pay when Amazon’s game is massive scale.