ISA, Big Business, Shock Study, People think and the cult of smart - Edition 2
The Birth of the Institute for Advanced Study
How do you go about building an institution that becomes the workplace for luminaries like Albert Einstein, John von Neumann, Kurt Gödel, and Robert Oppenheimer? And what kind of salary you would offer them? While reading this article for the first time I realized that someone must had to decide Einstein’s salary.
The pics shown in the article are a joy to look at. I wonder what it must be like working there knowing that you are surrounded by the smartest people in the world.
Why do big businesses seemingly suck at innovation?
In the early 1980s, McKinsey gave advice to AT&T that in the year 2000 mobile phone industry would have a market of 0.9m devices. Turned out it was closer to 100m. McKinsey missed the target by miles. Then why McKinsey is a thriving business today. There are many reasons. Primarily being that most of the time they get most of the operational stuff right. Predicting the future is a hard business and we can’t blame solely McKinsey for having missed this one. McKinsey is good at incrementalism and that’s a skill.
Under the regime of Tim Cook Apple has grown from a $365 Billion company to a $2.7 Trillion company. In other words, Tim Cook has added 7 more “Steve Jobs’s” Apple in his 11 years as the head of Apple. I’m not sure if it is a fair comparison but after the innovative work of Jobs, Apple needed someone like Tim Cook to make money off of that business. Don’t look at McKinsey for true innovation but they might be able to help get the “buy-in” to do the thing a company anyway wants to do but needs external validations for a variety of reasons including placating unions and investors.
The secret shock study
Milgram’s experiment is widely cited as humans are inherently power seekers and evil. The author takes a different take on this matter. We are hard-wired to do a good job. We really hate failing at our job and if the job is to hurt someone then we will do that too. Now that we know this we can bring out the best in people by raising the bar because we know that people will do their best not to fail and will try their hardest to meet the bar.
People like to blend in. We are hard-wired to belong to the tribe. We don’t want to fall too far from the tribe but at the same time, we don’t want to be too ahead of the tribe to be noticed a lot. We just want to fit in. W will try to meet the baseline set by the tribe.
How People Think
A mixture of small tales helps us see the world in a different way. People have nuances. Life has nuances. Happiness is not linear and what makes us happy today might not bring happiness tomorrow. So how do we live our life? Is it more important to tell a better story or is it more fulfilling to a great work for which the story wasn’t that compelling? Is maximizing productivity the goal? If not then how productive one should be?
Book Review by Scott Alexander: The Cult Of Smart
This is one of the best book reviews I’ve read.
Education is hard. There are so many variables to manage. This review is quite detailed and Scott takes many positions which are at odds with the author of the book. All positions taken by Scott are well researched and well presented. For example, Scott took the author to task for not researching enough on “Success Academy”. I have watched a few documentaries on how “Success Academy” works and calling them “cooking the books” is not fair. As Scott mentioned “success academy” has proved an amazing result at a fraction of the cost. There is something to learn there and not just pooh-pooh them.