Five Things — June 2021
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Dear friends,
Here is my latest newsletter. I hope you enjoy it and please keep the feedback coming.
As usual, if you enjoy reading this newsletter, please recommend it to one friend who might also like it. Just send her/him this website www.alexnewsletter.com
Thank you for your time,
Alex
#1 My new favorite definition of leadership: “Achieve a mission with joy”
Due to the pandemic, my graduation ceremony of The Lisbon MBA was only last month.
Maria João Carioca, an executive board member of Caixa Geral de Depósitos, was of the speakers and gave her definition of leadership:
“Achieve a mission with joy”.
This definition resonated with me after the challenges of the last 12 months. In pandemic times, good leaders might be able to achieve the mission and results, but only a great leader will be able to do it with joy, within and with others.
#2 Is meritocracy broken?
The meritocracy system has been responsible for developing the world and it is still the best system to manage organizations. However, it is important to understand that not everyone starts on the same line and we need to find ways to level up the ones in the back.
In this video, Michael Sandel, professor of political philosophy and ethics at Harvard University, takes a long hard look at the system of merit. He finds several flaws and suggests how to fix them.
I do not agree with everything in the video but I believe he makes a few points that we need to address as a society. I have been very fortunate in the life my parents gave me and it would be foolish to think that I had to work exactly the same as a person who did not have the same luck.
Ted Talk — The tyranny of merit (YouTube, 8 min)
#3 Is Napolean the greatest military leader?
Last month was the 200th year anniversary of Napoléon Bonaparte’s death in exile on the island of St Helena. I was not fully aware of his life, but it is fascinating. This short video works as a good introduction but I recommend you to read more about him.
He is widely regarded as a military genius and one of the greatest leaders in world history. He was born in 1769 in Corsica, only 15 months after France purchased the island from Italy. He became emperor at 35 years old. He is responsible for introducing the Napoleonic civil code, which is the main influence in the law systems of Europe and Latin America. He fought 60 battles and lost just seven, most at the end of his career. He won several battles while being hugely outnumbered.
Napoleon: “Imagination rules the world”
If you like military history, here is a longer video detailing the strategies and tactics used by Napolean in his wars.
Napoléon Bonaparte — Mini Bio (YouTube, 4 min)
#4 The story of captchas and why are they getting harder
Have you noticed captchas are getting harder?
A captcha is a simple test that intends to distinguish between humans and computers. While the test itself is simple, there’s a lot happening behind the scenes. The answers we give captchas end up being used to make AI smarter, thus ratcheting up the difficulty of future captcha tests.
But captchas can be broken by hackers. The tests we’re most familiar with already have been broken. Captcha makers try to stay ahead of the curve but have to balance increasing the difficulty of the test with making sure any person on earth — regardless of age, education, language, etc. — can still pass it. And eventually, they might have to phase out the test almost entirely.
Why captchas are getting harder (YouTube, 8 min)
#5 Short Book: The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity
Carlo M. Cipolla was an Italian economic historian and Berkley professor who wrote “The basic laws of human stupidity”.
You can read this book in a few hours. I am still not sure whether this book was written as a joke or meant to be serious. Nassim Taleb wrote the foreword and addresses this duality.
These are Cipolla’s five fundamental laws of stupidity:
- Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.
- The probability that a certain person (will) be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.
- A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.
- Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.
- A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.
Based on the dimensions of creating value to others or to themselves, Cipolla creates a matrix with four groups of people:
- Bandits: pursue their own self-interest even when doing so poses a net detriment to societal welfare
- Intelligent people: contribute to society and who leverage their contributions into reciprocal benefits
- Helpless people: contribute to society but are taken advantage of by it (and especially by the “bandit” sector of it);
- Stupid people: whose efforts are counterproductive to both their and others’ interests.
Book The basic laws of human stupidity (Amazon)
If you enjoyed reading this newsletter, please recommend it to one friend who might also like it. Just send her/him this website www.alexnewsletter.com
